Please Turn That Ego Down

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday March 26, 2007

Peter McCallum

? CLASSICAL

AUSTRALIAN CHAMBER

ORCHESTRA

City Recital Hall, March 22

Reviewed by Peter McCallum

OLLI MUSTONEN played Mozart's Piano Concerto in F, K.413 with the Australian Chamber Orchestra like an old tragedian who has been asked to say a few graceful words but decides he would rather play King Lear.

For the simple repeated notes of the piano's elegant first solo, he held his arm aloft as though about to wave all of creation into being: no concession to the fragility of the 18th-century fortepiano here. Nor could the distraction of arm movements be avoided by looking away: the extravagant curves were there in the musical fabric. Phrases surged forward and bulged exaggeratedly, and innocent staccato notes were accentuated like a speaker who magnifies simple points with alarming hand gestures.

In the theme of the Larghetto, Mozart puts in little sighing thirds as echo effects at the end of each phrase which could be coy if overdone, but that doesn't mean you have to pull back the tempo as though providing the soundtrack for a fluttering gaze in Bambi.

The outer movements of this concerto are different kinds of minuets and all Mozart asks for is simplicity, subtlety and naturalness. Mustonen's sound was brittle, overprojected and percussive so that at times one wanted to shout out: "It is not about you, it is about the music." What has Mozart done that his charming creation should become a vehicle for such infantile vanity?

Mustonen stuck to his own music in the second half with his Toccata for piano and chamber orchestra, which begins with vivid expressionist cries over sustained bass, moves to a neo-baroque Allegro and finishes with a chaconne fired by nightmarish apocalyptic fantasy.

Here Mustonen's ego sat more comfortably with the artistic purpose. Yet the true delights were the bristling energy of the ACO's performance of C.P.E. Bach's String Symphony in B flat major, its quiet, shadowy colours in Sibelius's suite Rakastava, Opus 14 and the range of its command of Walton's Sonata for Strings.

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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