Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Adelaide Town Hall. 12 Sep 2014
Beethoven is arguably the best known and most loved composer of them all. His music has made an impression on us all, and even those who would who would rather clean the Christmas Pageant chalk off King William Street with their tongues than go to an orchestral concert know some of Beethoven’s music. I remember my first introduction to his music when as a lad I was totally struck by Schroeder in a Charlie Brown Xmas TV Special sitting at his baby grand piano playing the opening bars to the Moonlight Sonata. I remember my first Ninth Symphony and my first Fifth. I remember Clemens Leske and Beryl Kimber in an Elder Hall lunch-time during university days introducing me to the excitement and exquisite boldness of the Kreutzer Sonata, and if I thought about it I’m sure I could recall other exquisite memories of Beethoven moments from the recesses of my mind.
So to Beethoven Festival 1, one of the key events in the festival that the ASO has ever so carefully and thoughtfully curated.
Conductor Nicholas McGegan took the Symphony No.1 at a comfortable, no-surprises, traditional pace, and the phrasing and articulation of the orchestra was first rate. Beethoven broke many of the established classical rules in this composition, and McGegan was able to remind us of this with his no-fuss approach to dynamics and thoughtful tempi.
The Symphony was followed by the Leonore Overture No. 1, which is less substantial and enjoyable than the Leonore Overture No.3, which is a crowd pleaser.
Natsuko Yoshimoto again demonstrated that she is a world-class violinist and her heartfelt performance of the Romance No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra was sublimely melancholy. McGegan ceded much control to Yoshimoto and she repaid his trust in spades.
Quite probably the audience was mostly looking forward to Stephen Hough performing the mighty Piano Concerto No. 5 “The Emperor”. I was! Hough is an imposing looking musician. He is tall and slender, and has a tight steely gaze. He is exciting to watch – there are dramatic moments as he attacks the keyboard, almost with Lisztian arrogance, and as he earnestly looks around at members of the orchestra as if to say that he is with them and we’re all in this together. The adagio movement was played with serene simplicity and Hough extracted crystal-clear bell-like tones from the upper register of the Steinway that gave an uncommon lightness to the performance. His rubato and attack in the extended cadenza almost drew the audience to their feet before McGegan had a chance to extract the final crashing chord from the piano and orchestra.
The appreciation of the audience was thunderous, and Hough, McGegan and the members of the ASO looked mighty pleased with themselves, as they should.
Beethoven Festival 2 is next week, when we will be treated to Leonore No.2 (not No. 3 dammit!), the first piano concerto performed by the great Robert Levin, and the pure explosion of exuberance and joy that is the Eighth symphony. Bring it on!
Kym Clayton
When: Closed
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Entertainment Centre. 30 Aug 2014
It’s not just the times that are a-changing. Things have Changed. Bob Dylan is back on stage in Adelaide and his opening song, Academy Award winning theme tune to the 2000 film Wonder Boys, tells us – “People are crazy, times are strange/I’m locked in tight , I’m outta range/ I used to care but things have changed.” Except, with Bob, the more things change, the more they also stay the same.
He’s been locked in tight for a long time now. The so-called Never Ending Tour (a tag he himself ridicules) began in 1988 and notched up 2000 concerts by 2007. Seven years, and hundreds of performances further on, and Dylan is now 73 and still on the road. Still hidden in plain sight, still that Alias character from Sam Peckinpah’s western, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
Dressed in a broad brimmed hat and black and grey patched suit Dylan has become the song and dance man he once whimsically called himself. The songs are drawn from the deepest wells in popular music. And the dance, well, he’s got some moves, you might call them a sardonic, slow jive.
Dylan doesn’t play guitar nowadays, instead it’s piano, not that tinny electric from last tour, but a half size grand. Or else he stands at the microphone and croons wolfishly, biting at the lyrics here, gliding lightly through the octave there. His voice is gravelly, sometimes it sounds utterly shredded, but often he moves it with startling invention and with such emotive phrasing that you have to catch your breath.
The set continues with “She Belongs to Me” – from Bringing it All Back Home, 1965- transition folk rock: Highway 61 to arrive in a few months and the thin wild mercury sound of Blonde on Blonde the following year. The band is relaxed – bassist Tony Garnier is settling back. Dylan’s longtime MD, he doesn’t have to explain the ways of God to the other musicians any more. On this year’s tour the set list is tight and relatively unvarying. The band is well-rehearsed. No more having to guess which song Bob has launched himself into, re-engineering the tempo and the intro.
