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AUSTRALIAN CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE



A first impression from the very first moments of their concert Friday night at Jordan Hall — and one that was sustained throughout — was that the Australian Chamber Orchestra has just about everything going for it that such an ensemble needs: spot-on intonation, unanimous phrasing, beauty of tone, and faultless ensemble.

But soon the misgivings arrived, and in spades. First off, it seemed that the ACO might have misjudged Jordan Hall’s famously lively (though intimate) acoustic. The Corelli D-major Concerto Grosso (Opus 6 No. 4) had something of the thunderous, overemphatic quality you hear in Baroque performances on old 78s. But then, amazingly, things would take a sharp turn into early-music territory — mostly the skinny, straight, vibrato-less string tone, though even this was on the loud side. Neal Peres da Costa’s harpsichord playing could be more often seen than heard.

With pianist Piotr Anderszewski’s arrival on stage — in black leather pants and a skintight top that provoked not a few giggles among the Celebrity Series audience — the evening really took off. The pair of concerto performances that followed afforded a pretty good idea of what this dazzling artist’s Liszt, Chopin, and Rachmaninov might be like. The range of dynamic shading, from pearly-toned almost nothing to stormy all-out fortissimos, and the generosity and sweep of the phrasing could take the breath away. The problem was that we were hearing all this in works by Bach (Concerto No. 1 in D minor, BWV 1052) and Haydn (Concerto in D major, Hob. XVIII/11). Although the Bach is, by common consent, a major work and the Haydn a minor one, so steep was the ratio of executive manner to compositional manner in these performances that their individualities as much as vanished. Leader Richard Tognetti’s taste for roller-coaster dynamics only added to the general impression of stylistic chaos. At intermission, a well-known pianist in the audience fled in horror, uttering oaths about Anderszewski’s penchant for (as he said) practically gluing the sustaining pedal to the floor. Have I neglected to say that these performances were thrilling? Well, they were.

String-orchestra transcriptions of the quartet repertory have a perfectly respectable history — Mahler, Toscanini, Mitropoulos, and Bernstein liked to conduct them — but you wouldn’t know that from Tognetti’s way with Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet. The shock-cut cinematic effects (subito piano, subito fortissimo) were effective enough on their own terms, but those are not to be confused with Schubert’s, and yet another form of incomprehension was shown by the yanking out of juicy bits for Tognetti’s own violin solos. All in all a nasty piece of work.

BY RICHARD BUELL

Issue Date: May 7 - 13, 2004
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