Sydney Reviews

I have covered four of the five iterations of the Blackheath Chamber Music Festival since its inception in 2021, and in my opinion this year's has set a new standard in refinement, both of performance (and here the bar is very high) and of structured programming.

In 2022 the audacious and indefatigable artistic director, Catherine Harker, put on 13 concerts. No-one went to all of them, not even me. This year she mounted just seven, and most of the audience went to all of them. This meant that they were fully able to appreciate Harker's skill in curating a series of concerts involving a galaxy of wonderful musicians, structured with great care. Having an MC in Louise Johnson, someone blessed not only with a dry sense of humour but also with an understanding that brevity is the soul of wit, in no small way contributes to the pleasure of attending this Festival.

The festival began with "In Bach’s Orbit", a concert of J. S. Bach and some of his contemporaries, played by Bach Akademie Australia, with the American counter-tenor Reginald Mobley. The ensemble's leader, Madeleine Easton, guided us through interesting connections between the four composers whose works they played (for example, that Telemann was godfather to Bach’s eldest son Carl Phillip Emanuel) with well-informed, infectious enthusiasm. Bach Akademie Australia is a group of eight of the finest instrumentalists specialising in baroque music, and their playing throughout the evening was absolutely flawless. I knew we were in for a good time when two violins played a trill with exact synchronisation as the trill increased speed.

This concert marked the last of a long series of concerts Reginald Mobley has given with Bach Akademie this month. He sang Vivaldi’s Nisi Dominus with an unaffected limpidity that blended perfectly with the timbres of the string ensemble, and allowed Vivaldi’s melodies, both florid and lyrical, to float effortlessly into the auditorium. Then he tackled one of Bach’s least voice-friendly cantatas, "Wer Sünde tut", in which the vocal part is simply one of the many contrapuntal strands of the work.

The lack of egotism which characterises all of Mobley's performances tactfully overcame all the awkwardnesses of Bach's writing.

Easton had mentioned the Thirty Years' War, which began in 1618. Mobley pointed out that in 1619 the first slave ship arrived from Africa to America. He spoke about how music, especially the singing of spirituals, had given his ancestors a commonality of situation and of purpose, and then sang, as an encore, "Steal away". This was so touching, so heart-felt, that it almost put the rest of the concert in the shade. There was hardly a dry eye in the house.

The second day of the Festival was structured as two concerts each of which featured three different duos, followed by a third concert in which all 12 players (yes, you've done your maths right) took the stage together.

First were two double-basses, David Campbell and Jaan Pallandi, who played, inevitably, Bottesini (did anyone else write duets for double basses?) and a quirky arrangement by Pallandi of a violin sonata by Henry Eccles. But the most remarkable piece was an arrangement, also by Pallandi, of – wait for it – Schubert's "Erlkönig"! Pallandi was the horse – the piano part with its relentlessly fast triplets – and Campbell played the voice part, which as you will remember is actually three voices: the father, the sick boy, and the Erlking himself. On the double bass!

In 1792 Beethoven travelled to Vienna to fulfil his lifelong desire to study with Mozart, only to discover that his idol had died the previous year. He then signed up with Haydn, who didn't really understand his tempestuous pupil, and the "Duo for clarinet and bassoon" is one of his student works. It pays homage to both Mozart and Haydn, and was played by the mercurial Lloyd Van't Hoff and the ever-reliable Matthew Wilkie. They also played two of Bach's didactic 2-part inventions, where I felt that Wilkie was the caring father instructing his wilful son how to compose.

Then they played the first of three pieces on the day's program to be written in Paris in 1921/22, Poulenc's "Sonata for clarinet and bassoon".

This work, and both the other two pieces, Ravel's "Duo for violin and cello" and Fauré's "Trio in D minor", all wrestle in one way or another with life in the aftermath of the Great War, as it was termed then. In the attempt to resume normal life everyone was constantly aware of the tens of thousands of citizens whose bodies or minds, or both, had been mutilated by the war. In Poulenc's Sonata, the insouciant café-music surface is repeatedly undermined by the wrong notes of mutilation; in Ravel's duo, which immediately followed the Poulenc in this concert, and was brilliantly played by Dimity Hall and Julian Smiles, the mutilation is on the surface in the incessant angularity of the writing in the second of the two movements. Fauré, being by then a sadder and a wiser man, in his 70's, has one intense, lyrical outpouring of grief though the entire length of the first two movements of his Trio, before crossly realising in the last movement that the proprietor of his favourite restaurant has also been a casualty. This trio was played, in the evening concert, also by Hall and Smiles, with the amazing Andrea Lam at the piano.

But I am getting ahead of myself. There were another 3 duos on Saturday afternoon. First, Astral Baroque, in the persons of viola da gambist Jennifer Eriksson and harpist Louise Johnson, played Marin Marais, Louis Andriessen, and Alice Chance. They chose to play on an electric viola da gamba (an oxymoron of the mind, if ever there was one) and an electric harp. While this was a choice that Andriessen would have surely embraced for his "Plain Chant", for me it was too much of a culture shock in the Marais. Eriksson has made a special project of the music of this French composer, a contemporary of Louis XIV, and no-one in Australia plays his music better. I would have loved to have heard this on her real viola da gamba. But it has to be said that the audience was intrigued and delighted by the electronic gamba.