“She’s got everything she needs, she’s an artist, she don’t look back.” Charlie Sexton is playing some sweet phrases on lead, but it is Dylan’s haunting harmonica, clarion from another century, which reminds us that it is not quite fifty years since many of us bought that album, and marvelled at “Mr Tambourine Man” and “Maggie’s Farm”, and even more at “Gates of Eden”.
After “Beyond Here Lies Nothing”, it is on “Workingman Blues #2” where things really start to lift. Dylan’s voice is surer and the latter day, hard-luck lyrics have a post-GFC edge to them. He’s standing at the mic – in fact there is a cluster of four of them, designed, you start to think, to obscure Dylan’s face; like the strange, shadowy stage lighting which was intriguing for those us in the front rows, but baffling, and at times frustrating, to some of my friends seated much further back. But that’s Bob – locked in tight, outta range - hidden in plain sight.
The little-known “Waiting for You”, another movie soundtrack song, gets the cowboy waltz treatment. Donnie Herron on pedal steel, Bob on piano – it is the first of several wistful ballads. The mood changes with the jaunty “Duquesne Whistle” and the mephistophelean “Pay in Blood”, both from last year’s Tempest album.
The first half closes strongly – with a slowed down, expertly phrased reading of “Tangled Up in Blue”, the band playing melody with an almost modal insistence, Bob adding more heraldic harmonica, to be followed by “Love Sick”, his bitter blues. Sexton supplies the keening lead, while the excellent Stu Kimball’s rhythm guitar has a relentless dread to it. This is from Dylan’s late masterpiece – Time Out of Mind, shades of W.B.Yeats’s Last Poems: The Circus Animals’ Desertion, Crazy Jane on the Mountain and Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?
“High Water (for Charley Patton)” opens the second half. Featuring Donnie Herron on banjo – alas, volume not high enough in the often bass heavy mix. Dylan makes the lyrics echo with prophetic import, just like it is so easily done, out on Highway 61.
Returning to Blood on the Tracks for a deftly simple twist on “A Simple Twist of Fate” again he adds crooning harmonica highlights. The band regroups for a thumping version of “Early Roman Kings” – Early Roman Hoochie Coochie Men, more like. Listen to Kimball’s driving chords, George Recile’s dead-arm drum and Bob barrel-housing the piano, it is drawn from the clear springs of Muddy Waters, and is a reminder that Dylan has always played great blues.
With the sprightly string band melody of “Spirit on the Water” Bob tells us we can have a very good time and with the creepy ballad, “Scarlet Town” and its grimly hypnotic banjo riff, he reminds us that the world is also too much with us - and it doesn’t wish us well.
Perhaps though, it is the melancholy of regret that falls most heavily on the night. In “Forgetful Heart” (why can’t we love like we did before?) Dylan takes the schmaltz of a cowboy ballad and, accompanied by Herron’s mournful violin, turns it into something far less generic. Instead it sounds heartfelt, personal, as if he is running out of aliases, and certainly running out of time.
It is the same with his closing song, again from Tempest, the slow strummed, half-crooned, half-spoken “Long and Wasted Years”. “For one brief time,” he dreamily recalls, “I was the bang for you. Maybe it’s the same for me as it is for you.” Sexton plays his trickle-down riff over and over as Dylan, still masked by shadows and microphones, delivers like a disembodied voice on late night country radio – “so many tears, so many long and wasted years.”
The encores follow briskly. “All Along the Watchtower” – Businessmen they drink my wine, ploughmen dig my earth - has long been his anthem, gloriously reframed by Jimi Hendrix, but long since reclaimed by Dylan and his band - with its rousing guitars, paused for Sexton’s duet with Dylan’s rhythmic piano, before Recile’s drums roar back into urgent warning –“outside in the distance a wildcat did growl /Two riders were approaching, and the wind began to howl.”
