Less Than A Dream Finish As Elvis Leaves The Building

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday January 26, 2006

Peter McCallum, Harriet Cunningham

MUSIC

Elvis Costello and The Sydney Symphony

Opera House, January 24

Review by Peter McCallum

AS A songwriter, Elvis Costello is adept at finding musical ideas to sketch a mood. As an orchestral concert composer, he is not quite as good at following them through, giving them continuation, further life and a sense of structure over time. Thus the suite from Il Sogno, his orchestral ballet score for Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, fleshed out the characters of the drama with recognisable musical symbols - noble horns and bright winds for the court, folk-like lumbering and gawky tubas for the mechanicals, and Costello twist- hot jazz licks for the fairies.

The harmonies, often built from the opening tritone, had unity and cohesion but the melodic ideas tended to be stated and left out to dry, so that, without a story line, the music became bitty, directionless, and, at 50 minutes, rather long.

Part of the problem was the determination of the conductor, Alan Broadbent, and the Sydney Symphony to make the performance slapdash. The intonation in Costello's impressionist string harmonies and in the woodwind was often poor and the ensemble ragged. Broadbent's expertise lay more in the song accompaniments of the second half, and the first half needed someone with the capacity to mould a fully orchestral work.

Costello's part writing may sometimes have been infelicitous: the solo trumpet, for example, was overused. But for a top-billed festival concert, the Sydney Symphony should have aspired to the professionalism of the London Symphony's recording of this work. They are paid enough to play better than this.

I know how the Sydney Symphony should sound but not how Costello should sound and was unsure how much his strained pitch and hoarseness in the song arrangements which made up the second half were due to end-of-tour vocal fatigue and how much they were the musical equivalent of his designer stubble.

It was in the duets between Costello and pianist Steve Nieve, and in the jazz breaks from the orchestra (Margery Smith: saxophone, John Foster: trumpet, Scott Kinmont: trombone) that the energy started to kindle. Costello's words, abounding in parody, were witty though sometimes difficult to catch, but for this capacity crowd of fans his rasping delivery well beguiled the heavy gait of night.

MUSIC

Brodsky Quartet

City Recital Hall, January 24 Reviewed by Harriet Cunningham

The Brodsky Quartet are nothing if not versatile. In one crazy festival week they have played Beethoven and Django Bates to children in Parramatta and shared the stage with Elvis Costello in Sydney. In this, their final gig, they were the headline act, although they recruited the Australian mezzo Jane Edwards to add words to their complex musical vocabulary.

The first half opened with Peter Sculthorpe's String Quartet No. 11, Jabiru Dreaming. His ingenious scoring reproduces the sounds of the Top End with uncanny accuracy and our European instruments are transformed, almost in spite of themselves, into exotic birds.

Janacek's String Quartet No. 2, Intimate Letters, was inspired by his love for Kamila Stosslova. It was a brief and almost certainly platonic relationship but the quartet flashes with emotion, reflective one moment and out of control the next. Leader Andrew Haveron brought an almost aggressive intensity to the passionate outbursts of the first movement, while the elegiac good humour of the third movement was moving.

The second half added words. Sally Beamish and Percy Grainger took the vernacular rhythms of folk music and spliced them into something artful but never pretentious. Andrew Ford's work, Tales of the Supernatural, was a perfect partner to both. The low range of the vocal part ( written with Robyn Archer's voice in mind) meant that some amplification is necessary. This had the benefit of freeing the singer from the need to project: these are ghost stories, to be sung in a hushed voice around the dying fire. Edwards and the quartet were master storytellers, drawing the audience in with deliciously covert artistry.

The Brodsky Quartet are great live performers. You can hear more immaculate interpretations from more fastidious ensembles (or on the Brodsky's range of recordings), but like their outspoken compatriot Nigel Kennedy, currently strutting his stuff at the Opera House, the intellectual, musical and emotional commitment is a potent mix.

© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald

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