Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Elder Hall. 5 Apr 2023
Presented in the recently refurbished Elder Hall, radiant with comfortable new seating and carpets, the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s 2023 matinee series was launched with a program that highlighted the artistry of violinist Elizabeth Layton. Dubbed Radiance, the program included Haydn’s Violin Concerto in G, Hob.VIIa:4 (usually listed as Violin Concerto No.4), and Suk’s Serenade for Strings in E-flat Major, Op.6, which proved to be the audience’s favourite.
On a perfect autumn morning, the sun shone through the windows and the hall glowed as the string orchestra tuned not to an oboe but to the harpsichord. Haydn’s Violin Concerto in G is a bright, sunny, and generally unfussy composition. Its emotional heart is the adagio middle movement which is lyrical and intimate. Layton’s clean and almost sparse lines in the first movement gave way to warmth and sunniness in the adagio, and to playful and gently spirited playing in the final allegro.
Josef Suk’s four-movement Serenade is a different proposition altogether. It marks a change in Suk’s compositional style as he stepped away from the melancholy influence of Dvořák (who became his father-in-law) and started to infuse his writing with less heft and more grace and vitality. The second and third movements of the Serenade are fine examples of that, and Layton’s direction draws out the elegance and refinement inherent in the piece. The warmth of the celli and basses is particularly rich, and Layton’s light and gentle treatment of the closing ornaments in the adagio movement are deeply satisfying. This all gives way to the fun and shifting temperament in the final allegro.
The ASO preserved the elegance, simplicity, and serenity of both the Haydn and the Suk, and the audience left more cheery for the experience.
Kym Clayton
When: 5 Apr
Where: Elder Hall
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Adelaide Town Hall. 31 Mar 2023
The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s signature Symphony Series exploded out of the blocks with an emotion charged program that was like a caged beast desperate for release. After what has become the ASO’s traditional musical Acknowledgement of Country, Pudnanthi Padninthi (The Coming and the Going) – a haunting and prescient musical presage specially commissioned and composed by Jack Buckskin – we heard the first performance by the ASO of seldom-heard French romantic composer Louise Farrenc’s Overture No.2 in E flat, Op.24, followed by Grieg’s iconic Piano Concerto in A minor, Op.16, featuring audience-favourite Konstantin Shamray at the piano. The concert finished with Elgar’s expansive Symphony No.1 in A flat, Op.55. Watching carefully over and nurturing the proceedings were ASO Conductor Laureate Nicholas Braithwaite and newly installed concertmaster Kate Suther. Both had big nights!
Everything about the program was big, imposing and oh-so-impressive.
In her day, Farrenc was better known as a pianist than as a composer, but her Overture No.2 – a concert overture as distinct from one that precedes and introduces a major stage work such as an opera – has the hallmarks of someone who knows exactly how to corral the assembled forces of a symphony orchestra. This reviewer had not heard Overture No.2 before and was struck by the rush of musical ideas in it, especially in the violas, cellos, and basses. Melodies, however, were transitory and the piece begs to be listened to again to fully appreciate it.
When the overture was concluded, Shamray briskly took to the stage, gave his customary brief and no-nonsense bow to the audience, and sat down at the Steinway. With no delay, Braithwaite summoned the timpani into action and Grieg’s famous concerto was under way. Seconds later, Shamray summoned the familiar and crashing A-minor chords from the upper register of the piano with enormous strength and uninhibited passion. From then on, it was clear this was going to be no ordinary reading of one of the most popular and well-known piano concertos ever written. It’s risky for a musician to stray too far from what is ‘expected’ from a composition, but Shamray is all class and the sustained strength and pace with which he performed the concerto seemed, by the end, the norm. Braithwaite was of course ‘in on it’, and the ASO was equally robust. The woodwinds in the final movement had some difficulty in being heard clearly, however, and some of the more delicate melodies were overshadowed.
Elgar’s first symphony is a monumental piece, coming in at around fifty minutes. The sizeable first movement unfolds at a languid pace and radiates both strength and graciousness. The main theme becomes an ear worm and is heard often right until the end of the symphony. The nobility of the first movement segues into what almost seems a mélange of forms, but Braithwaite holds a firm line with pace and dynamics, and it makes sense. The third movement is sublime, with superb playing from the strings, and the final movement restates the main theme to round it all out. It is almost exhausting taking it all in – it's big – but the panoramic pomp and circumstance is deeply satisfying!
Kym Clayton
When: 31 Mar
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Festival. St Peter’s Cathedral. 15 Mar 2023
The Adelaide Chamber Singers is one of the brightest lights on our cultural landscape. Indeed, they are world class and have commendations to prove it. They are outstanding, and their latest concert – interestingly titled Celestial – is out of this world. Conductor and Artistic Director Christie Anderson’s informative program notes state that the concert “… is about looking up and out, to the natural harmony of the heavens, and its relationship to our earthly lives.” This theme is evident in a number of the sung texts, and just as ancients would wonder at the stars in awe, so do we gaze into the infinity of the heavens and contemplate our relative insignificance, and even with our modern scientific knowledge of the natural world, we too marvel about our place in the wider scheme of things.
