Murphy, Rathbone And Tognetti Earn Spotlight

The Age

Tuesday March 7, 2006

CLIVE O'CONNELL, REVIEWER

MUSIC REVIEW: AUSTRALIAN CHAMBER ORCHESTRA The Players, Hamer Hall, March 5 RIGG BEQUEST RECITAL 6 Glenfern, East St Kilda, March 5

THE Australian Chamber Orchestra's second subscription series concert, before their overseas tour, was programmed to highlight its talents, although most attention fell on the ensemble's Big Three.

Principal cellist Emma-Jane Murphy gave a fluent account of the hybrid known as Boccherini's B Flat Cello Concerto, a score assembled from original scraps in the late 19th century and loaded with sweeping romantic gestures alongside the three movements' elegantly crafted melodic material. Apart from a few strained high notes, Murphy filled the hall with a firmly enunciated line.

A couple of concerti grossi by Corelli and Wassenaer displayed the ACO in fine, if temporarily shrunken, form: 10 strings, with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's Christopher Moore standing in as principal viola.

The ensemble is currently missing a cello, a couple of violas and a handful of violins, although an expansion, even an ad hoc one, must be on the cards to cope with later programs when the group resumes its national series in July.

Chief second violin Helena Rathbone played the solo line in an arrangement of the last movement to Richard Meale's String Quartet No. 2. Renamed Cantilena Pacifica, these pages focus on a bland, soporific melody soaring above a gently rocking accompaniment; on this occasion, neatly accomplished but - like so much of the composer's back-to-tonality material - unremarkable.

Finally, director Richard Tognetti kept himself more than occupied as first violin in Mendelssohn's Octet, giving a spirited and clean account of this high-spirited score.

FINISHING the C. and C. Rigg Bequest recitals from the Team of Pianists, Max Cooke, Darryl Coote and Robert Chamberlain gave an all-Mozart, twilight program, consisting of the D minor Fantasia, the C Major Sonata for piano duet, a piano duet Andante and Variations, the B Flat Piano Sonata, and the D Major Sonata for two pianos.

In the first half, the more successful exhibition came from Cooke and Coote working through the G Major Variations with no little nimbleness and a congruence of articulation that was wanting in the later, larger C Major duet.

Chamberlain, usually the most reliable of pianists, made heavy weather of the B flat Sonata's first movement, performing with an insistence and stolid deliberation that sounded unnerving at close quarters.

The final movement turned into something of a struggle, the insouciant main theme at odds with passages of uneven elaboration and some obvious fumbling.

Coote, playing the first piano part, kept the pace moving during the formidable C major Sonata, but his collaboration with Cooke impressed more for its doggedness than for any briskness or signs of optimism in the concluding Allegro.

A well-intentioned tribute in this 250th birth-anniversary year, but the three works I heard impressed more for their attempts than their achievement.

© 2006 The Age

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