Simone Young Conducts Mahler’s First Symphony
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Opera House Concert Hall
February 8
Until Feburary 11
★★★★½
Mahler First Symphony starts with a clear beam of light and ends in a sustained blaze of magnificence. In between lie woodland murmurs,fanfares,clumsy dances,darkness and warmth,striving and serenity,and,in the third movement,a fantastical sombre parade.
One leaves the hall as after a dream,senses still tingling as memories evaporate,knowing little about where one has been except that it was marvellous. Simone Young and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra took us there for this opening concert of their 2023 season.
As the French horns stood to deliver their final triumphant version of the theme heard quietly in dawn light of the opening,the only disappointment was,like children on an outing,we didn’t want it to end.
Conductor Simon Young and the SSO rekindled Sydney’s enthusiasm for Mahler last year.Sandra Steh
Young started the concert withBluminethe slow movement Mahler originally wrote as the second movement of the Symphony and then discarded (rightly in my view – the tautness of the Symphony’s structure would have sagged with this bouquet). As a stand-alone movement,however,its charm blossoms,particularly with the smoothly rounded burnish of David Elton’s trumpet in this performance.
In Debussy’s sixAriette oubliées (Forgotten Songs) arranged for orchestra by Brett Dean,soprano Siobhan Stagg createdlanguor and delicate sensuality,evoking the world offin-de-siecle responsiveness to the tiniest change to the wafting breeze of inner feeling. In the first song,C’est l’extase langoureuse,Stagg’s voice had a fresh blush of colour in the mid-upper range and imploring tone inIl pleure dans mon coeur.
Soprano Siobhan Stagg at the Sydney Opera House.Dylan Coker
As the cycle progresses it is as though the hypersensitivity to inner feeling exhausts itself. InL’ombre des arbreDean’s orchestration created shady mystery from the wind. But inChevaux de bois (which describes merry-go-round horses) the mood turns to anxiety as though agitated by some narcotic until the song reaches a mood of warm sadness in the last verse which quickly evaporates.Green tries to revive the freshness of the first song butSpleen resigns itself to sadness and lassitude,the senses irrevocably soured.
Young and the SSO rekindled Sydney’s enthusiasm for Mahler last year with their triumphant performance of his Second Symphony to reopen the refurbished Concert Hall. The full house and standing ovation for this performance showed that fire still burns.
Ilya Gringolts Plays Bruch
Australian Chamber Orchestra,City Recital Hall
February 7
Until February 12
★★★★★
Although framed around one of the best-loved violin concertos in the repertoire – Bruch’s Violin Concerto No.1 in G minor – Ilya Gringolts’ program as guest director and violin soloist with the Australian Chamber Orchestra provided a welcome platform for rarities and discoveries. Gringolts is a superb player with a distinctive sound and approach,carefully matching his tonal palette to the expressive and stylistic needs of each piece.
Ilya Gringolts is a superb player with a distinctive sound and approach.Julian Kingma
In Mendelssohn’s String Symphony No. 13 in C minor,itself an astonishingly precocious exercise in stylist emulation by the 14-year-old composer,Gringolts and the ACO avoided vibrato,producing beautifully layered clarity,with a keen edge to the texture that avoided indulgence without being austere.
Slanted,by young Sydney-based composer Harry Sdraulig,was in a different way,also an exercise in minute adaptations of musical style,each of its 18 variations giving its quietly creeping,fragmented opening theme a different “slant” in terms of which features were emphasised. The overall shape,however,came across in two main sections,the first half evolving rapidly with nervous energy,the second pulling back to quiet chords pregnant with tension. Moving through a warm cello solo and undulating calm,the piece found its moment of truth in a plateau of emotional intensity before a short moment of drama at the close.
Gringolts then gave a rare performance of Frank Martin’sPolyptyque for solo violin and strings,in six connected movements inspired by a series of miniatures in Sienna depicting episodes from the Passion. The violin solo part has a deeply human quality,capturing tender intimacy in the second movement and profound reflection and radiant clarity in the fourth. Here,Gringolts carefully graded each phrase like evolving thoughts with moments of golden glow.
In the Bruch concerto (arranged by Bernard Rofe for string orchestra with timpani),Gringolts allowed a rich Romantic sound to blossom in full colour while again avoiding over-indulgence in favour of cultivated expressive strength. The first movement brimmed over with sinewy feeling,the second carefully nuanced each utterance and cadence with the utmost serenity,while the third let the spirit run free with earthy vitality.
To finish,Gringolts and the ACO revived another rarity,the Concerto for String Orchestra by Polish composer Grazyna Bacewicz (1950). Written when Poland’s artists wrestled with the Soviet ideologies of social realism,the work achieved a cut-through clarity using a vigorous neo-Baroque style of muscular energy,saved from formulaic stylistic pastiche by the insertion of contrasting ideas of quirky character and originality.
The ACO,under Gringolts,has opened the year in excellent form,bringing each moment alive with their characteristic precision,concentration and elan.
- Peter McCallum
Chorus!
Opera Australia
Sydney Opera House,February 4
Until March 10
★★★★
Usually,it falls to the operatic chorus to watch destiny unfold from the side,to create the “ordinary” from which extraordinary things appear,shout cheers,mutter jeers,cry tears and fret darkly that this is not going to end well.
InChorus! the magnificent Opera Australia Chorus under conductor Paul Fitzsimon seized their own destiny,pushing the prima donna and primo uomo aside to make their own opera from 18 choruses written over three centuries.
