SSO’s Brahms feast ends in festive blaze
CONDUCTOR David Robertson’s Brahms mini-festival with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra went from English understatement to a massive crescendo.
Wentworth Courier
Don't miss out on the headlines from Wentworth Courier. Followed categories will be added to My News.
CONDUCTOR David Robertson’s Brahms mini-festival with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra ended on a massive crescendo when 34-year-old Australian-Ukrainian pianist Alexander Gavryluk brought the mountainous closing bars of the first piano concert to a crashing end.
And just as he did when he made his SSO debut with Vladimir Ashkenazy back in 2011, he came back to the stage and astounded the packed out audience with a pyrotechnic encore of the Horowitz/Liszt Variations of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March.
The two-week festival may have ended in a standing ovation for a young international star but it started rather gently and in a very English way with Edward Elgar’s Serenade for Strings, composed seven years after Brahms completed his fourth and final symphony, the work which closed this opening concert.
In between, and by way of complete contrast, German cellist Alban Gerhardt gave the world premiere of Australian composer and SSO Artist in Residence Brett Dean’s cello concerto. Playing from memory, Gerhardt gave a spectacular performance of this five-movement work in which the cello sometimes leads and sometime takes a back seat as Dean exploits the full orchestral palette of colours and effects.
Dean and Gerhardt are friends from the Australian’s career as a violist with the Berlin Philharmonic, often performing chamber music together.
EXPANSIVE
Concertos were the theme of the second Brahms program. Which got off to a whiz-bang start with the Academic Festival Overture, Brahms’ fond remembrance of his days as a 20-year-old drinking and carousing with students in Gottingen. Apparently some of the old boys turned up for its premiere nearly 30 years later and sang the obscene versions of the student songs in the audience.
The first of the concertos for the evening was the double concerto for violin and cello, composed as a conciliatory gesture to his old friend violinist Joseph Joachim, with whom he had had a falling out a few years previously. It worked and the piece represents Brahms at his happiest and most tuneful — the slow movement is a glorious expansive melody.
SSO concertmaster Andrew Haveron and principal cello Umberto Clerici were the soloists in a lovely reading under the energetic and exacting baton of Robertson.
Brahms was considerably less happy when he composed his massive first piano concerto, which many consider his dry run in symphonic form before he shrugged off the “footsteps of Beethoven behind him”.
Gavryluk took over with convincing power and poetic awareness for a riveting 50-minute ride
The concerto started out as a double piano sonata, but then Brahms realised that this was too limiting so he considered it as a symphony. Lacking confidence in his orchestral writing he put that aside until the idea of making it into a concerto came to him in a dream.
It was written when he was still in shock over the death of his friend Robert Schumann, and you can hear the pain in the long first movement. The work was hissed at its Leipzig premiere but it has become a concert warhorse, and rightly so.
Robertson kept his in-form band on just the right length of leash for the dramatic orchestral opening and Gavryluk took over with convincing power and poetic awareness for a riveting 50-minute ride.
DETAILS
● CONCERTS: Brahms with Sydney Symphony Orchestra
● WHERE: Sydney Opera House Concert Hall
● WHEN: August 24 and September 3