ASQ ends its virtual concert season on high and sad note

Australia’s flagship string quartet the ASQ has brought down the curtain on its eight-week COVID-safe streamed concerts before a small live audience.

Two works by Melbourne composer Joe Chindamo closed the Australian String Quartet’s virtual concert season.

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Australia’s flagship string quartet the ASQ has brought down the curtain on its eight-week COVID-safe streamed concerts before a small live audience.

The last of the Sunday afternoon one-hour bites of live performance and behind the scenes lifestyle featurettes “went to air” on Sunday with a program featuring two works by Melbourne composer and jazz pianist Joe Chindamo, including the world premiere of a “fantasy”, Meows and Muses, written in lockdown envisaging cats taking over the city’s streets at night and “staging the greatest theatre ever seen”.

The episode, recorded at the Ukaria concert hall in the Adelaide Hills, is the swan song for the group’s cellist, Sharon Grigoryan, who has left to concentrate on family and performing as a duo with her husband, classical guitarist Slava.

Violinists Dale Barltrop and Francesca Hiew and violist Stephen King will now be joined by Michael Dahlenburg, who filled in for Grigoryan when she went on maternity leave in 2018.

DIVERSE

As Chindamo says before the performances, the ASQ like all great groups have the knack of making old music sound fresh and new works seem as if they have been around for years. They played his string quartet Tempesta, which has become part of their regular repertoire, an attractive piece with some Bartokian flashes and plenty of intricate cross rhythms.

The webcast project, although brought on out of necessity with the closure of concert halls in March, was something the group had been thinking of doing as a way of reaching wider and more diverse audiences.

Singer and writer Johanna Allen hosted the series and sang in the final concert.

The episodes, hosted by singer and writer Johanna Allen, have proved a hit with subscribers – $40 for the season, all episodes of which are available until October 31 – both for the performances of works by four mainstream and four contemporary Australian composers and for the short lifestyle features which give insights into the performers away from the podium.

Chindamo is probably better known as a jazz pianist and composer, but he has turned to classical composition in the past decade, writing a lot of music for his partner violinist Zoe Black. Their recordings are well worth checking out – an adventurous and spectacularly successful arrangement of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and a collection of Baroque favourites, titled Dido’s Lament, being particularly enjoyable.

This final episode is capped off by Allen joining the quartet for Edith Piaf’s Hymne a l’amour.