MiV Home
Phillip T Young Recital Hall
May 28, 2008
"Such an astounding lack of talent was never before united to such pretentiousness."
That these rather harsh words came from the pen of Tchaikovsky - in a letter to his brother, Modest, in 1888 - is perhaps hardly surprising: he was, after all, equally vituperative about Brahms. It is, however, something of a surprise to realise that he was writing about Richard Strauss.
One imagines, though, that the Tchaikovsky who wrote the finale of the "Pathétique" might well have found Strauss's Metamorphosen, which closed Wednesday's outstanding Galiano Ensemble concert, more to his taste.
Metamorphosen is a challenging work in many ways: technically, for the 23 players; and, in particular, for the conductor. The work lasts almost half an hour, has no obvious structure and is thematically highly repetitive. To direct a performance which holds, nay grips, the attention as did Yariv Aloni, is testament indeed to his powers of concentration.
Strauss himself claimed that he had not at first realised the provenance of the dotted, descending figure which is heard - in the violas, Strauss holds back the violins - as early as the ninth bar. Perhaps - who, after all, can explain the workings of the creative mind? And yet, when it finally reaches its culmination, in the work's closing bars, in a direct quotation from the funeral march of the "Eroica" symphony, it seems, retrospectively, as if the work has always been bound for this destination.
And perhaps, in his grief at the destruction of German culture, Strauss instinctively harked back to Beethoven - one German composer whose legacy had not been tainted by the Third Reich.
Wednesday's performance was an unmitigated pleasure: although the regular core ensemble was reinforced with nine students, there were no passengers. For almost 30 minutes the audience was engulfed in Strauss's luscious, sumptuous sound world. And such was the power of the performance that the final dying notes were greeted with an appreciable and appropriate silence, before the inevitable storm of applause.
Great though the Strauss is and was, for me - and I don't believe I was alone in this - the highlight of the evening was Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis.
Aloni directed a reading of transcendent rapture, couched in the gorgeous sounds of Galiano+ (if I might dub them thus). Not every string orchestra contains its own world-class quartet, but the four members of the Lafayette Quartet made both the blending and separation of the solo quartet with the orchestra seamless. I simply cannot forebear from mentioning Joanna Hood's delectably restrained playing of the great viola solo, one of the supreme moments in the whole string orchestra literature.
If I had to make a small criticism, it would not be of the playing or the performance, it would simply be a mild plaint that the stage was not ideal for the separation of the two orchestras (the second consisting of a double quartet plus bass).
But that is a truly trivial gripe in the face of such a superlative performance, which so transfixed me that I was unable to write a single word in my notebook until the music had faded, blissfully, away.
And that single word was, simply, "wonderful".
The critic Philip Heseltine, better known as the composer Peter Warlock, was part of a strange, albeit loose circle of English composers in the first decades of the 20th century. That circle included figures as diverse as Delius, Cyril Scott, Percy Grainger, Bernard van Dieren and that ultimate iconoclast, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji.
Best-known for his songs, Warlock wrote a handful of instrumental works, including the single-movement Serenade for Strings performed on Wednesday.
Identifying the composer would be an interesting parlour game; it is clearly English and 20th century, but the echoes of Delius and even hints of Vaughan Williams, would challenge all but the most knowledgeable.
What I can say for certain is that so exquisitely was it played and directed that I suspect Victoria has a whole new set of Warlock enthusiasts.
I confess to being able to resist early Mozart without too much difficulty.
Usually, that is. Wednesday's concert opened with a performance of the Divertimento, K.137 which required a certain amount of reflection from the jaded. Although it is clearly no profound masterpiece, Aloni nonetheless directed a taut, joyful performance which held the attention throughout. And Mozart's impish sense of humour - not always the first attribute of performances of his music - was well to the fore in the lilting finale, with its soaring faux fugue suddenly resolving itself into a cadence onto the wrong chord. I could not prevent a chuckle escaping, even in the repeat.
There will be another performance of this wonderful programme on Sunday at 2 in the Mary Winspear Theatre in Sidney. If you missed the first performance, don't miss the repeat. You'll not hear string ensemble playing like this again this side of the Galiano's next season.
MiV Home