Canberra International Music Festival: Concert 11. The Velvet Revolution – from Prague to Berlin. Fitters' Workshop, Tuesday May 2, 2017
What a glorious concert: a refreshing dose of challenging 20th-century music followed by Mozart at his best. Lisa Moore took centre stage on the piano to perform Janacek's 1925 Concertino with strings, horn, clarinet and bassoon. An argumentative piece of music, the Concertino is constructed using chunks of dialogue between the instruments, and as Moore reminded us, Janacek pioneered the idea of speech rhythms as a compositional device. I enjoyed Moore's assertive attack and mastery of the combative score, but a better piano would have improved the sound by assisting the conversational blending and balancing of instrument voices. Still, the work was well suited to the festival theme celebrating revolutionaries – as Janacek certainly sounds like no other composer.
Sonya Lifschitz gave a thrilling performance on the piano in The Velvet Revolution Trio for violin, horn and piano by Elena Kats-Chernin. It is a brilliant work in which the composer has absorbed the experience of living through the effects of the fall of the Berlin Wall and reinterpreted in music "the drama of sudden change, the push-pull factors between contradiction and consensus, between past and future". Beginning with the pounding bass piano part fused with grunting violin and blaring horn in the strangely titled Hymn, the listener was in no doubt that normality had been overturned. The melancholy trio Freeze was followed by the rapid, angular Fountain and next the masterful Mostly Unison – an exquisitely agonising exploration of closely pitched dissonance creating a vivid sense of the post-communist world which looked the same and yet was and was not the same simultaneously. Jump was a short energetic burst leading into Anarchy – a nice bookending to the opening movement, this time with the piano providing rippling, tinkling continuo in the upper register while the horn and violin struck emphatic chords.
Could a Mozart quartet hold its own after this dramatic and splendidly discordant work? The Van Kuijk Quartet with Florian Peelman on viola excelled in their interpretation of the String Quartet No.4 in G KV 516, written four years before the composer's death. The opening Allegro had hints of the ragged ends of phrases, uneven tempo and hasty dismissal of motifs that marred Monday night's Mozart performances, but suddenly in the second movement with the tightly controlled contrasting dynamics, the mood relaxed; individual excitement was disciplined into a united enthusiasm and the Menuetto: Allegretto sang. The beginning of the Adagio non troppo was beautifully balanced, creating a hymn-like sonority. Peelman's distinctive viola voice complemented that of Emmanuel Francois' viola, the two instruments adding a subtle strength to the arrangement. The final Adagio-Allegro gave Nicolas van Kuijk the opportunity to demonstrate his delicate bowing and certainty of fingering, alternating sweet melodious playing with an exhilarating, joyous finale.