Australian Chamber Orchestra bring house down with sound of silence

The music stopped mid-bar and a dumb show by two dancers took over in a moving climax to the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s latest tour with star British counter tenor Iestyn Davies.

Richard Tognetti led the Australian Chamber Orchestra in a concert featuring Sydney Theatre Company and star English counter tenor Iestyn Davies. Picture: Daniel Boud

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The music stopped mid-bar and a dumb show by two dancers took over in a moving climax to the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s latest tour with star British counter tenor Iestyn Davies.

The concert, tagged Silence and Rapture, featured the music of two of the greatest composers ever to put pen to score, Johann Sebastian Bach and the 88-year-old Estonian Arvo Part. Two dancers, Liam Green and Emil Seymour, with choreography by Rafaela Bonachela, added a spectacular dimension to the program in the first collaboration between the ACO and Sydney Dance Company since the Project Rameau production in 2012.

Davies, making his much anticipated Australian debut, did not disappoint, his rich and beautiful tone swelling through the packed auditorium in the concert played straight through without applause until the end 70 minutes later. His rendition of the aria Embarme Dich from Bach’s St Matthew Passion was a time-stopping six minutes that will live long in the memory.

ACO artistic director Richard Tognetti led a group of 11 strings accompanied by Chad Kelly on keyboards in a program which took us through hope and temptation in the Garden of Eden; tragedy and passion in the Garden of Gethsemane; redemption in the Garden of Heaven, and, finally, silence with Bach’s movement from the Art of Fugue which was left unfinished by his death. His son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, filled the missing page with his father’s chorale When We Are In Utmost Need, and this was quoted by the German 20th century composer Paul Hindemith in his Trauermusik, composed in memory of George V, and which closed this spellbinding recital.

British counter tenor Iestyn Davies performing with the ACO. Picture: Daniel Boud

Davies, who comes from the English tradition of choral scholars – he was one at St John’s College, Cambridge – combines purity of line with a subtle vibrato and is adept at evoking the emotion of the text. He featured in six pieces, four from cantatas and religious works by Bach and two by Part – a lovely arrangement of the Lord’s Prayer Unser Vater and a setting of Robert Burns’s poem My Heart’s In The Highlands in the form of a lament when, during Soviet times, Estonians were forbidden from learning English.

The instrumental music – much of it with superb dance interpretations from Green and Seymour – drew on a wide range of excerpts from both composers with Timo-Veikko Valve playing the Prelude from Bach’s Cello Sonata No. 3 and Tognetti featuring in Part’s popular piece Fratres and the Andante from Bach’s Sonata for Solo Violin No. 2, among others.

The concert is repeated at City Recital Hall on Tuesday, August 6, at 8pm and Wednesday, August 7, at 7pm. If you can get a ticket I urge you to do so.

DETAILS

• CONCERT ACO: Silence & Rapture

• WHERE City Recital Hall

• WHEN August 2, 2024