Tognetti and Co restore musical history to original setting

A black life that mattered so little that history forget him is reinstated and celebrated in a brilliant collaboration between the ACO and Belvoir.

Angela Nica Sullen and Richard Tognetti and the ACO in the Beethoven Bridgetower concert at City Recital Hall Angel Place. Picture: Nic Walker

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Now here is a great idea for a movie: It’s the 18th century and a former slave from Barbados lands a job as a servant at a court in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He and his European wife have a son who takes up the violin, attracting the notice of the court’s world-famous composer.

The lad becomes a sensation in Paris and London, gaining royal patronage, and then takes Vienna by storm, performing in the premiere of a masterpiece by another world-famous composer, who dedicates the new work to him. However, they have a falling out – probably over a woman – and the violin sonata is rededicated to a French fiddler who refuses to play it anyway. Meanwhile our mixed-race hero dwindles into historical obscurity.

Couldn’t happen? Well, it did, and the fascinating story of George Polgreen Bridgetower and Beethoven’s celebrated Kreutzer Sonata is explored by Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra in a words and music program which links the work with Leo Tolstoy’s misogynistic murder novella of the same name and Leos Janacek’s subsequent string quartet, inspired by the tale – music based on literature based on music.

FLIPPED

Using a script by Australian pianist and writer Anna Goldsworthy and African-American poet Rita Dove and narrated by US-born comedian and actor Angela Nica Sullen, the ACO collaboration with Belvoir’s artistic director Eamon Flack neatly sews together the three elements, some of which have been visited separately by the orchestra in past seasons.

Chronology is flipped with the first half given over to a performance of Janacek’s quartet, written from the doomed wife’s perspective. This is broken up by readings and surtitles from the elderly Czech composer’s obsessive and intimate letters to his distant muse, Kamila Stosslova, with some of the musicians reciting the lines.

Richard Tognetti and the ACO performing Beethoven and Janacek. Picture: Nic Walker

For the second half Tognetti’s string orchestra arrangement of the Beethoven sonata, rechristened for the tour The Bridgetower, assumed the proportions of a violin concerto, with the all-important piano part divided up among the various players, featuring arpeggio flourishes in the cello and viola as a highlight, especially in the slow movement variations.

Sullen’s narration, drawing on Dove’s poetry collection Sonata Mulattica, related some of Bridgetower’s story, using a boy actor – uncredited in the program – as a visual prop. We learn how Bridgetower and Beethoven performed the premiere with the ink still wet on the page and with the violinist having to read the score over Beethoven’s shoulder. And how his s ad libbed cadenza in answer to the piano so delighted the composer that he interrupted the performance to ask for more of the same.

Tognetti’s arrangement had first been aired in the ACO’s 2000-1 season by the great Israeli violinist Ivry Gitlis, who died recently and to whom this concert was dedicated. It was revived in 2010 when Tolstoy’s story was reimagined with two actors.

The program made for a fascinating and satisfying whole, and on the eve of the trial of the Minneapolis policeman who knelt for nine minutes on the throat of George Floyd, it was a timely reminder about a Black Life that mattered so little that history forget him for more than 200 years.

DETAILS

●CONCERT Australian Chamber Orchestra: Beethoven & Bridgetower

●WHERE City Recital Hall Angel Place

●WHEN Sunday, March 28