Love Sonnet: After the Season of Thunder & Hail | Adelaide Festival 2021 review

Stephanie McCallum plumbed the very depths of the venue’s piano in visceral performances of Sculthorpe and Satie.

Stephanie McCallum

Love Sonnet: After the Season of Thunder & Hail

Classical Music / AUS

FESTIVAL

UKARIA Cultural Centre

March 6

UKARIA’S Incredible Floridas four-day musical offering is shaping up as an eclectic experience. Since the programmed music generally comprises pivotal works established or nearly established in their own right, the spotlight inevitably falls on how they are presented.

Olivier Messiaen’s enormous masterpiece Quatuor Pour la Fin du Temps naturally dominated day two’s late afternoon and evening concerts but clarinetist Jason Noble, violinist James Wannan, cellist Blair Harris and pianist Jack Symonds played it with mercurial facility, objectivity and great rhythmic drive.

As a result, its dance movements, numbers 4, 6 and 7 dominated. Indeed movement 6 – Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes – was as tightly controlled and precise as I have heard it.

It was quite confronting to experience such muscular, edgy Messiaen after the more perfumed interpretations one usually encounters.

In direct contrast, eminent pianist Stephanie McCallum plumbed the very depths of UKARIA’s Bosendorfer in visceral performances of Sculthorpe and Satie. Often seen as delicate lightweight works, Sculthorpe’s five Night Pieces and Satie’s six Gnossiennes were strongly etched in deeply personal statements that elevated them to an almost rhetorical level.

Later, up at Twin Peaks, UKARIA’s brilliant new artist accommodation high in the hills, Graeme Koehn’s String Quartet No. 3 did what Koehne does best, providing strong lucid ideas and leaving the rest to us. Its two movements, the first warmly reminiscent, the second a wild-eyed Jig, narrated Ned Kelly fact and fable with bold clarity.

The Australian String Quartet were deft and very persuasive as usual in the small concert hall’s delicious acoustic.

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