BY MARK BOSCH, LEAD CRITIC
No Strings Attached
Australia Ensemble
Sir John Clancy Auditorium, University of New South Wales, 27 April
UNSW’s resident Australia Ensemble is in its 40th(!) season this year. It’s a staple of Sydney’s chamber music community, with some of the city’s most venerable musicians on its roster, and it has a very loyal — if increasingly greying — following. On Sydney’s first really wintery night of the year, I felt a little stiff squeezing my way into this coterie, but it was well worth it.
I say that as a violinist most of all; No Strings Attached was, as you might have guessed, a program with no string players on the payroll (unless you’re a fuddy-duddy and count the piano as a string instrument). It’s not that I needed any convincing that the winds would deliver a delightful performance, but I didn’t expect it to be quite so compelling. It seems like the throes of string supremacy do still claw at my subconscious!
I was particularly enthralled by the last three pieces of the night: Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles (1961), and the sextets of Poulenc (1939) and Ludwig Thuille (1888). I was familiar with the former two pieces — came in thoroughly excited for the Poulenc — but Thuille was new to me. A contemporary and childhood friend of Richard Strauss, Thuille has a predictably persnickety musical dialect that speaks for the gulf in fame between the two. The sextet is a controlled slow burn, rarely adventurous, but so charming in its understated way. Like a lot of lesser-known late-century chamber music I’ve heard, it was paradoxically easy to get swept up in Thuille’s restrained expression.
As a string player, I couldn’t tell you how truthful the reports of the difficulty of Poulenc’s Sextuor are, but it definitely sounds devilish. Sharing some musical gestures with the similarly devilish Sonate pour violon et piano (1943) — one of my favourite pieces — the Sextuor feels a similarly searing, manic indictment of antebellum Europe. The performers, three of them guests in Shefali Pryor (oboe), Robert Johnson (horn), and Lyndon Watts (bassoon), handled the composer’s rapid character changes and textural twists and turns with panache; with Watts and David Griffiths (clarinet) cultivating particularly punchy personas, just right for this music.
After the interval, the Ligeti sometimes felt a little close to the precipice, but that’s how it was designed. Johnson made light work of the often-spectacularly high horn part, and the group never sacrificed execution for humour. That’s a staunch commitment where this piece is concerned!
The concert opened with Mozart’s Quintet in E flat K452 (1784), which felt a little bit like filler by the end of the night. It’s far from Mozart’s most focused work, and the performance just slightly lacked the lustre required to bring it into the same realm as the other items on the program. Ian Munro’s touch on the piano felt a bit safe to start with here, but was impeccable throughout the rest of the program, including in Martin Wesley-Smith’s Janet (1995), which, after a lengthy changeover, was revealed to be the odd one out on the program, featuring just Munro, Collins, and Alison Pratt on percussion.
Collins prefaced the work with the ostensibly true story behind its name, which Wesley-Smith has asserted is trivial: Janet was, apparently, a male alpaca, sold to the composer under the impression that Janet was female. Held after purchase for Wesley-Smith in a paddock with other female alpacas, the young buck romanced till he could romance no more, dropping dead two days later before he ever made it onto the composer’s property. Or so it is told. So now you know. A piece of Australian music history, passed from Collins to yours truly and, now, to you.
The program already had plenty of humour in the Poulenc and Ligeti, and although it wasn’t the most tasteful story, you could hardly say no to the zesty little trio it inspired.
Anyway, this was a long and highly satisfying program. I look forward to the remaining entries in the 40th season of this venerable ensemble.
Images supplied. Credit: Keith Saunders.
