Orchestral
CD and Other Review

Review: Bach & Beethoven: Fugue (Australian Chamber Orchestra/Tognetti)

Recorded live in Sydney’s City Recital Hall last year, this disc takes the listener from the beautifully spare, intertwining lines of JS Bach’s The Art of Fugue to the lush complexity of Beethoven’s Opus 130 Quartet. Tognetti and the ACO merely dip their toes into Bach’s contrapuntal water, offering the first four movements of the collection as a kind of musical primer for the Beethoven. The first Contrapunctus presents Bach’s subject before it’s accompanied by lively dotted rhythms in the second and inverted in the third, the ACO’s weaving voices lilting conversationally. The fourth Contrapunctus is all pizzicato, a motif from the subject’s tail brought to soft, haunting life by the voices of the instrumentalists – a quirky touch that, while effective, might scare off traditionalists. From the clean lines of the Bach, the ACO blossoms into the warmer – if no less cerebral – textures of Beethoven’s String Quartet in B Flat, the orchestra off-leash in the first movement, singing in the lyrical moments. The Presto is taken at a gallop while the Alla Danza Tedesca: Allegro Assai has a sweet naivety. The Cavatina throbs with expression before the climax: the Große Fuge, which the ACO… Continue reading Get…

July 21, 2017
Orchestral
CD and Other Review

Review: Mozart: Symphonies Nos 39, 40, 41 (Australian Chamber Orchestra)

As Donald Francis Tovey writes in his eminently useful Essays in Musical Analysis, Mozart’s three last symphonies, written in 1788 over six weeks, “express the healthiest of reactions on each other” and, being “in Mozart’s ripest style makes the full range of that style appear more vividly than in any other circumstances. Consequently, they make an ideal programme when played in their chronological order.” Thus does one often hear them, as a kind of triptych or three-movement, Major-Minor-Major meta-symphony, both in concert and on record. And thus does one hear them in this instance, recorded live during the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s 2015 Mozart’s Last Symphonies national tour, which commemorated 25 years since the great Frans Brüggen conducted the orchestra in the same programme. It was also Tognetti’s first year as leader. Listening again to Brüggen’s last great pronouncement on these three symphonies (for the Glossa label in 2014), one marvels anew at the way he shapes the Orchestra of the 18th Century’s lithe, colourful responses to Mozart’s almost Shakespearean combination of low comedy and high seriousness. But it is to John Eliot Gardiner’s live 2006 recording of Symphonies Nos 39 and 41 that we must turn to… Continue reading Get…

December 2, 2016