Murder & Redemption. The Australian Chamber Orchestra. Saturday, February 4, at 8pm. Llewellyn Hall, ANU School of Music. Tickets: Adults: $59-$129. Under 30 $49. Bookings: ACO Box Office 1800 44 444 (Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm).
Who wouldn't be intrigued to attend this concert, billed as "a reimagining of the work of Janacek, John Adams and traditional folk in a murderous psychological drama"?
It's the first concert of the Australian Chamber Orchestra's 2017 tour season: a world premiere performance under the direction of ACO Collective's artistic director, Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, and featuring American folk artist Sam Amidon.
"Sam came to my little festival in Finland some years ago," Kuusisto says, "and it was incredibly pleasing to make music with him. This project was the opportunity work with him again."
The program originated when Kuusisto talked with Anna Melville, ACO's programming director and an old friend of Amidon. "What would be logical companions to Sam's music in the kind of repertoire that the orchestra does with me?" Kuusisto says. "I think that the Janacek came first and the John Adams a close second. So many of the traditional songs have themes of jealousy and murder and then there are a lot of religious songs too. That led me to thinking of the Shaker Loops by Adams. Sam listened to the Janacek and the Adams and then tried to come up with his perfect selection of songs. It was a bit of a team effort."
The concert program will be a blend of these different pieces, the four movements of Janacek's String Quartet No. 1, Kreutzer, interspersed with four traditional songs featuring Amidon accompanying himself on banjo. Amidon's The Redemption Set and Adams' Shaker Loops I and II and the traditional Shaker hymn, Simple Gifts, will form the final part of the program.
"We have a nice arrangement for string orchestra of the ballads, and for the traditional songs, the arrangements were originally written by American composer Nico Muhly," Kuusisto says. "These arrangements have been fine tuned to fit the orchestra by ACO song librarian Bernard Rofe but the exact way that we'll link them will be established during rehearsals. I think that the first half of the concert will be continuously flowing so that we'll go directly from a Janacek movement to a folk song, then to another Janacek movement without breaks.
"The first half is pretty grim. The folk songs will be heavy and the Janacek is, of course, quite intense and dark."
It was Leo Tolstoy's novella, The Kreutzer Sonata, that inspired Janacek to compose his string quartet. The novella is a roller-coaster of emotions with passions rushing towards a final climax. Janacek himself wrote: "I was imagining a poor woman, tormented and run down, just like the one the Russian writer Tolstoy describes in his Kreutzer Sonata."
There is, ultimately, redemption, and this is where Adams' Shaker Loops are used to introduce the idea of vigorous spirituality.
"The piece by Adams is quite an athletic thing for the orchestra to play," Kuusisto says. "It's mimicking this sort of very wild dancing and frenetic physical movements that the Shakers would do in order to get close to their God. It doesn't quote exactly from the Shaker hymns or American folk songs but they're very bright with the sort of American sound that you get in Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring."
Does it please most people to hear a program consisting of a mixed bag of works?
Kuusisto says that ideally, people, both listeners and performers, should approach every piece with knowledge about the composer but without any form of routine. "That kills inspiration," he says. "If we believe that people only want to hear what they've heard before, then, in a few decades, we won't have concerts any more. We should have the idea of giving people something that they didn't know they needed." He mentions the first tour given by the collective in which the first half of every concert was a mixture of works by Tippett, Muhly and others, played as one long piece, and the second half was a piece by Sibelius and a Beethoven string quartet. "The ACO got a flood of feedback from audience members saying that the concert was a wonderful collection of music that they hadn't heard before."
Kuusisto has two projects with the collective this year: "Bartok and Brahms with Matthew Hunt, a fantastic clarinettist friend of mine from the UK in August/September, and in December, the Vasse Felix Festival at Margaret River, WA."
He says, "I think the first half of Murder and Redemption will be very powerful and the second half will be very welcome – the intermission will be much needed in this particular program."
Before the ultimate redemption the audience is promised "a wild psychological journey exploring sex, adultery and betrayal."
There will be no visuals, however.
"No, on this tour no one is going to get murdered or anything like that!" Kuusisto says.