The Firm

The Advertiser, 3rd October, 2009

ON the page, the 20 songs of Schubert’s Die Schone Mullerin look relatively simple. No runs, no trills, no spectacular show–off leaps.

Tenor Robert Macfarlane and pianist Leigh Harrold, however, teased out the stories inside Wilhelm Muller’s gently worded pictures of a young miller lad and his adoration of a beautiful miller lass, against the background of the mill brook, showing them to be loaded with emotion.

Macfarlane’s rapidly maturing, strongly focused voice and Harrold’s extra–sensory–perceptive partnership led through the lad’s wonderment at his own delight, his curiosity to know if his love is returned (such longing in his legato), his impatience, expressed at a tempo most pianists would baulk at, his triumph “Mine!” he shouts after an innocent tryst.

Alas. A horn–blowing, hooting hunter wins her favour. She is lost to him and perhaps his life is, too.

Always present, thanks to Harrold’s magical transformations of a percussive piano into smoothly rippling water, the brook asserts itself as a character, musing with the miller on love and death.

Macfarlane turned away. Fully prepared, composed, he faced us again to sing, with all his heart and mind, Des Baches Wiegenlied (The Brook’s Lullaby) the most perfect song written. There were many tears.

Elizabeth Silsbury

Dignified recital deftly delivered

The Advertiser, 1st August, 2009

CHAMBER music is not only created but promoted by The Firm, whose 2009 subscription series continued with an excellent – mainly vocal – recital by soprano Greta Bradman and pianist Leigh Harrold.

In his 80th year, Peter Sculthorpe is this year’s featured composer.

Harrold’s performance of Mountains (1981) conjured up more effectively than most the rugged terrain for which the piece is named. It contrasted well with Anne Cawrse’s song cycle This Too Shall Pass, a very worthy piece, four laments given aptly thoughtful treatment and shot through with “French” lightness.

The first, D.H.Lawrence’s Elegy, is a magnificent piece with Bradman’s gorgeous voice soaring rapturously. A Goethe text (“Speak, ye stones” incorrectly given as Roman Elegies II, which it isn’t) followed: A fine setting of a first–class rant.

Webern’s Five Songs (1909) was written when he was still perfecting his atonal craft – and it shows – but Bradman’s performance, especially of the final song, Kahl reckt der Baum, was superb.

Grahame Dudley’s Three Pieces for Piano are well–crafted if a little aimless, wheras Firm supremos Raymond Chapman Smith and Quentin Grant were utterly focused in their contributions.

Chapman Smith’s Hymns to the Night is a Viennese homage and Grant’s Rilke Songs are quite distinctive – especially the second, Pathways, with its bell–like instrumental and vocal upper work.

Schubert’s harrowing Mignon Lieder, exquisitely sung, brought proceedings to a deeply impressive close.

Peter Burdon

The Firm June 22

The Advertiser, 27 June, 2009
 

Greta Bradman and her partner The Langbein String Quartet soared through an unfailingly engaging program to set a high bar for opening of The Firm’s 2009 series.

Ranging from Australia to Austria to the Argentine, they also covered several centuries. At the root of everything was the string quartet’s founding father, Joseph Haydn. In his honour, Langbein played the very last of the 83 authenticated in his name.

Only two movements — at 69, he said he was too old and weak to finish. Langbein proved his invention and organization were in full flight with a graceful Andante and an unusually spikey “Menuetto”.

Peter Sculthorpe, this year’s featured composer, just turned 80 and still dotting the manuscripts, based “Island Dreaming” (1996) on ideas gathered in Torres Strait.

Bradman extended her lofty range down the scale into chest territory, producing a near–authentic, aboriginal nasal twang for the winds, the waves and the seagulls crying, floating and wheeling like them in a long, meditative vocalize.

Switch to the luck and the pluck of the Irish for Quentin O’Grant’s settings of poems by Yeats, MacNeice et al — tunes, or very nearly, sung without artifice, woven around with decorative, dancing strings.

The first three movements of Luke Altmann’s String Quartet No. 1 (1999) reflect the holes, squeaky gates and noisy plumbing fashionable in the music of his student days. Fortunately he grew out of all that and the last two parts get going with sprightly rhythms and promising ideas.

Finally, singer and players were united by the melancholy poetry and music of Rosalia de Castro and Osvaldo Golijov. The moon of “Lua Descolorida” not colorless. Bradman (in Spanish, the very tongue of melancholy) and the Langbeins painted many hues, from pale gold through myriad shades of grey to the blackness of death. Her thrilling high C flew to the moon and beyond.

Elizabeth Silsbury