The new, the unfamiliar and the old friend
A music review by Fraser Beath McEwing
Ray Chen
Last night’s concert was something of a reunion, with former SSO chief conductor David Robertson stopping by to swish air, Queensland violinist Ray Chen to scrape horsehair, and Sydney Con-trained composer Alice Chance to distribute manuscript paper.
Like many of the composers featured in the 50 Fanfares Commission, 39-year-old Alice Chance is professionally occupied on many fronts. She is a composer, conductor, singer, arranger, writer and French teacher – with a remarkable set of landmark musical achievements. Her piece, Through Changing Landscape, was for full symphony orchestra but would just as easily have been at home with voices – where much of her creative work has been done.
She reasoned that her five minutes of fanfare offered only limited developmental space, so she chose to focus on a single note, E. While what she did with it was inventive and sometimes transportive, the repeated Es grated on me after a while as they hijacked what might have been one of the top draw contributions to this popular program inclusion.
The Tchaikovsky violin concerto was a work familiar to SSO audiences, as was the soloist, Taiwan-born and Queensland-raised Ray Chen. Ray is as enthusiastically unpretentious as he is a world-class solo violinist. I had a beer one night with him and his mother after a concert and was delighted to find him chatty and good fun. Along with understandable pride, his mother was worried that he practised too much. Ray’s fiddle (on loan from the Nippon Music Foundation) is said to be one of the top three of the Stradivarius output. As such, it is virtually priceless and a tribute to his world standing among the best fiddlers.
Ray Chen is also credited with bringing a growing crop of young people to classical music via social media, especially through his series on YouTube, which is both accessible and age-appropriate.
On to Pytor, who wrote his one and only violin concerto in 1878 while holidaying in the Swiss Alps. He succumbed to continual badgering from violinist Iosif Kotek and then produced a work that Kotek didn’t like, saying it was too technically demanding to play. The first performance was given at the end of 1881 in Vienna by Alolph Brodsky. One prominent critic, Eduard Hanslick, hated it, saying that the poor old violin was ‘beaten black and blue’. But time has ripened the public love for this concerto to the point where it is in danger of becoming overexposed, although time has not diminished its towering technical demands.
Ray Chen was not overawed by the concerto’s difficulties as he jumped astride the bronco and rode it to submission, pausing only in the slow movement to fuel up for a hair-raising finish in the third. Chen didn’t just play the right notes at blazing speed, his phrasing imparted a freshness and a shape that few soloists achieve. Part of that, of course, was the understanding between soloist, orchestra and conductor which, in this case, produced pinpoint coordination.
While I would have been happy to leave the concert with the Tchaikovsky and Ray Chen’s passionate performance whirring around in my head, the Symphony No. 5, Op. 50, by Danish composer Carl Nielsen, was still to come as the final event.
Nielsen is generally regarded as Denmark’s most prominent composer. Among many other musical forms, he wrote six symphonies, of which the fifth is the most popular – although not a frequent choice for symphony concerts. Reaching into the early 20th-century rule-breaking era, it is written in two mood-swinging movements, often drifting away into introspection or exploding into a war between instruments.
Fraser Beath McEwing
Although the first movement began gently enough, a cracker under the percussion switched the attention to the snare drum, where Rebecca Lagos played a forte mini-concerto before taking her drumsticks and marching off stage in what looked like a huff. But her departure was explained when we could hear her drumming outside. However, when she ran out of notes, she didn’t return. I daresay she went home for a Bex and a good lie down.
The second movement offered some poetic, wistful passages but then wound up for an apocalyptic finish employing every instrument and ending in a chord that, to my failing ear, wasn’t quite right. It’s too late to talk to Carl about it, so I leave it to the better informed of my readers to decide.
It was a pleasure to see David Robertson on The Opera House podium again, with his appreciative smile for the players – in contrast to the talented but authoritarian style of Simone Young. All of our chief conductors have had their idiosyncrasies, from Ashkenazy’s Charlie Chaplin scurrying stage-walk to Challender’s nearly-falling-down, sweaty exhaustion. Only Gelmetti on his podium chair and looking for all the world like a comma is not quite so endearing.
SSO Sydney Opera House concert 12 July 2023
Fraser Beath McEwing is an accomplished pianist and commentator on classical music performance and is a founding member of The theme & Variations Foundation Advisory Board which provides assistance to talented young Australian pianists. His professional background is in journalism, editing and publishing. He is also the author of three novels.He is a Governor of the Sir Moses Montefiore Home.
