Roberts Insightful; Go Vital, Insistent

The Age

Tuesday February 21, 2006

CLIVE O'CONNELL, REVIEWER

MUSIC REVIEWS: CAMERON ROBERTS Melba Hall, February 19; RIGG BEQUEST RECITAL 5 Glenfern, East St Kilda, February 19

PIANIST Cameron Roberts, recently attracting attention in Dead Horse Production's recital at North Melbourne's Meat Market, moved a few hundred metres north to Melbourne University's Faculty of Music for last Sunday's launch of his first CD.

Roberts joins the long list of keyboard players to have recorded Bach's Goldberg Variations, which began his program. The interpretation is not short on colourful touches, Roberts using the sustaining pedal discreetly and introducing some metrical flexibility, as well as opening up some usually hidden lines, as in the final Quodlibet.

With a highly developed technical facility, the pianist made exciting work of the faster sections, particularly those that require the hands to cross. At times, the attempt to caress phrases sounded mannered, a few notes almost disappearing because of extra-light phrase shaping. Yet Roberts has a clear grasp of the work and manipulated its internal pulleys and levers with impressive insight.

He ended with his own transcription of the Bach Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, a sterling demonstration of keeping most of the original's 10 lines on the boil, admirable at many points for the player's clean management of chains of thirds. This was more entertaining than his effort in moving the first movement of Chopin's E minor Concerto to a solo piano exercise. Not that you could complain about his handling of the actual notes, which preserved the original and deleted the orchestral interludes. But the original allows the executant to employ a lighter palette because the strings provide a harmonic underpinning which, in a solo version, the player has to provide.

But the most satisfying of these transcriptions came in Rachmaninov's treatment of his own songs Daisies and Lilacs, idiosyncratic and felicitously organised. These found a praiseworthy companion in Roberts' own treatment of another song, Sleep - the afternoon's most effective example of this young artist's high level of musicianship.

AURA Go performed at the Rigg Bequest Recital later on Sunday in the National Trust's stately home, Glenfern. A student of the Team of Pianists' senior member, Max Cooke, Go also contributed to the day's Bach intake with the first of the keyboard partitas, the quickly accomplished No. 1 in B flat. The young musician made a pretty clean fist of the happy Corrente and showed a clean pair of heels in the work's final Giga.

Mendelssohn's Variations Serieuses suited this pianist's style even better. The pages offer an interpreter a wealth of material, much of it sombre in flavour and heavy enough to bring Schumann and even Brahms to mind; Go gave them a firm rendition, pushing forward insistently and handling its final strophes with vital determination.

She also presented the premiere a piano sonata by her fellow VCA student James Rushford. Dedicated to its performer, this work exploits a range of textures with vehement single-mindedness although you can observe developmental wheels at play. But, in Glenfern's gracious main room, the work proved overbearing, the restless final movement pounding listeners into submission with its clangorous heftiness and the performer's all-too-enthusiastic partisanship.

© 2006 The Age

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