ACO makes a high-octane launch to its 2021 season

The Australian Chamber Orchestra launched its 2021 season with five works highlighting the precision, nuance and sheer exhilaration of their playing.

Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra has launched its 2021 season. Picture: Nic Walker

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The Australian Chamber Orchestra launched its 2021 season with five works that highlight the precision, nuance and sheer exhilaration of their playing.

The twin pillars of these pieces from the former Soviet Union – Arvo Part’s Tabula Rasa and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony – both drew gasps from behind the masks of the audience capped to three-quarters capacity, the former for its sheer transporting beauty and the latter for its powerful expression of grief.

The enthusiasm of the ACO’s fans, deprived of live music for so long by the Covid pandemic, hit the concert hall stage like a tsunami, leaving Richard Tognetti and his colleagues beaming.

This was a well thought out and carefully constructed program, with the only unforeseen consequence of the pandemic being that Wollongong hosted the world premiere of English composer Thomas Ades’ Shanty, jointly commissioned by the ACO and six other orchestras. Tognetti, along with Norman Gunston perhaps the ’Gong’s most famous son, could barely hide his delight in his witty introduction to the evening.

LIVELY

Drawing a very long bow, Tognetti said that although Ades had nothing to do with the Soviet Union, he did use folk song as his inspiration for the new work, as did the other composers on the program.

The concert got off to a lively start with Orawa, a work by Polish composer Wojciech Killar, who is best known for his scores for Francis Ford Coppola and Roman Polanski movies. The short piece, evoking the folk fiddlers of the Tatra Mountains, used some time signatures that jazz legend Dave Brubeck would have proud of.

Time seems to stand still in Part’s masterpiece Tabula Rasa, so named as it was his “clean slate” rejection of his previous heavy-going serialism music. His tinkling bell-like tintinnabuli style which went on to make him the biggest selling contemporary classical composer.

Tognetti and Satu Vanska’s twin violins duel and at times die away to mere whispers over the Gregorian chant steplike progressions of the orchestra and the regularly repeated piano figure which grounds the floating strings.

The high-octane second movement, with its famous Jewish folk tune, was extraordinarily powerful

Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony is an orchestral arrangement of his eighth string quartet, written in Dresden when he was working on a film on the city’s devastation in World War II. The composer put all his anger, grief and frustration at his precarious creative life under respective Soviet regimes, into this most personal work – his musical signature is used throughout – which he dedicated to “the victims of a fascist war”.

The high-octane second movement, with its famous Jewish folk tune, was extraordinarily powerful under Tognetti’s direction.

That other great Soviet composer, Sergei Prokofiev, also had tough times under Stalin. His Sonata for Violin in D major, more often played by one soloist, was originally conceived as a kind of graduation piece for entire classes of violinists, all playing in unison.

Ten of the ACO fiddlers performed it as the opening to the second half.

Needless to say, they all passed with flying colours.

The concert is repeated at City Recital Hall Angel Place on Friday, February 12, at 1.30pm; Saturday, February 13, at 7pm, and Sunday, February 14, at 2pm.

DETAILS

● CONCERT ACO: Tabula Rosa

● WHERE City Recital Hall

● WHEN February 10