Australian Chamber Orchestra/ Tognetti assessment – bitty however fantastically performed | Classical music

The third and final live performance within the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s newest Barbican residency carried the banner Indies and Idols. It continued their affiliation with the Guildhall faculty too, with 19 pupil string gamers becoming a member of the ensemble for the primary half of the live performance, which was directed as at all times by Richard Tognetti.

The indie composers of the title had been evidently Bryce Dessner and Jonny Greenwood, their idols, Lutosławski and Penderecki; works by Wojciech Kilar and Szymanowski continued the Polish theme of the programme. If the didactic intention was to hint traces of affect between generations, it failed dismally. No matter Dessner and Greenwood may say about their admiration for his or her Polish fashions, represented within the programme by the prologue from Lutosławski’s Musique Funèbre and Penderecki’s String Quartet No 1 (in Tognetti’s string-orchestra association), their very own items hardly betrayed it. Dessner’s Réponse Lutosławski is a meandering collection of featureless brief actions, with titles that proved extra attention-grabbing than the music itself. Greenwood’s rating for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, in the meantime, loses a lot of its efficiency when transplanted from display screen to live performance corridor.

All of it made for a bitty programme missing in focus, an absence that solely appeared to be emphasised by the predictable excellence of the performances. The ACO remains to be a outstanding band, fairly in contrast to another, and Tognetti’s dedication to take its programming into areas that different chamber orchestras wouldn’t consider colonising has been so profitable that maybe they’re allowed the occasional misstep.

Because it was, there have been simply a few gadgets right here to offer reminders of their innate brilliance and verve: the stampeding fury of Kilar’s Orawa, a miracle of exact ensemble, and Tognetti’s string-orchestra growth of Szymanowski’s Second Quartet, its diaphanous textures spun like silk, its folk-music references seamlessly touched in.