In a word: exquisite. A concert that demands and rewards your complete attention.
Ghosts of Rahere, Betjeman – pray for me. The world is too much with us, we cannot just swipe away the pixels and the rot. Christ, I can’t even find a decent coffee at 6am in London.
Debussy’s Sonata in G minor opened the program: his last completed work, signed “Musicien français,” composed as he lay dying in wartime Paris, its continuous-variation writing looking backward to Couperin and Rameau rather than forward to Romantic bravura. Josefowicz played it with her entire body, the melodic line’s slow unspooling as much danced as bowed, the finale’s tumultuous joy registering as gesture before it registered as sound.
A nocturne maybe, tinkling in the distance, Or clinking glasses as the bistros fill. Perhaps you looked out over this same view Of the Vieux-Port, with George at your shoulder.
What an utterly captivating release this is, with three consummate performers recreating a Parisian fin de siècle salon in which the mandolin takes centre stage.
Beilman moved effortlessly from the opening movement’s ambiguous vocalics and marvellous cadenza through a serene C major cantabile to a sparkling, elfin finale, while Bihlmaier and WASO projected a classically proportioned sound picture enlivened by romantic burrs.
I stroll along the Seine towards the hotel, way lit by gibbous moon cross hatched by vapour trails...
And thanks not only to the seamless stylistic transitions from the Renaissance and Baroque material to the new works but to Hughes’s impossibly pure soprano so tastefully illuminated by lute and viol, every note here floats not in aspic but in aether.
Lovers of Robert Schumann’s lieder – and I count myself among those happy multitudes – will find song in everything he wrote. Judging by this intimate, lyrical performance, Belarusian-French cellist Ivan Karizna, conductor Otto Tausk and the West Australian Symphony Orchestra certainly seem to have done so in the composer’s Cello Concerto in A minor, Op. 129.