Celestial is a sung through event – no pauses, no applause until the end. As the lighting in the cathedral is dimmed, the choir enters from all corners and the pinpoint reading lamps on their scores light their way as they process to the front. Anderson joins them and begins the concert with the medieval Dou Way Robyn/Sancta Mater Gratiae. The bass and tenor gentle drone suffused the vast space of the cathedral with a sense of expectancy. The choir moves up into the quire and sings Ubi caritas that was commissioned for William and Catherine’s royal wedding in 2011. The sung text is medieval, but Paul Mealor’s music is fresh with modern harmonic language. The softest softs gently drift upwards into the cosmos.
Stars, with century old text by Sara Teasdale and music by Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds composed barely a decade ago, is accompanied by water-tuned wine glasses that produce long sounds almost like a delicate chamber organ. The marriage of voices and tuned glasses produces a sound colour that is quite ethereal. Z Randall Stroope’s We Beheld Once Again The Stars is an apt segue and the gentleness of Stars is replaced by sonorous intonations that become a little blurry as the reverberation inherent in the expanse of the cathedral’s interior puts itself on notice.
Rhonda Sandberg’s arrangement of Bach (again) Come Sweet Death is sung by the choir without direction from the conductor. Singing from memory and without books, the choristers gesture with their hands and add meaning to particular words in the text. Some beseech and beckon (‘come sweet death’), others gently rest their hands on their chests (‘come blessed rest’). The effect is soothing and transporting.
Grammy Award-winning composer Eric Whiteacre’s Sleep is captivating, and like many of his compositions, the music embellishes individual words. With the closing line ‘…I surrender unto sleep’, the music gently floated away, soft and pure.
Videte Miraculum by sixteenth century Tudor composer Thomas Tallis features tenor David Hamer. The choir sings with controlled intensity, especially the basses, and Hamer responds with excellent articulation and gentleness, but also with unassuming authority.
The familiar poem Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep is sung by the choir from the behind the audience at the back of the filled cathedral. Many turned to view the choir, but most gazed forward and appreciated Anderson’s artistic decision to allow Joe Twist’s arrangements to gently wash over them as if from a seemingly familiar but in reality an unknown and mysterious place. The words felt like silk being tenderly drawn across our necks and faces.
Immortal Bach arranged by Norwegian composer Knut Nystedt is another re-imagining of Bach’s Come Sweet Death. It is complex and features sections of the choir singing various texts at different tempi. It is vaguely unsettling to listen to, and the audience seeks resolution. Indeed it comes with a wonderful performance of a choral arrangements of the iconic Nimrod from Elgar’s Enigma variations sung to the Lux Aeterna text from the catholic Requiem Mass.
Silence followed, and then thunderous applause as the large audience rose to its feet and expressed great joy and appreciation for what was a wonderful concert.
Kym Clayton
When: Closed
Where: St Peter’s Cathedral
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Festival. Alex Frayne and Paul Grabowsky. Adelaide Town Hall. 15 Mar 2023
Adelaide Town Hall is packed. An Adelaide Festival audience has gathered to gaze through what the programmers call a “window of possibility”. This is as good a way as any to describe this brave and beautiful arts experiment: a celebrated jazz pianist improvising music at the prompt of photographic art imagery by an equally celebrated photographer; two wildly contrasting genres; two outstanding talents. Can they complement each other? The audience clearly thinks so as it rises to its feet after the 90-minute performance.
But it feels like a tough call for Grabowsky. The images are spread over three giant screens with the sleek grand piano shiny black in a blackened shoebox of stage, the pianist’s hands and his silver-haired head carefully spot-lit. He is performing respectfully attired in a dark suit. There is a smaller extra screen for his eyes across the piano so he does not have to crane to see his inspirations.
The images are static. Or are they? Opening with a serene vista of leafy open woodland, it becomes apparent very gradually that the still images are expanding ever so slightly by a subtlety of projector zooming.
Grabowsky responds to the leafy tranquillity with a twinkling of light keys, playing with the fresh forest air between the leaves. As the images grow, it is the strength of the trees’ great exposed roots that he depicts, his chords deepening and the hands pounding.
There are seven phases of Frayne imagery around which the musician must improvise.
Landscapes with piano-scapes.
Sometimes Grabowsky seems to focus on the pictorial moment and then, as the images remain in place, he retreats into the world of his own swirling creative juices whence the power of his jazz derives.
Depending, of course, upon the photographs.
