Above: Nicolas Fleury appeared courtesy of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, playing Mozart and Brahms horn trios.
Despite the potential change of the Arts climate following 2020, Musica Viva remains a major supplier of quality chamber music in its 2021 Concert Season.
We were treated to a programme featuring the rarer combination of horn, piano and violin in a typically rewarding Musica Viva event complete with a newly commissioned Australian work, namely the Sonata for Violin and Piano by Gordon Kerry (2020)
Around this concert’s central premiere work, Nicholas Fleury (horn) Emily Sun (violin), and Amir Farid (piano) performed challenging and highly contrasted trios for this combination from both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Excellent chamber music performances require a seamless blend of the instruments involved, regardless of how different their timbres. Conversation needs to be keen and unison utterances are required to be joyous from the unique joint voice of each particular blend.
Such fine ensemble skills were well displayed during this concert. They were in evidence to equal degree in works from very different stylistic eras spanning from the eighteenth century to present day.
It is not often that we are treated to chamber works from master composers featuring horn, piano and violin. MSO principal horn Nicolas Fleury capable playing on the modern valve instrument fluidly switched between the styles required in the outer works on the programme.
Fleury’s restrained cantabile tone and agility blended impressively with the other instruments during Mozart’s Horn Trio in E-flat major K 407 (arr Neumann). The treatment of melody from him and his colleagues on stage, especially during the touching Andante was beautiful. Use of the natural horn was not missed here, as the playing by Fleury was so suitable to the Mozartean early horn tone colour.
Above: Violinist Emily Sun
Energy, crystal clarity and passing of motives in imitation between all instruments made this work such a satisfying start to the event. As live Mozart it dazzled and overcame all challenges of drama as well as technique throughout.
The concert concluded with a horn trio from Johannes Brahms to extend these challenges and bravura playing from all trio members. The tone and resonance from the horn in this Horn Trio in E-flat major Op 40.
This extended four movement work was devoured by the trio. Once more the slow movement (here an Adagio mesto) was touchingly approached with a beautifully sad single trio voice. The other movements impressed with a mix of elegance, caricature and finale energy in that order, complete with clean gestural energy and neat Brahmsian passion within the structure. There was a nice spontaneous feel and big bell blats from the French horn.
Above : Pianist Amir Farid
In the centre of this concert’s trio of works was a stunning premiere of Gordon Kerry’s commissioned work, Sonata for Violin and Piano-in one movement (2020).
Farid and Sun were isolated for a lot of the learning and rehearsal process, but during this premiere of the miniature one-movement sonata their excellent ensemble approach spoke as one throughout the organic growth of the work.
Sun and Farid championed this Musica Viva premiere with shifting ethereal glimmers, carefully played instrumental effects and supersubtle shades. It was an exciting reveal for the audience and a scintillating, capable reading of Kerry’s clever new soundscape.
Mesmerising our masked sensibilities and open ears, this concert’s combination of accomplished instrumental specialists forming a rarer type of ensemble and timbral resource delighted us over and over with significant performances of old and new works of substance.