A Night Full Of Tunes

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday May 25, 1998

By GORDON KERRY

SYDNEY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

Meet the Music Concert, May 20

THIS Meet the Music concert sure was a night of tunes. Rachmaninov's third piano concerto took up the first half with an almost embarrassment of melodic richness. Richard Mills's Symphonic Pictures from The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and Mendelssohn's "Italian" symphony each offered their own versions of ingratiatingly tuneful writing.

This was the second time this year I have heard the "Rach 3" in the concert hall. Comparisons are odious, but I might say that while Nikolai Lugansky (who played the work with the Russian National Orchestra) and Ian Munro (the soloist on this occasion) are pianists of radically different temperament, the results, though different, were equally gratifying.

Munro has a powerful and virtuosic technique, but a manner which eschews any theatricality of gesture. Indeed he is, in the best sense, an unsentimental interpreter of this music - a blessing really, as it offers plenty of opportunities for dramatic voicing and subtle colouration which can easily be swept away by the "big hair" school of playing. John Harding, in his role as associate conductor rather than concert master, directed an orchestra with which it is clear he has great rapport.

String discipline was very good and the band as a whole very responsive. There were also numerous instances of fine solo playing, particularly in the warm toned writing for lower winds in the opening movement.

Richard Mills is one of the finest orchestrators in the country, and his "Doll Pictures" show this aspect of his craft at its finest. Not having been around at the time, and in the current political climate, I am perhaps a little wary of nostalgia for the '50s - it strikes me that to create art-music out of the commonplaces of '50s dance music, as in the first part of this piece, is more likely to create a Glo-mesh bag than a silk purse, but then in the context of the opera from which this music comes that is dramatically very appropriate. Opera, as Patricia Howard once said, is a blunt instrument, and Mills opts for a rhetoric whose provenance is always immediately recognisable - the Doll-smashing music evokes the Strauss of Elektra or Salome, baleful Sibelian brass presages doom. The most engaging music in the suite came in that which expresses Olive's realisation that the past is lost - here given to the flugel horn played superbly by Paul Goodchild.

Mills's harmonic language is based on six-note chords, whose pitch content to some extent dictates the shape of his melodies. There is therefore a huge contrast between this and Rachmaninov's apparently spontaneous surgings and the classical shapes in Mendelssohn's "Italian" symphony.

Mendelssohn is having a good run with the SSO lately, and this performance by and large had all the spring and lightness it needed. The triplet figurations with which the winds support the opening tune were nice and crisp; the andante had a nice poise to it. The third movement could perhaps have gone a shade faster, but the last had an appropriate dose of energy.