There’s a girl on a tyre swing in front of grand old building. There’s the Claypan church and crosses silhouetted against a lonely Aussie vista. Grabowsky reacts with a hymnal intonations working forth to perhaps a deeper place suggestive of failed farms and faith. There are quick grabs of dunes and slow misty rural views. As the audience studies them, the Grabowsky fingers race around the keyboard, sometimes in steeples of precision, sometimes exploratory and delicate. On one occasion, he reaches into the piano’s gizzards and emits a plonk and a twang.
The music reaches its zenith on the open road. There are a number of wonderful country and outback road studies among the Frayne collection: one is of the sort of challenging scrub-lined undulating roads one encounters on Eyre Peninsular; another is of straight lines of pristine bitumen; and yet another is of a graded dirt road. They are a fabulous road trip in themselves, complete with a forlorn “Motel” sign.
Then Frayne returns home to the Heysenesque gums and streams of the hills. Superbly lit photographs also depicting drowned trees of flood, beauty as from the eye of the artist and illustrated by the imagination of the musician. It is slowly paced, cerebral and sensual...
And one is not to forget the sublime loveliness and serenity of the gulf shallows on calm summer’s day.
The Fraye hues are exquisite. The soul comes to rest on them, that sense of calm, cool, luscious leisure. Meanwhile, Grabowsky plays with and to those scenes, evoking senses of great moody depths, a dose of the inimical and the relief of sweet sandy safety - or so one interprets as he flourishes those dextrous fingers.
Perchance Grabowsky looks a little relieved as he stands to take a bow at the end of 90 minutes of intense concentration. It was always a big ask. But, he has pulled it off. A brave piece of experimental art - and another Adelaide Festival landmark.
Samela Harris
When: Closed
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Festival. Festival Theatre. 13 Mar 2023
The Kronos Quartet is not your usual string quartet. Yes, they comprise the customary instruments – two violins, a viola, and a cello – but their repertoire is markedly different to most other string quartets. It could be said this famous ensemble inhabit and rejoice in a different sound world, and this concert was certainly that. It comprised an iconic composition from George Crumb (Black Angels), a world première (BEAK, by Australian composers Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor), an Australian première (ilektrikés rímes by Serbian composer Aleksandra Vrebalov), a composition by Missy Mazzoli (Enthusiasm Strategies) and one by Krzysztof Penderecki (Quartetto per archi), and a bracket of heartfelt and provocative songs performed in Farsi and Kurdish by Iranian singer Mahsa Vahdat.
Kronos concerts are as much to be seen as they are to be heard. Dressed in relaxed dark hued clothing, David Harrington, violin, John Sherba, violin, Hank Dutt, viola, and Paul Wiancko, cello, walk on to the dimly lit Festival Theatre stage where their instruments are suspended on overhead lanyards and their music stands and other paraphernalia is spread widely across the stage. No standard configuration here. They are greeted enthusiastically by the very large and diverse audience, who are clearly Kronos enthusiasts.
They remove their instruments from the lanyards and start with Black Angels. Its mood is ominous and dark, and it speaks about the physical and emotional horrors of war. The strings for a time are replaced by crystal glasses over which their bows are run to create almost otherworldly sounds. Gongs are sounded, and the lighting changes expressively to announce different sonic approaches. It is theatrical.
Harrington later speaks to the audience and states this is only the second time in 49.8 years that Kronos have started a concert with Black Angels. As visceral and unsettling as the piece is, the devotees in the audience deeply appreciate this. He also comments that Vrebalov’s ilektrikés rimes (which translates as Electric Rhymes) is a response to Black Angels: as Black Angels is to Vietnam, Electric Rhymes is to former war-torn Yugoslavia.
Seemingly, the die is cast: this program is not a happy one. It is deeply contemplative, and it speaks almost harshly about the human condition. Vahdat’s songs are political, and speak about the suppression of people in her beloved homeland Iran, particularly women.
But there is some respite, and BEAK is a musical conversation with the birdsong of a warbling pied butcherbird. A large screen behind the quartet projects images of a lone bird in the depths of night under moonlight warbling out to the world. It is humorous. It is refreshing.
Mazzoli’s Enthusiasm Strategies was composed for the Kronos Quartet as part of their Fifty for the Future initiative. Mazzoli has said that music is a “…strategy for mustering enthusiasm and joy” and Enthusiasm Strategies does just that: it enlivens and excites.
Kronos’s performance of Penderecki’s Quartetto per archi is as interesting visually as it is aurally. They stand with their backs to the audience and read the score on a large screen as it scrolls past. The notation almost looks like hieroglyphics at some points, and we as audience enjoy following the score perversely checking whether it all makes sense!
Mahsa Vahdat is a beautiful singer. She has a purity of tone that is perfectly supported by the playing from the ensemble. Indeed, the arrangements by Iranian American contemporary composer Sahba Aminikia are superbly crafted for a string quartet and soprano. The songs retain a full sense of their ethnic roots but the music crosses seamlessly into the western tradition.
Yes, the songs were political, as was the music of Crumb and Vrebalov, but shouldn’t festivals provoke?
Kym Clayton
When: Closed
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed