EIF: Australian World Orchestra
Usher Hall - 19/08/22
As part of the UK/Australia 2021/22 Season, the Edinburgh International Festival welcomed the Australian World Orchestra, under the direction of Zubin Mehta, to the Usher Hall on the night of 19th August, in a programme of Webern, Debussy and Dvořák. This orchestra, composed of players from some of the world’s great orchestras, was founded in 2010 by Australian conductor Alexander Briger, the nephew of Sir Charles Mackerras, and has had a long association with maestro Mehta.
Two Webern works opened the concert, the seminal Schoenberg-influenced 1908 ‘Passacaglia Op. 1’ and the compact but intense ‘Six Pieces for Orchestra’ of the following year, which we heard in its 1928 revision (which pared huge orchestral forces to merely large). Both eschew tonality and conventional harmony in favour of the exploration of sonority and tonal colour combinations, yet achieve extraordinary emotional intensity, nonetheless. Both were composed following the death of the composer’s mother. The Passacaglia uses 20th-Century musical language wrapped in a classical form to give expression to an elegiac mood, the intensity of grief mounting with each restatement of an 8-note figure. The Six Pieces explore different aspects of the experience of bereavement, with the fourth being the longest and most intense, a funeral march starting softly but balefully with bass drum, tuned gongs and tam-tam, gradually joined by dejected figures on solo winds and menacing comments on brass, rising in volume to a deafening climax, seeming to “rage against the dying of the light”. Maestro Mehta guided the orchestra to revealing every detail of this extraordinary music to the rapt audience and the performance was very moving.
The forces were then pared down for the Debussy (though still a good-sized chamber orchestra with 32 stringed instruments). The Australian violist and composer Brett Dean has orchestrated Debussy’s ‘Ariettes Oubliées’ (Forgotten Little Songs) and these Verlaine settings were performed (with English supertitles but no text provided in the EIF £4.50 programme) by Australian soprano Siobhan Stagg. I must say at first that the orchestration is absolutely exquisite, capturing the same colours as are to be found in ‘La Mer’, with the occasional Wagnerian reference. The poems deal with aspects of love and Verlaine’s poetry has an inner music that begs to be set to song. But there are issues. First, there is the challenge of dynamic balance. These settings have a delicacy and purity that precludes them being sung, as Harry Secombe put it, ‘can belto’. What I could hear of the singing was beautiful but I couldn’t always hear it and much of the French text was lost. The other issue is with the absence of “flesh and blood” whenever Debussy sets Verlaine. The opera ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’, for instance, supposedly a tale of crime passionel, leaves me cold as I find it anaemic. The imagery in these poems is largely floral/botanic and even the horses, being on a fairground carousel, are wooden. So, for me, orchestrating the Ariettes resurrects that chill, a feeling best oublié.
After the interval, the concluding work was Dvořák’s magnificent ‘Symphony No.7 in D minor’. This is Dvořák at his most gutsy and overtly Brahmsian, and this can be overdone at the expense of giving full expression to Slavonic charm in some interpretations. Not by Zubin Mehta. From the brooding intensity of the opening to the blistering coda of the finale and the final major chord, we were taken on a journey through Dvořák’s creative mind and the composer’s voice was allowed to speak. The tempi were natural and unforced. There is a lot of challenging writing for horn in this symphony, and the melodic solo in the middle of the slow movement was as sweet as I have heard, as was all the wind-playing. The furiant-like third movement was thrilling with its Slavonic cross-rhythms and the finale was immensely satisfying.
After several minutes of rapturous applause the maestro half-turned and coyly announced “some more Dvořák”. The encore was the ‘Slavonic Dance Op.46 No.8’, another spirited furiant. Nothing anaemic about Dvořák or Australia!
Cover photo: J Shurte