By Reviewed by Clive O’Connell
MUSIC
AUSTRALIAN MELODIES ★★★
EMANUEL AX PLAYS BRAHMS AND SCHUMANN ★★★
Melbourne Recital Centre
June 24
Resonating loud and inescapable at the Zenith duo’s recital on Tuesday was the triumph of tonality. In songs by five Australian composers, baritone Michael Lampard and pianist Rhodri Clarke demonstrated that the diatonic scale is still a powerful life-form, capable of resuscitation after a century of divagation and investigation into complex harmonic musical languages.
The Zenith partnership is comfortable, Lampard’s baritone well-honed and resonant if exercised for projection power at its lower end, Clarke a considerate and secure accompanist. Still, the performers benefited from long stretches of pretty undemanding material. Three songs by Calvin Bowman showed once again the writer’s empathy with British folk/art song of a century ago, while Matthew Dewey’s Shakespeare settings revealed an assertive talent for constructing atmosphere. Some Edward Lear settings by Andrew Ford amused, as intended, but the program’s most original sounds came in three Richard Mills lyrics: sophisticated, asymmetrical and, in this context, adventurous.
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra guest Emanuel Ax hosted a mildly intriguing recital in the Soloists Choice series, his major offering a fulcrum for the Schumann Piano Quintet, prefaced by an amalgam of Brahms’ last solo piano work, the Op. 119 Klavierstucke, Brett Dean’s newly minted Hommage a Brahms
While the Australian composer’s commentaries suggest Brahmsian tropes, their inspirational debt remains subtle, angular melodies and contrapuntal meshes employed gently, mirroring the elusive and meandering nature of the Brahms constructs. Ax invested this fusion with a persuasive seamlessness, finding the connexions between the interwoven compositions and emphasising their shared bemused gravity, then investing the final Rhapsody with a welcome energy.
Partnered by MSO principals, he headed a pliant reading of the popular Schumann work where the piano is king, leading the action most of the time and very present even in subservient passages; in these hands, a generous, no-surprises interpretation.