Sydney Reviews

Left - Oleg Caetani. Photo - Greg Barrett

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter”, said Keats. While I can’t agree with him about music, preferring, like most musicians, actually to hear it, I can sympathise with Keats more in the field of dance. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s concert yesterday night was titled Dance of the Imagination, and this title invited the audience to delight in the power of the music of two works which were originally conceived as music for dancing to create in their own minds the dances that were not to be seen last night.

The concert opened, however, with a work which, while indeed conjuring up a wealth of images by its astonishing melodic fecundity, was not intended to be danced; Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. It is a measure of the power of this work, one of the archetypes of musical romanticism, that it came across so well through the conductor’s restrained, very classical, reading. Oleg Caetani took both movements at exactly the same tempo, allowing almost no rubato, allowing their structure to be clearly discernible, and the startling modulations to speak for themselves.

The dancing began with Percy Grainger’s most ambitious work, The Warriors, which followed the Schubert, not without some incongruity. I had never heard the piece live, and likewise had never seen three pianos in an orchestra before. The work calls for a huge orchestra, with a vast percussion section, and the scoring requires the pianists to lean inside their instruments and play the strings with percussion sticks. You need to see this, because it is very hard to hear it. It is a wild piece, where sections of the orchestra play completely different music from other sections simultaneously, like some of Charles Ives’ music. In fact at one point this disjunction is marked by the exit from the stage of half a dozen brass players who play offstage, even in a different tempo from what is happening onstage.

It seems to be an enormous piece. It sounds as if part of The Rite of Spring has stumbled into Holst’s Planets. But I found it a little frustrating. Several times tunes start that make you remember that Grainger adored folksongs, and every time they get aborted. It lasts 20 minutes, and has ten short sections in that time. Certainly there is always something happening, but at the end I wondered what it was really all about. And the idea of people trying to dance to it beggared at least my imagination.

After the interval the SSO played what I consider the single most virtuosic piece ever written for orchestra, Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe. This too must be hard to dance, with its 7/8 and 5/4 meters, and is much more often played as an orchestral piece than given as a ballet. Comparisons with The Rite of Spring are in order here, too, as the work was completed just a year before the premiere of Stravinsky’s ballet, and while Stravinsky’s orchestration is sometimes even more spectacular than Ravel’s it is not quite so sophisticated. When Ravel heard Balakirev’s Islamey he was determined to write a piano piece that was even more difficult – the result was Gaspard de la Nuit – and the score of Daphnis seems prompted by a similar motive. It is like attending a fireworks display so spectacular that you practically forget your are standing on the ground. The orchestra was more than equal to it, and under Caetani’s assured and powerful direction seemed to revel in displays of virtuosity that would terrify me. There are solos for many of the individual players, and to name two moments does not mean that there were not dozens of other magic moments – but the dialogue between the cor anglais and the clarinet, and Janet Webb’s incredible flute solos stood out for me as especially delicious.

Daphnis and Chloe incorporates a choir who sing Ah! from time to time, as if the members of the Sydney Philharmonia were being privileged to witness the magic from close quarters, and couldn’t quite think of any words to describe it. If this is fanciful, I can nonetheless sympathise. The audience received this performance with rapture, and I must say I felt proud that Sydney has an orchestra that can put on such a wonderful display.

Fled is that music – do I wake or sleep?


Sydney Symphony presents
DANCE OF THE IMAGINATION

SCHUBERT Symphony No.8 (Unfinished)
GRAINGER The Warriors
RAVEL Daphnis et Chloé - Ballet

Conductor Oleg Caetani

Venue: Sydney Opera House Concert Hall
Dates/Times: Wed 23 June @ 8pm, Fri 25 June @ 8pm, Sat 26 June @ 8pm and Mon 28 June @ 7pm
Tickets: from $35*
Bookings: 8215 4600 | www.sydneysymphony.com