Subtle Colours Of Eygpt; Feisty Duo

The Age

Wednesday February 15, 2006

CLIVE O'CONNELL, REVIEWER

MUSIC REVIEWS: AUSTRALIAN CHAMBER ORCHESTRA Hamer Hall, February 12; RIGG BEQUEST RECITAL 4 Labassa, February 12

RICHARD Tognetti, artistic director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, aims to expand the horizons of players and audiences with musical or media fusions.

Sometimes, these come off, like last year's involving vocalist Paul Capsis and the photography of Bill Henson; others, like the 2003 effort with Tim Freedman, are best forgotten.

To start this year's season, the ACO's Travellers program took in a pretty broad range, starting with English composer Robert Saxton's Birthday Piece for Richard Rodney Bennett, for no apparent reason other than the ACO is celebrating its 30th.

Then the music started its global tour, to an anonymous Baroque string sonata written in one of the Bolivian Jesuit colleges and the Shostakovich String Quartet No. 7, before the arrival of the afternoon's guests: oud master Joseph Tawadros and his younger brother James on percussion.

Tognetti and the elder Tawadros produced arrangements of the Egyptian-born composer's works, giving the ACO a significant role to play rather than simply marking time by playing sustained chords. In fact, the five examples performed displayed sufficient variation of character and performance mechanics to sustain interest, both in the subdued elegy of Remember Baghdad and in the rapid-fire virtuoso riffs oscillating between the oud and Tognetti's violin in Existence.

As an amalgam of Eastern and Western styles, the arrangements came off most of the time, the only dubious passages arising during solo violin passages where that instrument's timbre and associations proved too suggestive of art music.

But while the program later travelled from American Ruth Crawford Seeger's Andante for Strings to more Shostakovich and took in a Pink Floyd song along the way, little in this catch-all compendium distracted from the colours of the lute-like oud, particularly in several bracing improvised passages that suggested the sitar's virtuosity, allied with the subtle restraint of James Tawadros' tambour-drums.

WHEN the Team of Pianists presents at Labassa in Caulfield, its audience enjoys two half-concerts. On Sunday evening, the Team's Rohan Murray partnered violinist Cameron Hill in the substantial Schumann Violin Sonata No. 2 while, at the same time, in another room of the National Trust mansion, guitarist Jochen Schubert played Spanish music by Llobet, Falla, Torroba and Edouardo Sainz de la Maza; after interval, audiences simply changed rooms.

Of the guitar works, Falla's Homenaje written on the death of Debussy stood out for its clarity of emotional expression and an impressive sense of stately mourning, delivered with hefty power by Schubert. Similarly, Sainz de la Maza's small prelude/homage to the guitar gave patrons some meat to consider.

Hill and Murray's reading of the Schumann sonata was an aggressive exhibition. At close quarters, you heard every detail, Murray keeping the active keyboard part under wraps, but giving Hill a much-needed challenge in the feisty finale. Listeners can gain great insights into a performance's stress points when they are on top of the action; here, the violinist's bow technique was fully tested, and even the piano's subsidiary arpeggios took on fresh urgency.

Full credit to these young musicians for confronting this sometimes stodgy sonata and treating it with gritty determination rather than smoothing out its jutting edges.

© 2006 The Age

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