Untried Melody Scores Big On Style

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday September 29, 2007

Graeme Skinner

? CLASSICAL

MOZART IN THE CITY

Sydney Symphony

City Recital Hall

September 27

Reviewed by Graeme Skinner

IT HAS taken the Sydney Symphony all of its 75 years to get round to one of Haydn's earliest symphonies, Le Matin, the sixth (out of 104), and it was worth the wait, in at least two respects.

The music, more chamber than symphonic, has a quizzical, untried quality, refreshingly at odds with the later Haydn's characteristic self-assurance. The performance, too, was less predictably symphonic than it would have been during most of the past 75 years.

Some stylish solo playing, especially from the leader Dene Olding and cellist Catherine Hewgill, both of whom brought a keen awareness of period niceties to their modern-instrument performances, was a reminder that, these days, Sydney Symphony is made up of leading players whose expertise draws on the gamut of contemporary performing possibilities.

This gesture to the period-instrument movement was contrasted with one of its precursors, Poulenc's bitter-sweet Suite francaise, economical and effective modern reworkings of some 16th-century dances, not in the work's familiar piano version, but in the original 1935 chamber scoring as incidental music for winds, brass and percussion, with token harpsichord.

Clarinets are usually cited as the excuse for the key of Mozart's A-major piano concerto, though they were somewhat overshadowed by the other winds. The French pianist Roger Muraro was studiously collegial towards all his orchestral colleagues, yet delivered as near to ideal a Mozart performance as could be imagined - characterful, intimate in scale and unfailingly elegant in detail.

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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