ACO dazzlingly brings Shostakovich to life - The Australian

Pianist Steven Osborne rehearsing this week with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Picture: Steve Arnold Source: Supplied

• MUSIC
  
  Australian Chamber Orchestra
  
  Artistic director and lead violin: Richard Tognetti. Piano: Steven Osborne. Trumpet: David Elton. ANU Llewellyn Hall, Canberra, November 10.

FIFTY years ago, I made my first acquaintance with Russian music. I was bemused by Rudolf Barshai's string orchestrations of Prokofiev's Visions Fugitives and exhilarated by Shostakovich's Octet. Today, those impressions remain as these same two pieces appear in the Australian Chamber Orchestra's last touring program for the year.

The 27-year-old Prokofiev premiered his 20 Visions in 1918 in post-revolutionary Petrograd. Forty years later, Barshai arranged 15 of them for his Moscow Chamber Orchestra. For an ACO tour in 1998, Richard Tognetti revisited them as a kind of concertino for piano and strings, heard again in this program. The result is a kind of black-and-white family photograph, strong enough to register in the memory but disembodied and distant.

With no warning, a trumpet call sounded offstage, jolting us into the phantasmagoric circus-land of Shostakovich's first Piano Concerto. Without moving from the keyboard, the effervescent Steven Osborne sprang into life, his piano morphed into a demented typewriter, and David Elton, newly appointed principal trumpet of the Sydney Symphony, emerged as crooning ring-master and barking barracks sergeant. Theirs was a thrilling performance of a dazzling work that refuses to answer the eternally nagging question about Shostakovich: just where is he taking us?

That same question re-emerged after intermission in his early Two Pieces for String Octet, Op 11. Here is the 30-year-old Shostakovich showing the world what he could really do. The second piece, a demonic Scherzo, contains string writing possibly more advanced than anything until Witold Lutoslawski. In barely 12 minutes, Tognetti and his band, with a luminous contribution from violinist Ilya Isakovich, delivered the most thrilling musical memory of their entire 2012 season.

Would that the same could be said of Tchaikovsky's Souvenir of Florence. For this punter-pleasing chestnut, the ACO marshalled its 18 musicians, ballooning Tchaikovsky's sextet by 200 per cent and recalling some wit's observation about Beecham's treatment of Handel: you couldn't hear the music for all the noise.

Any Italianate lightness that Tchaikovsky might have been attempting was drowned in a glutinous morass of string overkill. There was some consolation in the realisation that the ACO may have been trying to make it sound a better piece than it actually is. But instead of taking him to Florence they sent him to some dowdy Stalinist resort on the Crimea. If only they had ended the program with Shostakovich's Scherzo. Then I would have leapt to my feet.

Hamer Hall, Melbourne, tonight; Perth Concert Hall, Wednesday; City Recital Hall, Sydney, Saturday; QPAC Concert Hall, Brisbane, November 19; City Recital Hall, Sydney, November 20 & 21; Newcastle City Hall, November 22; Sydney Opera House, November 25.

MUSIC

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Artistic director and lead violin: Richard Tognetti. Piano: Steven Osborne. Trumpet: David Elton. ANU Llewellyn Hall, Canberra, November 10.