A Slight Lack Of Wit And Subtlety

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday February 12, 2008

Reviewed by Peter McCallum

AUSTRALIAN CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

with MELVYN TAN

City Recital Hall, February 9

AT ITS best, the Australian Chamber Orchestra is peerless in this country in 18th-century music: Haydn and Mozart are its heartland. In the context of this high expectation, the orchestra's contribution to the music of these two composers in this concert was slightly disappointing.

Haydn's Symphony No. 47 in G had energy and incisiveness but the accents of the palindromic minuet, the excessive expressiveness of the delicately balanced slow movement and the vivacity of the finale tended to come in the wrong places. Instead of the orchestra's customary thoughtfulness with phrasing, one was left with the impression of the postures of elan, a slight lack of wit and subtlety in the central movements, and roughness in the sound in the outer ones.

All this should have been put right in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 19 in F, K. 495 where the orchestra was joined by Melvyn Tan, a sensitive soloist of refined musicality. Tan shaped phrases with immaculate smoothness although the volume was subdued and the tonal range kept within small dimensions. It was a performance of inner polish, from which unnecessary accents were refreshingly excluded. Yet the orchestra didn't seem to pick up on this lead. Time after time, they presented an idea with all the impetuous bumps that Tan, with a view to the long melodic line, had ironed out.

Part of the problem may simply have been the challenging program. In Roger Smalley's innovative Strung Out, the orchestra stands in a single line across the stage so that instead of coalescing into homogeneous wholeness, the ideas are passed up and down the line, as though, in Yevtushenko's words, strained like wires between the City of Yes and the City of No.

Richard Tognetti's arrangement of Schubert's final String Quartet in G major made up the second half, Schubert's unusual use of romantic tremolo effects inviting such an orchestral try-out. The demanding parts strained first violin intonation (particularly in the finale) but the exercise was interesting.

Arranging a quartet particularly involves deciding where the double bass should reinforce the cello, and where to thin out to single instruments. Tognetti's decisions were sound except in the moment of solo playing in the slow movement which seemed structurally illogical. Nevertheless, it was a welcome chance to hear a masterpiece that gets far fewer outings than it deserves.

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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