De Borah, Shamray, Tinalley lift Coriole to the next level

The Coriole Music Festival is always a treat, but this year’s programming and performances were exceptionally exciting.

Coriole Music Festival director Anthony Steel came up with a well-integrated Russian-English program.

As if summoned by nature’s beauty in the picturesque surrounds of Adelaide’s Southern Vales, the miracles just kept rolling at this year’s Coriole Music Festival.

The annual weekend event invariably puts on a good show, making it one of Australia’s top three chamber music festivals — smaller but equal in quality to Huntington and Four Winds.

But this one was vintage. Some magnificent performances and a strongly integrated English-Russian program from director Anthony Steel made it especially successful.

A substitute piece to open proceedings, Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending felt too sentimental for a Steel festival, but the audience was nevertheless thankful for violinist Adam Chalabi’s spellbindingly delicate performance of this piece with pianist Daniel de Borah.

Tinalley String Quartet supplied the heart and soul of the festival, playing throughout with an unforced, intuitive musical sense. When pianist Konstantin Shamray joined it for Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet Op 57, they stepped up in power to produce one of the program’s many highlights.

Tenor Andrew Goodwin and de Borah eclipsed even their much-admired performances five years ago at Coriole. These two musicians think alike. Their set of Rachmaninov songs in the second concert rippled with emotion, and in Britten’s The Poet’s Echo they seemed to unlock every tiny inner flex and sensitivity of this composer’s hauntingly beautiful setting of the Pushkin text.

Vaughan Williams’s song cycle On Wenlock Edge, on which they were joined by Tinalley,was something else again. Eloquent and noble of expression, Goodwin has a very special ability of letting the words just hang in the air.

Shamray, one of this country’s finest pianists and winner of the 2008 Sydney International Piano Competition, was the undisputed star on day three. He thrived on a large Steinway brought in for the occasion, and the results were, frankly, gobsmacking.

An earlier taste of Shamray playing Mozart had been impressive: his clean, disciplined playing suits classical composers. But nothing could prepare one for Prokofiev’s Sarcasms, Five Pieces for Piano in the last concert. This young man’s huge sense of scale of this music was something never heard before at this festival.

In many ways it was equalled by oboist Celia Craig’s effortless vivacity in Mozart’s Oboe Quartet and a superbly characterful, almost theatrically alive performance of Britten’s Six Metamorphoses after Ovid.

A young singer in the midst of all this might have been eclipsed, but not so soprano Morgan Balfour. With a lovely, highly listenable voice and outstanding responsiveness to word and mood, she was thoroughly wonderful in songs by Walton, Britten and Prokofiev.

Coriole Music Festival. Music director: Anthony Steel. Coriole Vineyards, McLaren Vale, May 7-8.