Zoë Knighton and Amir Farid: France to Argentina

Zoë Knighton and Amir Farid

45 Downstairs, Flinders Lane, Melbourne

5 March 2014

Persons such as me with certain disabilities go pale at the two flights of stairs down to the concert space of 45 Downstairs: roughly as steep as the final ascent of Everest without the snow. Andy admits the vertiginously challenged through Tradesperson’s Entrance from a lane off a lane off Flinders Street. The 1900s style warehouse is of ancient brick, wobbly glass, steel beams and a beautifully solid old Baltic pine floor. The architectural features conspire to make the space acoustically it’s superb and it loves cello-ish sounds. It loves cellos. It love pianos.

45 is one of the five-year old Knighton-Farid Duo’s homes and they were obviously happy there on Wednesday night. So was the audience – glass of chardy in hand.

The recital was part of Mary-Lou Jelbart’s Festival of Words and Music. The music bit on Wednesday was K & F’s continuum of French to Argentinian – and back again – music. The program notes promised ‘sumptuous romanticism’. K & F delivered without a hint of soup. Their secret was judicious use of rubato: just enough to deliver romanticism but not so much as to cloy or interrupt the march of the music. That secret made the program opener, Debussy (Claire de Lune) new all over again and it continued – via Bragato and Solare – through the rare and beautiful Huré sonata and the equally rare Nadia Boulanger pieces back to Debussy. The Italian José Bragato was Piazolla’s cellist and Piazolla was Boulanger’s student so the transition from 20^th century French music to Argentina was fixed. Clever programming and it worked superbly: the duo is very much at home in Argentina.

Huré's 1929 cello sonata could easily have been cello with piano accompaniment. Huré was an organist by trade – and a contemporary of Widor – so he knew about multiple levels of harmony. K & F knew about that idea too. We heard, by turns, bitter and sweet, longing and yearning. Huré wasn’t Jewsh but the ghosts of the Jewish rag traders in the warehouse came out to listen.

Boulanger’s three pieces had piquant transitions of harmony from major to minor and back again and back again. The Duo used these to produce superb emotional arcs that found Boulanger’s witty, acerbic and assertive ideas. There were hints of Argentina, too I think … possibly … and I imagined the pair each with a red rose, tango-like, in teeth, behind an ear, in the hair.

For me, though, they absolutely shone in Debussy’s late cello sonata with its hints of the 1910-ish The Girl with the Flaxen Hair and The Engulfed Cathedral. Not surprisingly, the piece is considered technically demanding but there were no hints of that with this pair. Their technical mastery and superb musicianship were clear.

 https://itunes.apple.com/au/album/argentine-cello/id624946854

Victorian Opera's 2014 Master of Music

Victorian Opera

2014 Master of Music (Opera Performance)

Student recital

Horti Hall. Victoria Street, Melbourne

Saturday 1 March 2014

It was the socks. A touch of irony, a tiny statement of independence: ‘I’m not your average self-effacing accompanist,’ they said. There’s fun to be had in classical music, even in opera. And like the best of jokes, it was subtle – only visible when he sat at the piano. A Tardis motif on the top of his black socks peeped out from his black trouser cuffs. Classical musicians (ladies) are expected to wear colour – the more startling the better. Classical musicians (gentlemen) are expected to wear black unless they are forced to wear white tie and tails circa 1950 (actually more like circa 1913). Classical musicians (gentlemen, wicked) wear lurid paisley or tartan socks or a thin tartan tie swiped from their grandfather. Just a little protest against convention, you understand.

Simon Bruckard

The ‘he’ was Simon Bruckard and he is a very rare bird indeed: one of eight young graduate musicians selected from a field of 70 applicants as the second intake of Victorian Opera’s Master of Music program. He, more unusually, is a repetiteur. He has a dry sense of humour. He will need it. The occasion was their first student recital and he was associate artist with seven singers.

He (the pianist) and them (the singers) face two years of very intensive singing coaching, Italian language study, diction training in French, English, German and Russian – with exams – and opera stage-craft. And just in case they get a role in The Magic Pudding, puppetry. Towards the end they’ll be put through the wringer of a master class with Australia’s Wagnerian soprano great, Lisa Gasteen. I first saw her singing sfortzando (very, very loud) no microphone, flat on her back in a huge, circular gas oven towards the end of Gotterdammerung, the last opera in the Adelaide Ring Cycle. It was hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck stuff.

When she’s teaching senior students Ms Gasteen gives absolutely no quarter. Elizabeth, one of her former students, a Queensland Con. graduate, told me she’s a gentle sweetie. When I saw taking a master class in 2013 it was more like Attila the Hun-sweetie.

