This afternoon’s program, Trembling Earth, was not meant to leave you with a nostalgic sense of place. The title names a landscape that will not stay still. Contemporary composer Bryce Dessner walked the forest next to his house many times during Lockdown, a forced pastoral – stay at home, walk the park, and witness nature’s recovery. That is a different contract from the older Romantic garden, where Dvořák’s Eighth still lets the idea of nature restore the self. Between those poles sits György Ligeti, who grew up Hungarian-speaking in the Carpathians of Transylvania and, in Concert Românesc, returns to raw folk melody and living musical practice he transcribed from village musicians after the second world war.
Concert Românesc (1951) by György Ligeti is a folk-concerto: about twelve minutes, four movements without a break, song to dance to mountain space to a village-band finale.
Real Romanian material sits beside invention “in the spirit of the village bands.” It opens upbeat and open-air: featuring the cellos (led by principal Jesper Svedberg) and clarinets (led by principal Francesco Celata) on a lyrical line. The ballad snaps into dance; short wind solos pop out of the texture the way a clarinet or fiddle would in a mixed rural group. Then a rush led by the strings and the solo violin of concertmaster Andrew Haveron leading a high-kicking dance — and the horn call returns only to be stamped out by a final chord.
The cello concerto, The Trembling Earth, was commissioned by SSO and Bryce Dessner wrote the piece for tonight’s soloist, Anastasia Kobekina. Born in Russia, she took up the cello at four, came to notice as a prizewinner at the 2016 Enescu and 2019 Tchaikovsky competitions, and later served as a BBC New Generation Artist. She walks on barefoot, without ceremony, already in possession of the piece.
The opening could be Elgar: a long cello line with a note of anxiety already in it. That lyricism does not last as a climate. The solo is quickly bound to the orchestra’s low voices — tuba, double basses (led by principal bass Kees Boersma), the other bass instruments — while the strings press in and overload the melody rather than cushion it. Percussion supplies the drive: not only pulse but slaps and pizzicato landing in unison, a physical grid the cello has to live inside.
Kobekina’s ownership was visible curled over the instrument, her face expressing the line with the instrument. The cello holds the emotional arc in its frantic, rising and falling, a conflicted voice, as if it wanted to break free of the classical reference and move on at speed.
The Harps of Louisic Dulbecco and guest Kate Maloney, and high winds (led by principal Emma Sholl) open air above that struggle. Underneath, the drama is in the bass: doubled brass and tuba (Steve Rosse) with the basses, punctuating in a filmic way that recalls Bernard Herrmann, and at times an earthy drone not far from a didgeridoo.
Once the music locks into a Steve Reich–like rhythm, the pulse is modern and merciless. It overrides the pastoral sense the opening had promised. Then the texture shifts toward a set of looping, descending arpeggios that keep swimming while a longer line cuts across them. Dessner references his own musical world which includes bands such as Sonic Youth and Radiohead.
The reception was immediate: three calls with Clerici and Dessner, who was in the hall, then Kobekina alone for a Bach minuet, a miniature that was full of feeling and a nod to the core Cello repertoire.
Dessner joined the orchestra on electric guitar for an earlier work, St. Carolyn by the Sea (2011), a score inspired by Jack Kerouac’s paean to Big Sur and the California coastal landscape with its sweep and sudden undertow. Dessner is a classically trained guitarist, and plays guitar with his brother in the band The National. He has also spoken about being inspired by the jazz guitar of Pat Metheny, and the improvisational style of rock guitarist Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead. Tonight he was playing a Les Paul and guest musician Zane Banks, a Telecaster, and not as rock soloists, but a section inside the orchestra. They played in mirror at low volume — the Gibson thicker, the Telecaster bell-like — a slightly out-of-phase ringing against high winds and a prominent violin line riding the shimmer. Lower strings, violas (led by principal Tobias Brieder) and basses, hold the floor. A tone-field swells, breaks into downward progressions, and stops dead.
Umberto Clerici has twenty years behind him as soloist and orchestral musician, including Principal Cello of this orchestra from 2014 to 2021. He is now the guest with the family knowledge still in his hands and he was keen to personally present Dessner to the audience this afternoon. Dessner first trained as a flautist and then guitarist, and it is only since working on The Revenant (2015) that he has turned his hard to film scores. He has also worked with The Kronos Quartet and very influential american composers, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich, as well as popular musicians Paul Simon, Thom Yorke and Bon Iver.
After the tension of the Dessner works, Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8 feels like relief. The full body of the orchestra falls into a shared pulse and shared harmony that takes no effort to follow. High winds, horns and timpani speak Beethoven’s symphonic language without becoming rustic. The second movement wanders, held by a three-note refrain. Parts of the orchestra answer one another over a floor of double bass and cello. The third movement begins as a waltz, lower strings giving it body rather than glitter. Horn and trumpets (led by principal David Elton) play a fanfare which opened the door into the finale. Cadences and crescendos land with an emphatic satisfaction the earlier works had refused. Clerici crouches, rocks, signals with the whole body — the image of control this score needs. His last gesture is to turn that control outward and invite the audience applause again.
The Sydney Symphony’s programming is putting important new work like Dessner’s — and the young players and conductors who can carry it, Anastasia Kobekina and Umberto Clerici — in front of an Australian audience that has already shown it will listen, and respond.
Sunday 20 September, Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House