As for the whole tour, “Watchtower” is twinned with “Blowin’ in the Wind”, Dylan at the piano, his weary vocals turning the earnest exhortations of his most famous protest song into perplexed questions that seem lost in time and context. Things have changed. Without the guitar, Bob Dylan is no longer the folk troubadour. Now he’s the Lonesome Hobo, the Wicked Messenger, the Jokerman – take your pick.
For his loyal audience, ageing with him, he is a Beckettian figure of rebuke. Alone and remote in his eccentricity and his undoubted genius, he has long told us he is not the one we want or need. Yet we still yearn for his approval, his benediction. People ask – did he speak to the audience? What performer, after all, does not warmly acknowledge his or her fans, admirers, cult followers? But of course he didn’t speak, except to announce the interval. Mr Godot is not coming today or any other. In his concert, with a masterful band, Mr Dylan has given a great deal of himself, but, as always, he is hidden in plain sight. He’s locked in tight. Things have changed. And nothing has changed at all.
Murray Bramwell
When: Closed
Where: Adelaide Entertainment Centre
Bookings: Closed
The Moldau – My Homeland. Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Adelaide Town Hall. 29 Aug 2014
This concert, the ASO’s seventh in their 2014 Masters Series for 2014, was deeply satisfying and immensely enjoyable for three reasons: appealing programming, outstanding conducting, and prodigiously talented youth.
The programming was excellent and comprised three superb examples of nationalistic composition. Smetana’s ‘Ma vlast: Vltava’ (The Moldau) is a full-on crowd pleaser and everyone ‘knows’ it. Its sweeping melodies stir something deep within and it is exalted by Czechs as something that captures the essence of their country. Guest conductor Christopher Seaman handled the shifting dynamics with great care and ensured that when the orchestra played fortissimo key instruments still shone through decisively. His style was almost understated with no exuberant and over embellished gestures, but his control is palpable.
Richard Strauss’s ‘Tod und Verklärung’ (Death and Transfiguration), Op 24, is a broody and complex work that can be considered a herald of post-romantic German music. I adore it and get lost in its multifaceted expressions of joy, pain, hope and giving over to the unknowable, which are all indicated by the highlighting of various instruments – including harp, viola and tuba - as they state, restate and takeover various melodic fragments. Again Seaman extracted the full dynamic range from the orchestra but the music never lost its texture or dissolved into a sonic blur. There was always clarity.
Sibelius’s ‘Karelia Suite’, Op 11, is a sumptuously melodic piece that is revered by the Finnish people, and like ‘Ma vlast’ stirs passions of patriotism. Seaman was in his element with this piece – his enjoyment of its inherent joie de vivre was clear for all to see. The third movement (alla marcia) is the one that people quietly hum to themselves as they leave at the conclusion of a concert but Seaman extracted something additional from the first (intermezzo) that wasn’t too far from being hummed as well! Again, his masterful control of the dynamical shading allowed the colour of Sibelius’s superb orchestration to shine through.
As satisfying as the Smetana, Strauss and Sibelius were, the highlight of the evening no doubt was sixteen-year old Grace Clifford’s performance of Beethoven’s mighty and ever popular Violin Concerto. It is a challenging composition and requires technical skill and musicianship, but it is not ‘flashy’. It possesses elegance and simplicity in its structure, and is loved and well known by countless concertgoers who are alert to anything that sounds too ‘different’. Grace is the very recently crowned 2014 ABC Symphony Australia Young Performer of the Year, and she served up a performance that had a number of differences to excite and stir the audience. She took the work at a measured tempo with clearly articulated phrasing that allowed her to expose the intricacy of the score. In later years, when her strength has fully developed, she might choose to take parts of the piece at greater speed but this can also blur the full impact and sharp beauty of the double stopping required by the score. Beethoven did not write any cadenzas for the concerto, and Clifford chose to play the well-known ones written by famed violinist Fritz Kreisler.
Grace Clifford demonstrated composure, nascent flair, and a clear understanding of the score. The audience loved her and deserved her three curtain calls and striking spray of Tynte flowers.
Kym Clayton
When: Closed
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide International Guitar Festival. Adelaide Festival Theatre. 18 July 2014
Pepe Romero and Yamandú Costa make for a stunning but contrasting double bill. One alone sits you back and leaves you with a gently drawn smile over your awe-struck face, but two is almost too much and leaves you shaking your head in disbelief. Their styles are different – one appears casual, almost offhand, while the other exudes wisdom and the calmness of years. One is flamboyant, the other is almost reserved. But, in their hands the guitar is a majestic concert instrument that demands and deserves as much attention as any other mainstream instrument.