Then flautist Eliza Shephard joined Andrea Lam to play Lili Boulangerś gorgeous "Nocturne". An even better composer than her more famous sister Nadia, I have yet to hear a work of hers that did not charm me. Shepherd and Lam then tackled the fiendishly difficult set of variations on "Trockne Blumen", by Schubert. This is one of the few major works by a Classical composer for flute and piano, but, whereas the song on which the variations are based is deeply touching, the variations obscure this in a welter of virtuosity. Nonetheless, both Shephard and Lam negotiated their extremely difficult parts with great elan.

But there was more. The last of the duos featured Alexandra Osborne and Harry Bennetts, both violinists. The Sonata by Ysaÿe they played sometimes sounded like a whole orchestra, complete with wind and brass. Their double-stopping, which is almost continuous in some passages, was impeccable, and the audience whispered, as one, "How is this possible?"

They all joined together for Saturday evening's concert. First Jennifer Eriksson played a Telemann suite, this time playing on her real viola da gamba, particularly exquisite in the Sarabande. Then there was an interesting trio, for clarinet, bassoon and piano, by Glinka. This piece allowed Matthew Wilkie to show off the cantabile possibilities of the bassoon, and the Italianate classical idiom of the music was refreshing after the somewhat breathless virtuosity of some of the duos. A beautiful passacaglia in pure 18th century style by Eriksson led to the Fauré trio I have already mentioned, in which Andrea Lam provided a cascading backdrop to the soaring lyricism of violin and cello.

The only pieces to actually involve all twelve players were specially arranged for this concert by Harry Sdraulig from one of his own works, "Starlit". Sdraulig is a composer to watch, and the three contrasting movements played here showed off some of the unusual sonorities afforded by the strange assortment of instruments on stage.

The third and final day was a testament to the vigour of the Australian composition tradition of the 21st century. Apart from Stephen Adams’ delightful, immersive piece for flute and prerecorded track of birdsong from Blackheath, none of the Australian works was a first performance. Some time ago Jonathan Miller wrote a book about theatre entitled Subsequent Performances, in which he maintained that first performances are everywhere, but later performances show that the work in question has, to use Diana Doherty's felicitous expression, ´Wings´.

For the first concert Eliza Shephard, Lloyd Van't Hoff, and Matthew Wilkie were joined by saxophonist Michael Duke, of Nexas Quartet fame. They played quartets by Jean Français and Eugene Bozza, both originally involving oboe rather than saxophone, and although Duke has enormous flexibility of sound I found that he rather overpowered the other instruments in forte. Meredith Connie's "Tiddalik" is an unusual but effective work based on a well-known indigenous story of a giant frog who drinks all the water in the land, causing a drought, and how the people break the drought by tickling him so that in the frog´s laughter all the water comes pouring back. The five short movements of this piece are so graphic in their illustration of the story (saxophones can do good frog sounds) that I thought it could be interesting to incorporate a narrator into the performance, as with Prokovief's "Peter and the Wolf".

Diana Doherty, Rebecca Lagos and the Streeton Trio joined us for the second-last concert of this wonderful Festival. After Lachlan Skipworth's slightly colourless Oboe Quartet and Harry Sdraulig´s exciting and vibrant "Joybox", these two final concerts were devoted to two giants of Australian music, Ross Edwards and Nigel Westlake. Edwards' oboe concerto, "Bird Spirit Dreaming", played here in a pared-down arrangement by the composer, was written for Doherty, who has played it all over the world since its composition in 2002. Her performance is electric, the difficulties of the part completely subsumed in her playful whirl of becoming the bird spirit. The score is sparse even by Edwards' standards, and I thought how remarkably important every note is in all of Edwards' music.

This performance was preceded by a discussion between Edwards and Doherty about the gestation of the work. Catherine Harker, the Festival director, is keen to generate conversations about music, and this discussion worked really well, not least by being confined to 10 minutes. I think audiences generally love to be brought into the sacred space of the composers' workshop.

The final concert consisted of one work, Lior and Westlake's towering masterpiece, "Compassion". This was also preceded by a discussion between the two composers, which took the audience into the very heart of the piece. Westlake, unlike Edwards, is no pointilliste, and reducing the score which was written for 86 players of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra to an ensemble consisting of string quintet, percussion and piano must have been a herculean task. But it worked.

The work consists of seven movements, each setting a religious text in ancient Hebrew or ancient Arabic. They all concern one aspect or another of compassion, including how difficult it can be to feel compassion. Westlake's score emphasises this, with its added notes constantly asking the question, how is this possible? Compassion here is not a feel-good sympathy, but a raw, challenging, even life-changing experience.

I had not heard Lior before. His voice is truly individual, and he sings in three distinct registers: deep bass, high baritone, and counter-tenor. He sang with a microphone, but frequently his voice would have easily carried over the ensemble. There is nothing clichéd about his performance – he uses each of his registers not for effect but with utter sincerity.

I thought how perfect one aspect of the structure of this Festival was. It opened and closed with the only featured singers, one an African American and one an Israeli Jew, each diving deeply into their tortured, persecuted ancestral history, and sharing it with us, so that all of us left the Festival touched by the redemptive, healing power of music.