MSO vs TSO: no contest!

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Sir Andrew Davis (conductor)

Saturday 3 March, Hamer Hall Melbourne

Beethoven: Piano Concerto Number 5 in D major, Op. 61; Nelson Freire (piano)

Wagner, Verdi: arias; Stuart Sketon, tenor

Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra

Marko Letonja (conductor)

Friday 2 March 7.30pm

ABC Classic FM Concert broadcast from Federation Concert Hall, Hobart

Beethoven: Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61; Veronika Eberle (violin),

“Not much oomph.”

The three mature-age gentlemen were in a huddle at half-time. One clutched a plastic flute of bubbles; another, an icy pole; the third, hands in pockets. Bubbles leaned his head into the triumvirate. He spoke slowly and deliberately, “It just lacked oomph”.

And that about sums up the MSO, the Emperor and Freir.

I’d saved up my pension specifically to hear Stuart Skelton again. First in the Adelaide Ring, then Mahler in Sydney, Tristan in Hobart and now ”Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond” from Die Walküre. The bonus was going to be The Emperor – I’d first heard it and was fascinated by it when I was about 15 – played by Nelson Freire.

The MSO has some of the best orchestral players in the world. It does not have the best conductors. Neither does its managers always select the best soloists.

Nelson Freire is a gentle pianist without the very up-front pianism of, say, Stephen McIntyre or Timothy Young or Kathryn Selby or Anna Goldsworthy or Stefan Cassomenos or Benjamin Martin or Kristian Chong or Adam McMillan or Laurence Matheson – et al. His playing seemed not to inspire the orchestra. Neither did Davis. But worse, more fatally(!) Davis got the balance wrong. Too-loud, turgid double basses swamped the brilliance of the smaller strings and the piano; even the bassoons struggled. So the texture of Beethoven’s brilliant, often angry, very harmonic orchestration was never there. I thought about the Victorian performances of Messiah with a 1000 voice choir and the sort of conducting that Malcolm Sargeant excelled at: Tom Sawyer with his 4” whitewash brush attacking the neighbour’s fence when a #3 camel hair bush was all that was needed. Beethoven got the 4” brush treatment and the MSO’s pre-break playing made me glad I’d subscribed to other bands in Melbourne for 2018.

Perhaps the problem is that, in spite of their high-level technical skill, the MSO musicians don’t like or don’t respect Davis. The tension sometimes erupts with sniping at each other in rehearsal. I wondered if Davis hears the orchestra in the conducting sense. If I can hear 'turgid', 'moribund', 'boring' surely he can - or can he?

The balance and the lightness of touch needed to expose Beethoven's complex textures was way off in the first half. Things fell into place much more happily when Skelton and Wagner hit the stage. (Wagner? Lightness of touch? Nah!) He wasn’t togged up in the ridiculous 19thC tail coat that the orchestra had to wear. Did that fact alone give them hope?

The TSO is a much smaller band – but still big enough to handle Wagner brilliantly. It’s true that they excel at baroque repertoire and that’s next door to Classical Beethoven.

It was no surprise that the TSO made their Beethoven sing and sparkle. I had the advantage that a broadcast gave me of standing in and above the orchestra. From that position the balance was spot-on. You can’t hide technical wobbles from a microphone a few feet from you and there was none as you’d expect. It was the controlled energy and unrestrained musicianship that made this performance so exciting. Veronika Eberle, Latonja and the TSO band understood each other and you could hear them all smiling at each other at the end.

There are some world-class conductors tucked away in hidey holes in Australia. One is running Vic Opera, another is playing clarinet in the QSO, a third is conducting the Adelaide Symphony.

It’s time to get rid of the Europo-centric cringe and put a great Australian musician-conductor whom the musos respect in front of the MSO. Until MSO’s manager do something courageous I’ll spend my concert ticket allowance elsewhere. There are lots of choices in Victoria.

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra: Thomas Tallis’ England

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and Australian Brandenburg choir

Paul Dyer, conductor

Max Reibl, counter tenor

Melbourne Recital Centre

7:00pm Saturday 24 February 2018

And ABC Classic FM Weekend Afternoons (from Angel Place)

Saturday 10 March 2018

A few of us ganged up to buy Chris and Ian an Oz-Brandenburg subscription as a wedding present. Great idea: they renewed it for 2018 in the same row as us – up near pensioner class. “Thomas Tallis’ England” on a warm Summer evening was superb on so many fronts – the ideal (extended) wedding present for them.

Someone with an excellent working knowledge of music history (Mr Dyer et al) had drawn on their research to find well/not-well known music from composers who had worked together, succeeded each other, inspired each other and who had, very importantly for a composing career, managed to survive a potentially fatal devotion to the wrong religious brand.

The concert was a programming masterpiece. Every piece earned its place in its own right. And there was a couple of little private bonuses that every programmer has the right to enjoy.

Bonus 1: Here’s the question: Purcell’s Rondeau from Abdelazar, how do I know it? But there’s no answer unless you read the program note to its end. (It was used 250 years later by another brilliant Englishman in his Young Person’s Guide …).

https://open.spotify.com/search/results/abdelazar

Bonus 2: Tallis’s Third tune (Psalm 2) of 9 Psalm tunes for Archbishop Parker's Psalter was played without comment. Here’s the question: I know that theme, but where, how?”.

Thomas Tallis wrti.org

Ralph Vaughan Williams wrti.org

Wait three minutes and you’ll get it. It was recomposed into a landmark fantasy by Vaughn Williams 340 years later.