Director Matthew Barclay,movement co-ordinator Troy Honeysett and lighting designer Matthew Marshall shaped a narrative of collectivism,in which the crowd was not faceless but populated with shyness and boldness,excitement and despair,and where individuals supported rather than killed each other.
The narrative was of a crowd populated with shyness and boldness,excitement and despair.Supplied
Talk about a revolution! The stage was set from the chorus’s angle,as though from the back,and strewn with scenery crates,dangling cables and wheelie bins to collect the props.
In the Pilgrims’ Chorus from Wagner’sTannhäusermale chorus members emerged obscurely from darkness before achieving stirring full voice with pianists Kate Johnson and Michael Curtain,followed by celestial light from the female chorus.
Such piety,it turned out,was for the God of football rather than heaven,and Puccini’s Humming Chorus fromMadam Butterfly quietly comforted the inevitable disappointment. After the Moon Chorus fromTurandot,the scenario flowed into a sequence of bucolic charm framed by numbers from Tchaikovsky’sEugene Onegin,with Verdi’sZitti,zitti (Rigoletto) sung with hushed pinpoint precision and the Anvil Chorus fromIl Trovatore clamouring with lusty fatefulness.
A military episode began with the mock heroism ofBella vita militar from Mozart’sCosi fan Tutte but the Soldiers’ Chorus from Gounod’sFaust left all the male singers slain,mourned in candlelight by nuns of Verdi’sIl Trovatore. The darkness turned to love courtesy of Offenbach and dancing,champagne and a wedding ensued with music from Gounod and Johann Strauss’sDie Fledermaus.
When the excitement cleared from the chorus at the start of Act 4 of Bizet’sCarmen,the Toreador lay dead on the floor and a statuesque female chorus member lamented with Purcell’s drooping wings fromDido and Aeneas.
InMake our garden grow from Bernstein’sCandide,the singers confessed they were neither pure,nor wise nor good,but,in addition to their splendid sound,the AO chorus had certainly shown they could act,hold the stage,strike a pose,and conjure charm or fear in small gestures to draw the listener in.
- Peter McCallum
A BROADCAST COUP
Ensemble Theatre,February 1
Until March 4
★★★½
Melanie Tait is a fine playwright,but she’s just missed the bullseye on this one. As plays and films stretching fromMacbeth all the way to Bernd Eichinger’s brilliant screenplay forDownfall (about Adolf Hitler’s final weeks) have shown,villainous protagonists are much more compelling if we see some species of the charm that lure others into becoming victims or into turning a blind eye. The problem is that Mike King,played by Tony Cogin,does not just lack the charm the play wants him to have,he’s reptilian from the outset,and so his behaviour comes as no particular surprise.
Mike King,played by Tony Cogin,is reptilian from the outset.Prudence Upton
Mike is a successful radio talkback host of 30 years’ standing,with national reach from nine to noon each weekday morning. He’s also fond of behaving badly. Tait’s play has him surrounded by women who range or morph between being complicit and confrontational,and her work is about the power that position can bestow,and whether the lines around consensual sex are blurred or hard and fast.
He works for an ABC-like network (the contrast with commercial radio being emphasised),and when we first meet him,he’s fresh off the plane from Fiji,having attended an anger management retreat after hurling a mixing desk at an intern. Tait’s other characters are Louise,Mike’s long-term executive producer (,Noa,a new junior producer (Alex King),Troy,the station manager (Ben Gerrard) and Jez,an ex-producer and now hugely successful podcaster (Amber McMahon).
Millerchip’s Louise is beautifully drawn and performed,and if Tait had created a Mike to match,or perhaps if Cogin could have oozed more magnetism,would instantly be stronger. “Could you be more of a cliché?” Louise asks Mike at one point,and therein lies the problem. As she routinely does,Millerchip commands the stage with consummate ease,her Louise being smart,funny,briskly efficient and obsessively dedicated – so dedicated that she has been tidying up after Mike’s transgressions for years.
Designer Veronique Benett’s ingenious use of the stage allows Janine Watson’s production to flit between different settings – office,studio,bar,Mike’s place – with a fluidity that’s built into the script and is vital to maintaining a galloping comedic pace.
Despite everyone having a share of the laughs,the rest of the cast can’t quite match Millerchip’s performance – although their characters aren’t as complete,either. Gerrard makes the most of the clean-living,do-things-by-the-book Troy,imbuing him with a hurt dignity in the face of Mike’s onslaughts,and an amusingly infectious elation,later.
McMahon dials down her usual charisma to make Jez utterly relentless in her MeToo crusade,and while King is uneven as the young,cocky Noa,she nails some scenes,including sending up Mike and his ilk.
The play craves another layer of complexity to take it away from predictable patterns of character,behaviour and plot. Nonetheless,despite seeing the endpoint on the horizon from some way off,you are still inexorably drawn into it,both by the inherent morality tale and by Tait’s crisp wit,as when Noa says to Mike,“Women find that glistening celebrity,serious journalist,tucked-in shirt thing you have going super attractive.”
It’s also Noa who points out that inanity of the idea that men don’t get the hint when someone rebuffs their advances.
“We’re human beings,” she says. “Were attuned to picking up what others are putting down.”
Alas,Mike’s not just stuck in a time warp,he’s probing a moral vacuum.
- John Shand
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