The thing about the guitar is that it can easily be engulfed by a backing ensemble. By itself, and in the hands of a maestro, it can be easily heard even to the back row of the cavernous Festival Theatre, but with a sizeable orchestra it can become lost. That is unless it is expertly amplified (not just made louder) and the music suits the combination of guitar and orchestra. This was precisely the case with Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. The composition is a masterpiece that allows the virtuosity of the soloist to be demonstrated and the orchestration is such that it never overshadows the guitar. Romero’s reading was exceptional. He was a picture of studied concentration but in the more lyrical and relaxed sections of the concerto he looked intently at the audience and gently smiled on occasion. The Adelaide Art Orchestra under Brett Kelly were finely balanced during the concerto, and seemed more at home than with the more free-flowing but less memorable compositions played by Costa in the first half. Perhaps I’m showing my own personal taste?
Costa’s solo sets were adored by the audience, particularly for his showy dexterity and almost unrestrained joy, and the audience went to the interval wanting more. On the other hand, Romero’s solos were just sublime. They featured some of the mainstays of the repertoire, including Asturias, Malagueña and Recuerdos de la Alhambra. The Aranjuez was wonderful, but Romero’s solos were spell-binding and one knew one was in the presence of guitar royalty.
Kym Clayton
When: Closed
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide International Guitar Festival. Festival Theatre. 17 Jul 2014
The Adelaide International Guitar Festival is upon us once again, celebrating its fifth year running and what better way to open proceedings than with a performance that harks back to the very origins of guitar music in the west.
The guitar (whose name is derived from the Spanish guitarra) was a popular instrument in Spain throughout history, and was brought to Iberia by the Moors and Arabs during their occupation. As a result the instrument, and the Middle Eastern musical influence, characterized Spanish folk music through history. By the 1700s a flamboyant style, with remnants of Middle Eastern influence coupled with Spanish flair, began to be called flamenco and it’s this music and the associated dance that we know and love today. Thus, a flamenco extravaganza is a perfect way to open a festival dedicated to las guitarras!
Opening with Adelaide flamenco troupe Flamenco Areti, temperatures rose in the Festival Theatre resembling the Andalusian summer despite plummeting temperatures and rain outside. Sporting two guitarists, an amazing vocalist reaching all the highs and lows of Arabesque flamenco singing, and a troupe of colourful dancers, the Adelaide Guitar Festival was off to a fine start.
The music weaved its intricate path through the theatre, with gentle melodies and structures contrasted with the abrupt staccato strumming style. The dancers complemented things perfectly, artfully and gracefully flashing colour across the stage and punctuating it with plenty of foot stomps. With a single male dancer and six females, there was balance and beauty a plenty, all delivered with a perfect soundtrack.
After a short break, it was time to welcome José Antonio Rodríguez and his band to the stage. There was definitely a change in pace as we welcomed percussion to the stage, and this time the guitar took centre. There two guitarists unaccompanied by a singer really made the music the primary focus and as José demonstrated in the first few bars he had plenty of talent to back things up!
Flamenco styles were the primary showcase, but there was a lot more to the music on offer, with gypsy and folkloric influences coming in throughout. The guitar playing was so strong that the lack of vocals took nothing away from the performance. José’s tone was brilliant, and he varied things up throughout to accentuate different aspects of his playing; his technique was faultless. He played a wide ranging set of tunes, taking the audience on a ride through the Andalusian heartland, and it didn’t even matter that he spoke very little English (mind you, as a Spanish speaker, no es el problema para me!).
The percussion was the perfect accompaniment, incorporating the traditional cajon, as well as less traditional djembe and cymbals, and the male dancer from Flamenco Areti even joined the trio on stage for a few numbers.
Sadly, things came towards a close, but after a massive standing ovation, José returned to his chair for a few more tunes, including a spectacular closer where he was joined by his accompanying guitarist and percussionist… all playing the same guitar! What a finish, and what a spectacular show! Me gusta la guitarra y me gusta flamenco mucho! Ole!
Luke Balzan
When: Closed
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed