Steven Isserlis gives us searing Shostakovich
ENGLISH cellist Steven Isserlis is one of classical music’s brightest stars and his latest visit shows his special relationship with the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
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ENGLISH cellist Steven Isserlis is undoubtedly one of the brightest stars in classical music’s firmament.
He has been coming here regularly for several years and has built up a special relationship with the Australian Chamber Orchestra — he is after all “unofficial godfather” of artistic director Richard Tognetti’s teenage son Leonardo.
He is also one of the most exciting, daring and involving performers — interacting not only with his musical collaborators but with his audience as well with his famous labradoodle-like hair flying this way and that as he bends over his cello, leaning back or lurching sideways, his face working to the emotion of the music.
For his latest ACO tour he showcases one of the most powerful and searing masterpieces written for the instrument, Dmitri Shostakovich’s first concerto with its relentlessly driving opening, cold and haunting slow movement and long unaccompanied passage leading to a showstopping finale.
IMMACULATE
In it you can hear anguish — it was written after Stalin’s death but the psychological scars of the brutal regime still ran deep — defiance and great beauty, all of which was illuminated with immaculate artistry in this performance.
Isserlis was supported by an equally immaculate orchestra, led with characteristic attention to nuance and detail by Tognetti wielding his Guarneri violin. The ACO’s glorious string playing was complemented by crack woodwind and brass sections featuring regular and guest performers.
Shostakovich reportedly slept with a suitcase packed ready for the dreaded knock on the door by the security police
The moderato movement, in which Isserlis’ ghostly harmonics were accompanied by Brenda Jones’ celesta, was eerie and spine tingling, while the chattering flute and piccolo passages cut through with brittle brilliance in the first movement; Premysl Vojta’s burnished horn excited in the fanfares earning him a special ovation, and Olli Leppaniemi’s bitingly sarcastic clarinet lent a disturbing air, all underpinned by the ominous beat of the timpani.
Shostakovich reportedly slept with a suitcase packed ready for the dreaded knock on the door by the security police. It never came for him but it did for the Generowicz children, Mirek and Ala, who were transported from wartime Poland to Soviet labour camps before they made it to a British army base in Nazareth and finally settled in Australia.
STAMP
Their story, and that of their parents, was the subject of a new work by Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin, A Knock One Night, commissioned by Mirek, which was given its world premiere on this tour.
The evocative 12-minute piece is divided into four sections — Childhood, Knock, Train and Peace — reflecting idyllic days rudely awakened, with the musicians called on to stamp their feet and tap their bow screws on their instruments.
The tempo rises in the train section and the mood lightens near the end when a tango rhythm evokes the tunes the children marched to in the British camp before they left for Australia.
The other world premiere on the program, Samuel Adams’ Movements (for us and them) which opened the concert, was jointly commissioned by the ACO.
It starts off in the famed Shaker Loops style of the composer’s famous minimalist father John Adams, but quickly dissolves into something entirely original with the divided strings vying with each other, gyring at times like a wobbly bridge.
By the time Joseph Haydn composed his London Symphony he had had plenty of practice in the art form, having written 103 of them before this his last, and many consider greatest, masterpiece of the genre.
Its four movements cover a panoply of emotions, moods, tonal colours and innovative ideas, and all departments of the orchestra are allowed their moment in the sun.
Tognetti and his players brought out the full majesty of the work, as well as the almost singalong quality of the slower passages, in a jubilant performance that set the seal on a varied and superlative concert.
It will be repeated at City Recital Hall Angel Place on Wednesday, July 4, at 7pm and if you can get a seat you’re in for a rare treat.
DETAILS
● CONCERT: Steven Isserlis and the Australian Chamber Orchestra
● WHERE: City Recital Hall Angel Place
● WHEN: Tuesday, July 3