BY MARK BOSCH, LEAD CRITIC
Folksong
Australia Ensemble
Sir John Clancy Auditorium, University of New South Wales, 8 June
Australia Ensemble continued its 40th season Saturday night with Folksong, its third program of the year. After April’s No Strings Attached, I was keenly interested to hear what the ensemble would sound like with, well, strings attached.
While milling around amongst loyal audience members in the newly renovated foyer of UNSW’s John Clancy Auditorium, I read in the program that the concert was dedicated to Roger Covell – the preeminent musicologist, critic, and long-time UNSW professor emeritus, who cofounded the Australia Ensemble all the way back in 1980 with the late clarinettist Murray Khouri.
Covell died 4 June. It was clear many in the audience knew him, and although I didn’t, in reading some reproduced program notes of his for two of the pieces on the program, the clear, personable quality of expression jumped out and made me smile. Thank you for that smile, Roger. Vale.
The concert opened sans strings, actually: just David Griffiths (clarinet) and Ian Munro (piano) onstage for Lutosławski’s Dance Preludes (1954). Just like last time, Griffiths provided plenty of extra colour and shape to Lutosławski’s already colourful, shapely score. Munro’s touch was terrifically sensitive to the changes of feeling between movements and between this and the next work, Vaughan Williams’ Six Studies in English Folk Song (1926).
Julian Smiles (cello) replaced Griffiths, and supplied an appropriately hearty rendition of the six pieces. Vaughn Williams suggested these pieces be “treated with love”, as Megan Lang notes in her highly informative program note. And, if anything, Smiles could have brought a little more vulnerability to his sound. I thought something similar in the night’s closer, Dvorak’s Dumky Trio (1891), where the meatiness of Smiles’ vibrato felt a bit uniform across the work despite its stop-start structure and broad spectrum of emotional registers. Dvorak is not usually my cup of tea, though, so, grains of salt and all that.
Berio’s Folk Songs for mezzo-soprano and seven instruments (1964) closed the first half, with the strings flanked by the two percussionists Bree Van Reyk and Richard Gleeson, for whom the Berio was sadly their only call. Berio’s work is so full of colour and textural variety, and mezzo Fiona Campbell brought it in spades, going from sanguine to skittish to surly. Occasionally, her diction was a bit on the safe side, particularly in the finale, the Azerbaijan Love Song, which preeminent mezzo (and Berio’s wife at the time) Cathy Berberian had transcribed phonetically from Azeri, of which she knew nothing. Undoubtedly a difficult text, then; though it might have simply been a question of balance. Andrew Ford’s Northumbrian Songs (2012) posed no such questions, with simpler, pastoral string textures and elegant use of vocal tessitura.
The conceit of building a program from mostly short, multi-movement, folksy, accessible works, worked completely. By the end of the night, I felt full up on melodic morsels. A great evening of good music-making, and a beautiful tribute to the ensemble’s beloved progenitor.
Images supplied.