Listen for the viola part

https://open.spotify.com/track/35OgqVoojakcoabPbdaGq2

Paul got it right with this program. He got it right with Max Reibl, particularly when he was paired with Timothy Chung and he got it right – as usual – with the orchestra and chorus.

The Brandenburgs – vocal and instrumental – have extremely high order musicianship. That’s by no means universal in Australian orchestras so it makes this gang stand out. But, most importantly they have a very rare precision. It’s not the mechanical, cut glass precision that many German-style orchestras have. It’s an organic variety that is precise but warm. We are enticed into the piece with the musicians to enjoy it’s warmth and joy. Reibl fell into that style too and the bonus he gave us was his acting. He brought “Cold Song” from Henry Purcell’s King Arthur to life with that most difficult of all acting techniques, ‘doing nothing’.

I can scarcely move or draw my breath,

Let me, let me freeze to death.

Simply wonderful, superb, unpretentious, gut-grabbing!

Dyer has a secret weapon; the like him! They have complete confidence in him (and him, them) and they trust him.

Word has got around. MRC was sold out – twice. Thomas Tallis’ England was a ten-out-of-ten concert.

I went hunting for a seat for the Sunday arvo repeat; I found two; I bought neither. The 5:30pm start would have made me very late for dinner with my ginger grandbrats; something that was always going to have higher production values than a Dyer job – even if he did have Australia’s best baroque musicians to work with.

General Jim Molan, Liberal senator

The Australian on July 19 published an edited extract of General Jim Molan's  Running the War in Iraq, Harper Collins AU, 2008.

According to Chris Doran in ON Line Opinion 4 August 2008, General Molan’s excerpt ... suggests that the attack on Fallujah, codenamed Operation Fury, was little more than a few surgical missile strikes which unfortunately and only occasionally resulted in civilian deaths.

Further, Doran writes, (General Molan)  omits

• 'the fact that an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 civilians still remained in Fallujah when the attack began. Citizens had been instructed to evacuate the city, population 250,000, before bombing began in October 2004, but any and all men aged 15 to 45 were prohibited from leaving.' 
• ...  the now irrefutable evidence that chemical weapons, specifically white phosphorous, were used under his command on Fallujah. Irrefutable because US Colonel Barry Venable admitted it to the UK’s Independent newspaper a year later.
• that 'In a November 2005 editorial denouncing its use, the New York Times described white phosphorous: “Packed into an artillery shell, it explodes over a battlefield in a white glare that can illuminate an enemy's positions. It also rains balls of flaming chemicals, which cling to anything they touch and burn until their oxygen supply is cut off. They can burn for hours inside a human body.'

Is General Molan a fit person to sit in the Australian senate?

to The Hon. Peter Dutton MP, Minister for Home Affairs

The Minister for Home Affairs

The Hon Peter Dutton MP

Dear Mr Dutton,

Tuesday’s Guardian reports (and http://minister.homeaffairs.gov.au/peterdutton/Pages/Interview-with-Chris-Kenny.aspx confirms), ‘Victorians are “scared to go out to restaurants” because of “African gang violence”, Peter Dutton has said, in an interview attacking the supposed lack of deterrence of crime in Victoria.

Please tell me the data to support this statement.

•             What is the number of people who scared to go out to restaurants?

•             How was the data obtained?

•             Which regions or suburbs does it apply to?

The Guardian reports further,

‘Dutton blamed Daniel Andrews, calling for the premier to pass stricter bail laws and to stop appointing “civil libertarians” as magistrates.’

Please tell me which magistrates do you consider to be civil libertarians. The people of Victoria need to know this.

You are reported as saying,

‘… the reality is people are scared to go out to restaurants of a night time because they’re followed home by these gangs, home invasion and cars are stolen.’

How many people does your data show

•             have been followed home by “these” gangs

•             have suffered home invasions

•             have had their cars stolen?

If you can’t or won’t provide these data your statement must be considered bullshit*.

If you can’t or won’t provide these data the anti-South Sudanese ‘gangs’ campaign by you, Mr Turnbull and Mr Hunt must be considered supremely and cynically political.

John Howard’s ‘children overboard’ campaign was demonstrably political and is now known to be baseless in fact. In short he used the lives of human, in that case refugees, as a political weapon.

You appear to be doing the same.

Yours sincerely,

Stewart Jackel

sent: 3 January 2018

*Bullshit is described as a statement without reference to fact. Conversely a lie contradicts a fact.

I will publish the reply to this email as soon as it arrives - due 29 January.

A great year for clean energy in Australia ends, while bad news for coal continues

... The real story, driven by the states and the private sector, is more interesting and much more positive.

Australia now has renewables-friendly governments in every state and territory. Victoria legislated a target of 40% by 2025 and both Queensland and the Northern Territory committed to 50% renewables by 2030. South Australia leads the world on wind and solar integration and has shed its title of the highest wholesale energy prices in the country.

More than 50 large-scale renewable energy projects are either under construction or have been completed in Australia in 2017 totalling 4,670MW, as much as was built over the first 15 years of the renewable energy target. Australian households installed more rooftop solar than any year since 2012 when subsidies were three times as generous — no other country has a higher take-up of residential solar.

 ‘It’s undeniable that the energy transition is well under way — but Australians could be forgiven for despairing when coal dominates our politics and media cycle.’ Photograph: Dan Himbrechts/AAP

Read the full piece here