Kate Amos

Kate Amos has positioned herself well with a diploma in Italian – and study in Italy – a rich soprano voice and an ability to sing - and act - the coquettish, strong-willed maiden in Don Pasquale.

Nathan Lay

Nathan Lay, whose wicked grin would have got him out of most trouble in  class, already has a swag of prizes and major roles in opera. His voice has settled into a rich baritone. It's clear that he has the voice and the temperament to play Billy Bluegum in The Pudding. Typecast? Not a bit. His beautiful singing of Sir Riccardo Forth's “Oh! Forever I have lost you“ in I Purtani says otherwise.

Cristina Russo

Cristina Russo describes herself as an Italo-Australian soprano. She – BA, B Mus (Italian) – settled, eyes flashing, into Il barbeier di Siviglia as if she’d been born to it. Simply beautiful; simply spectacular.

Matthew Tng

Matthew Tng has already gathered a collection of prestigious awards. He has performed a heap of roles in recent VO productions and covered Chou En Lai in VO’s 2013 Nixon in China. He's walked away with lots of prizes and awards and has been involved in high-level master classes. It shows. His singing of Fritz's yearning dance song from Die Tote Stadt was superb. There is a lyric baritone to watch.

Michael Petruccelli

Michael Petruccelli had to deal with the problem of what to do during a soliloquy (not very much; keep your hands still, Michael) in Lensky’s aria from Eugene Onegin. He had that most difficult of singing problems – a long piano note – under control though. Singing a loud high note is relatively easy but maintaining power in the production of pianissimo at the end of a phrase is a killer. 

Emma Muir-Smith

Emma Muir-Smith has the most wonderful mezzo voice and she knows how to user it. Her aria from Faust was simply superb. No histrionics, no ‘look at me’ stuff. She simply let the music take its course by acting as if she wasn’t acting.

Elizabeth Lewis

Elizabeth Lewis had it organised. She also had the long, descending scales towards the end of her La Cenerentola aria well-organised even if she does have a problem with a single note in the transition from head to chest voice on the way down. She was one of only two singers who told us that 'she and Simon' – Michael was the other – 'were going to perform'. The others were, presumably, singing alone.

Be nice to your associate artist, boys and girls. It’s said he can make or break you. In truth he can just break you. He slows your long phrase by five percent, you run out of puff two long notes before the end of the phrase. “But we rehearsed it like that didn’t we?” all innocence. Of course any pianist who wears Dr Who socks is innocent, yes?

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra & Anna: Mozart's last concerto

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra

Anna Goldsworthy, piano

Deakin Edge

Friday 28 February 2014

It’s thought to be a truism that if you program a piano the hall will be full. It must also be true that if you program a Mozart piano concerto the hall will be full-er. It is certainly true that Deakin Edge was nearly full last Friday evening but the truism serves only to denigrate the band and the pianist. Both have are now compelling reasons to fill a hall in their own right.

William Hennessey’s Melbourne Chamber orchestra, studded as it is with ANAM graduates and members of chamber groups that are well-known around Australia, are so musically expert that they worked without a conductor-up-front for most of this concert. The strings were not as razor sharp as, say, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, but they were warmer and musically aware enough to work with a soloist with no-one pointing at them. They were able to play like a small chamber group watching and listening to the pianist in order to play with her rather than against her. Anna Goldsworthy, the pianist concerned, has had 20 years playing with Seraphim Trio. My observation was that the orchestra-pianist relationship was like a very big piano trio – one with double bassoons, oboes, horns and strings. She knew what she was doing and so did MCO.

Anna Goldsworthy not playing Mozart

Anna played Mozart’s last piano concerto with absolute assurance. Every note earned its keep. Every phrase was nuanced and shaped so that Mozart’s classical structure was given the tiniest touch of romanticism. Her pedalling was delicate so that every note was heard to it’s written value. Last year I heard Angela Hewitt play a Beethoven piano sonata with so much sustain pedal that notes struggled to rise above the indistinguishable. There was none of that here. This performance was not about egos. It was about what Mozart had to say: clever, very inventive and highly chromatic music writing. So Anna’s playing was at once liquid and sparkling so she became the star simply by not attempting to be so.

The same was true of the band’s playing of Mozart’s 36^th symphony for strings and tympani, and double bassoons, oboes, horns and trumpets. No maestro, no podium, no white ties and tails, no pomp and circumstance. The conspiracy between Emma Sullivan, double bass and John Acaro, tympani, to instance but one example, was pure joy: single, gentle tympani notes that blended into the bass notes to underpin - and direct -  the rest of the orchestra.

The trains rumbled underneath, the silver gulls wheeled about outside, St Paul’s bells invaded gently and the odd rubbernecker peered through the glass polygons. MCO was alive and well and at home.

