Australian Chamber Orchestra breaks its six-month silence with live concert
After six months of silence and empty halls, live music has made a comeback with the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s much anticipated return to the stage
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After six months of silence and empty halls, live music has made a comeback with the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s much anticipated return to the stage for five special concerts in the City Recital Hall Angel Place.
With the hall’s 1200 capacity pegged back to 400 to ensure 4m social distancing – and free face masks and sanitiser – the hour-long concert of three works is playing over four nights. And it could just be the start of a series in the COVID era - the ACO is hopeful that it will be able to perform its Beethoven 250 anniversary tribute concert in November as originally planned.
ACO leader Richard Tognetti, who is celebrating his 30th year as artistic director, told the scattered but loudly enthusiastic audience that he felt like a Parks and Wildlife officer reintroducing his musicians back to their natural habitat. The program of three works brought smiles to the players’ faces and muffled cheers and stamping feet from the faithful – and that was before a note had been played.
RADIANCE
That first note came from an acoustic guitar strummed by an old friend of the ACO and didgeridoo guru, William Barton, with Didge Fusion, an arrangement of a beautiful tune Kalkadunga he wrote when he was 15, and sung in his own Kalkatunga tongue. As Sir Simon Rattle said of the versatile Barton, “he radiates”.
There was more radiance in the second work, Tognetti’s orchestral arrangement of Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in D major, whose opening bars were like a shaft of sunlight penetrating the COVID clouds. The thicker textures of a 19-piece ensemble didn’t always suit the conversational nuances of a quartet – think of an oil painting instead of a watercolour – but the playing was glorious and the joyful momentum of the outer movements proved irresistible.
Schoenberg himself made the orchestral version of his passionate and beautiful Verklarte Nacht (Transfigured Night), composed as a string sextet and inspired by a poem about a woman telling her lover that the baby she is expecting is not his. Anguish and agony turn to reconciliation and the power of love in the dark forest setting, all of this captured superbly by the ACO, with some exceptional playing from Stefanie Farrands and her team of violists.
There are three more performances of Transfigured at the City Recital Hall - on Wednesday, September 9, at 7pm, and at 1.30pm and 7pm on Friday, September 9.
DETAILS
● CONCERT: Australian Chamber Orchestra Transfigured
● WHEN: Tuesday, September 8
● WHERE: City Recital Hall Angel Place