By Clive O'Connell
MUSIC
VIVALDI & BACH ★★★½
Richard Tognetti and Australian Chamber Orchestra Soloists
Melbourne Recital Centre, December 7
By this night's end, nearly everyone involved in the small group that Richard Tognetti brought to the Recital Centre for his ensemble's final 2017 Melbourne appearance had played a solo. He himself took the top line in nearly all the works offered – Bach's A minor Violin Concerto, Vivaldi's Concerto for Two Violins and Cello, and the same composer's Four Violins and Cello D minor Concerto. Finally, Tognetti led this mini-ACO in Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 2, supporting Genevieve Lacey's recorders with much-needed restraint.
Recorder virtuoso Genevieve Lacey.
Alongside these, the ACO premiered Elena Kats-Chernin's Singing Trees, four movements in a near-symphony sequence dealing with woods employed in string-instrument construction: maple, ebony, willow, spruce. This new score gives eminence to the ACO's top-quality voices: Tognetti's Guarneri, Satu Vanska's Stradivarius, Nicole Divall's Maggini viola, and Maxime Bibeau's Salo double bass.
But Kats-Chernin gives all her forces a clear-speaking voice as she moves through treatments of a Middle-European folk-like melody, a slow lament, spasmodic gruppetti for a scherzo, and a moto perpetuo, minimalism-suggestive elongated finale: fine material for displaying the physically expressive potential of this body.
For the solo concerto, Tognetti produced a mobile interpretation, the work treated with plasticity of metre and dynamic – surprises around every corner. The 11 strings and Erin Helyard's harpsichord made just as engrossing work of the Vivaldi concertos, avoiding the temptation to chug remorselessly though the fast outer movements. Lacey gave an attractive, elegantly controlled reading of the Bach suite, her line a presence even in full-bodied passages of play.