Plexus: We have Lift Off

Plexus: Monica Curro, violin; Philip Arkinstall, clarinet; Stephan Cassomenos, piano

45 Downstairs, Flinders Lane, Melbourne

24 February 2014

“Plexus”, he told me, “they’re the hottest thing in town.” Correct! but hardly an unbiased opinion given he, Paul Dean, was in music school with the violinist, Monica Curro, Philip Arkinstall plays clarinet as does Dean, and the trio were about to premier his new trio.

Stephan Cassomenos, Monica Curro, Philip Arkinstall

http://www.plexuscollective.com/

Plexus ‘had blast off’ with Jennifer Higdon’s 2001 Dash then Khachaturian’s 1932 Trio. In Trio, Stefan Cassomenos’s brilliant piano playing underpinned the thorny folk-song themes with his characteristic romanticism. The piano-tragic in me would pay extra for a piano-view seat to watch him play.

Five world premieres by Australian composers followed. Plexus was joined by cellist Michelle Wood for Hugh Crosthwaite’s Mountain Ash. The cello and Crosthwaite’s classical and rock allusions took us deep into the wet forest floor. Plexus were very much at home there. Next, Judith Dodsworth was in total revenge-mode in Nicholas Routley’s difficult ‘Draupadi’s Aria’ from his opera Draupadi. Then the Trio premiered Ian Whitney’s Tanzendanses: movement mannerisms lifted from baroque – very 21^st century baroque – dances. Next, Mrs Fantasia the Timekeeper – a black and white (and red) silent film built on references to Chaplin, Marceau and Dadaism set to music by Daniel Clive McCallum – was an exercise in time-keeping by the Trio that worked spectacularly well.

Dean’s four Fragmented Journeys from ‘Fraught’ to ‘Emergency’ show a mind stressed beyond endurance and Plexus had to deal with it. Each instrument was stretched to its limits. Each player was extended emotionally and technically. Dean wrote that the clarinet part is horrendous and he was glad he was not playing it. The same holds true for the violin and piano parts.

Screen dump; Paul Dean discussing his new string quartet for Flinders Quartet with me, February 2014.

Whoever said, ‘playing classical music is doing something difficult and making it look easy’ had Plexus’s Monday’s inaugural recital and their high-level music-making in mind. The sell-out audience, who responded with roars of approval, agreed.

Flinders Quartet: Over a skinny latté I

Helen Ayres

The first in a series of interviews with members of Flinders Quartet.
First published in Flinders Quartet: February update 2014

Some eight year olds at Highbury Primary School in Adelaide sat in a circle. The teacher asked what they wanted to be. Helen, firmly, “Violin teacher”. Two years later school camp clashed with the visit of advanced Japanese Suzuki students.

 “I can’t decide. I can’t.”

 Dad said, “I’ll count, you say ‘camp’ or ‘violin’.”

 “One … two … .”

 “Violin!”

 “Ever since,” Helen says, “violin has been my priority.”

Image: www.nicholaspurcell.com.au:

Used with permission. Thank you Nicholas

She had piano lessons, too and swam. Eventually she played netball and squash. “Lately,” she says, “I’ve been tempted by the cello and the viola. I wanted a C string on my violin (violas have one) to see what I could get out of my violin. But it makes sense to play at the highest level of self-expression you can on the instrument you play best. The temptation for other instruments is about discovering aspects of your own. For me, it comes back to the violin.”

 “I’d always wanted to play second violin. Playing with Seraphim Trio showed me that the violin in a piano trio is like first violin in a quartet. Now, with Flinders Quartet, I’m happiest in that role.”

 She once wrote “Enescu's music exploits the tactile joys of being a violinist.” “Tactile joy,” she says, “is the physical experience of playing. The physicality of the way your fingers move, the way you can feel your body moving, the way you feel the bow on the strings. Enescu’s is very earthy, gypsy-influenced music. I love letting go of everything I’ve learned, playing the way I imagine a gypsy violinist would play, completely from the heart – even though his work is influenced by Brahms and Ravel – being aware of every single finger movement for what it is, not trying to force my fingers into a particular way of playing but letting them do what they want to do.”

OVER A SKINNY LATTÉ - the series

This month Helen Ayres, Violin I, talks about violins and violin playing. Other members of Flinders Quartet will follow during the year.

Next month Paul Dean talks about his new quartet, to be premiered by FQ in October. He was taking his daughter to hockey when the opening hit him: a G# – actually three. Second violin, viola and cello will play a G#, each with a different type of mute.

During 2014 I will follow the growth of Paul’s quartet – writing, rehearsal, performance – and all the bits in between. ‘Bits’ here are, critically, the Flinders Quartet musicians who will take Paul Dean’s response to the death of the brilliant young violinist and Paul's  friend Richard Pollett and present it to you, FQ’s friends.