Brandies put on night of pluck and Cuban flair
AS a child born in poverty and living on the streets of Havana Lixsania Fernandez was captivated when she heard someone playing a viola. It was the start of a career.
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AS a child born in poverty and living on the streets of Havana Lixsania Fernandez was captivated when she heard someone playing a viola.
Her family couldn’t afford an instrument — much less music lessons — but someone fashioned a piece of wood for her and she asked the local fishermen for some line for strings, so she could pretend to play.
Skip forward a few years and as a teenager she managed to escape the poverty of Cuba, ending up (illegally) in Europe where she studied the modern instrument but chose its older uncle, the viola da gamba, as her specialty.
She studied in Spain with Jordi Savall, that great master of the six-stringed fretted forerunner of the cello, and started to make a name for herself.
So it was quite an occasion this week when she made her Australian debut with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra whose artistic director Paul Dyer correctly observed in his chat to the packed out Angel Place audience that “she has charisma to burn”.
Dyer first saw her at a music festival in France in an old church. He found it a riveting experience and it’s safe to say the first night crowd for this concert felt the same.
Fernandez cut a striking figure in a slinky black gown — the first of three frocks for the evening — with tattoos on her bowing arm and a stunning hairstyle shaved short on one side with an extravagantly curled sweep over with red highlights.
EFFECTIVE
She walked out on stage alone for the start of a pastiche based on the Portuguese dance folia (meaning “madness”) — a ground bass chord sequence much loved by Baroque composers including, in this instance, Arcangelo Corelli, the elder Scarlatti and Frenchman Marin Marais.
After some broken chords in the Corelli, Dyer joined Fernandez on harpsichord for the Scarlatti, then associate concertmaster Matt Bruce added some violin and by the time we got to Vivaldi’s La Follia the whole orchestra had filed in.
This effective opening was followed by concertmaster Shaun Lee’s plucky attempt at Pietro Locatelli’s notoriously difficult Harmonic Labyrinth concerto.
The 18th century Italian teacher throws down the gauntlet to his pupils with this piece, especially in the capriccio outer movements which are basically two long exercises in solo violin pyrotechnics exploiting finger bending double stopping, lightning-fast runs up and down the whole length of the fingerboard and some extremely deft bowing techniques.
As the composer boasted, this maze is easy to enter, difficult to exit.
The opening capriccio drew applause and even the welcome slow movement afforded little relaxation for the soloist with its heavily ornamented figures.
The final movement was a far more rhythmical capriccio than the first with more solo double-stopped feats through the various keys. Despite Lee’s superb effort (inevitably on a period gut string instrument there were occasional blurry notes and tuning problems) this listener found the music a little tiresome and began wishing for edited highlights.
REDISCOVERED
As if this wasn’t enough, Lee was back to share fiddle honours with Ben Dollman for Vivaldi’s concerto for two violins and viola da gamba. Fernandez returned to the stage with a change of dress — still black but this one with sequins.
If Lee almost stole the first half the other part of the program was all about Fernandez with a rare performance of a viola da gamba concerto written by Johann Gottlieb Graun, the lead violinist in Frederick the Great’s orchestra which included Johann Sebastian Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel among its members.
This work has only recently been rediscovered and it showed off Fernandez’ finesse as well as her more virtuosic skills.
After a short and lovely church piece by “Red Priest” Vivaldi, played beautifully by the orchestra, the Cuban returned to the stage in a lemon outfit — matched by the ties of the suited male musicians. She was joined by ABO cellist and and gamba player Anthea Cottee for a more modern take on the instrument by American musician Rene Schiffer.
Dramatic lighting and some mean dance moves by Bruce and Dollman — as well as Dyer’s flamboyant conducting style from the keyboard — all added to the sense of fun as the two soloists duelled in a joyful tango.
The concert is repeated at City Recital Hall Angel Place at 7pm on Friday, November 2; Saturday, November 3; Wednesday, November 7, and Friday, November 9, with a 2pm matinee on the Saturday.
DETAILS
● CONCERT: Lixsania and the Labyrinth, Australian Brandenburg Orchestra
● WHERE: City Recital Hall Angel Place
● WHEN: Wednesday, October 31