The Return | Adelaide Festival 2021 review

It was great to hear Peggy Glanville-Hicks’ Concerto Romantico paired with Margaret Sutherland’s Concerto for Strings.

Viola player James Wannan was part of The Return program at UKARIA.

The Return

Classical Music / AUS

UKARIA Cultural Centre

March 7

The Return was a rare opportunity to experience an entire concert dedicated to Australian works for chamber orchestra.

It was particularly great to hear Peggy Glanville-Hicks’ Concerto Romantico (1956) paired with Margaret Sutherland’s Concerto for Strings (1961). Glanville-Hicks might be a name more familiar to classical music audiences, but both composers deserve to be performed much more frequently.

Sutherland was a pioneering figure in Australian music. As well as lobbying for Australian composition, she was also one of the first Australian composers to engage with contemporary European trends. Her Concerto for Strings features neoclassical elements, along with dense orchestration, and angsty dissonances in the final movement.

Viola player James Wannan was part of The Return program at UKARIA.

Concerto Romantico also shows the influence of neoclassicism, while placing virtuosic demands on the soloist. Violist James Wannan played with great tonal depth and technical flourish. There was a melancholy sweetness to the second movement and the orchestra brought a folk-music energy to the third movement,

Elena Kats-Chernin is well-known today, but her piece Intension (1982) might have been a stylistic surprise to an audience. It’s a short, frenetic work, built from fragmented bursts of sound and using extremes of pitch and dynamics.

Kats-Chernin’s Wild Swans, by contrast, is probably the composer’s best-known work. Soprano Suzanne Pederson’s delicate, crystalline clarity was very well suited to the piece.

The Return was a jam-packed program, which also included Peter Sculthorpe’s Irkanda IV and Sonata for Strings, and two of Percy Grainger’s folk song arrangements.

The Graingers, in particular, felt superfluous and, with the concert duration extending well beyond its advertised length, it might have been better to leave out the final two works, and give the audience more space to appreciate the rest of the program.

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