Above : Violinist and Director of Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra, Rachael Beesley. Photo credit above and in featured image: Oscar Smith
Since its formative years, Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra, (‘ARCO’) have established a good following. When attending one of their concerts, we have come to expect a few standard features and continue to be rewarded by them.
In addition to exposing the audience to rarely heard works from masters in the target slice of history, we are typically spoiled with a gem of orchestral music from a much lesser heard composer. These works are researched and charismatically performed, often in Australian premiere. The concerts also present a loved work from this period in a fresh and informed light.
Other givens in these concerts included clear and exciting direction of the assembled HIP performance experts from around the globe by Director Rachael Beesley. From the violin she harnesses an exciting interaction between period wind and strings and marries subtlety with strength in the communication.
This concert featured works from the contemporaries Mozart, Beethoven and the much more seldom heard Franz Anton Eberl. This snapshot of just over a quarter of a century sandwiched the developing dramatic voices of Mozart and Beethoven with the comparatively worthy and vibrant one of Eberl, a friend of Mozart whose Symphony in E flat major Op 33 was first heard in the same concert as Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’.
Such synchronicities and intersections between this trio of composers keen to impress the Viennese with their works makes for interesting listening. This orchestra’s Co-Artistic Director and public educator, Nicole van Bruggen, brings her passion and research history surrounding Eberl to this orchestra.
Her introductory comments included the fact that Eberl’s music needs to be heard more in this country. The tasteful and energetic rendering of the symphony supported such enthusiasm.
Eberl obviously shared Mozart’s deft writing for and exposure of the clarinet. His dramatic orchestral filigree, perhaps of a different complexity than Mozart’s, still was presented here with exciting swoop and effective impact. A quantity of runs and colourful changes in contour emerged clearly from within this orchestra of
experts.
Above : Clarenettist and Co-Artistic Director of ARCO, Nicole van Bruggen. Photo by Oscar Smith.
This enlightening, effervescent local premiere had me also scurrying hungrily to find more of this composer’s works with similar scintillating and deceptively neat veneer. His never completely predictable exploration of symphonic form was spontaneously delivered here.
Eberl’s work had different timbre to that we are familiar with. Its quite commanding voice though still followed smoothly from the concert’s opening, a buoyantly played overture to Mozart’s pre-operatic Singspiel work, Der Schauspieldirektor (The Impressario).
As continued to be the case, Mozart’s overture writing even for a comic theatre work was rich in colour with hints of drama and pathos woven into the fabric of the prelude to the vocal scenes. Beesley and fellow HIP musicians offered us controlled colouring indeed, speaking in turn in nicely blended strokes which were both intimate and bold.
As heard in other recent concerts, as when this orchestra delivered the Beethoven Symphony No 5 or Mozart Symphony No 40, this concert’s ‘classic work reborn’ in the guise of Beethoven’ s Symphony No 7, continued the breathtaking traditional journey of post – interval musical re-discovery in this successful programme.
The iconic and treasured second movement had substantial air let in and articulation was so on edge and on point that the well known music bristled with energy. Likewise the movements to bookend this work were interpreted with such keen tempi and charismatic phrasing that the slower movement’s statement echoed with unprecedented lyricism for us.
The wind choir sang always with exquisitely voiced unisons throughout the loved work. As always with this orchestra, the academic approach to major works did not sacrifice the essentially drama at the core of such music hurtling towards a larger and later Romanticism.
Thrilling from a music-event perspective was also the progressive satellite educational evening, ‘Voyage of Musical Discovery’. This instalment fascinatingly concerned with motivic development in music progressively to combine the svelte work of Eberl with the world of jazz. Impressive and enlightened impressarios and instrumentalists were indeed in abundance around Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra’s events this month.