Paavali Jumppanen, Artistic Director of the Australian National Academy of Music, is internationally recognised as a most imaginative, creative and energetic director and a frequent performer and champion of contemporary music. To have him perform both as a soloist and ensemble leader with Australia’s best young instrumentalists gave a dedicated audience an opportunity to hear most stimulating and exciting rarely heard piano and chamber works.
Highly appreciated were the significant and most erudite program notes written by ANAM Music Librarian Alex Owens, with Jumppanen adding extra special points of interest in his addresses to the packed auditorium when stage resetting allowed. The Concert’s Title, “That Moment in Time”, was an invitation to reflect on and explore concepts of what is new and old, the modern and the contemporary.
Tonight’s program was music more than a century old, Jumppanen suggesting it was “modern music from old times”, adding that “music was much more than a representation of the time, the composer’s personality and maturity, even nationality”. Owens’ extensive program notes came under the heading “Exiles in their Times” – a reminder that, in Europe particularly, artists had to re-locate and that not all music in “contemporary times” is “modern”.
Jumppanen opened each of the two “halves” of the program with four of Debussy’s 12 Etudes (1915). Recognised as one of the most original and most adventurous composers of his time, with connections to elements of past times, Debussy himself suggested his Etudes were for a single listener only, and there was indeed a beautiful shroud of intimacy around the pianist’s delivery. Probably the least played of Debussy’s piano music, each demands a mature and immense range of nuanced tone. Demands are made on extreme pitch registers, and there were no easy moments in the composer’s very detailed and precise scores.
From Book 1, No. 1 Pour les cinq doights (d’après Monsieur Czerny), began with five-fingered patterns that quickly developed into a bubbling and turbulent flow of gently cascading waves with contrasting left hand chordal punctuations. No. 3 Pour les quartes began sweetly with descending 4th intervals, with suspenseful silences between hugely varied rhythmic shapes and extreme timbres. No. 5 Pour les octaves seemed fun to play with sudden energetic mixed rhythms and staccato chromaticism. A touch of grandeur came into an imitative waltz section where Jumppanen’s stamina and precise control of alternating hand triplet rhythms was most admirable. No. 6 Pour les huit doigts demanded a whirlwind of non-stop flying chromatic and scalic patterns, delicate and expressive, showing why Debussy gave a warning for “pianists not to take up the musical profession (as demanded in his Etudes) unless they have remarkable hands”. Tonight, Jumppanen was given enthusiastic applause for this remarkable first set.
Twenty-five ANAM instrumentalists joined the pianist for Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, a work composed in 1923 at that moment in time for optimism and artistic opportunity in the theatre and performing arts. Here was an impressive performance, its opening sorrowful yet “modern” funereal march rhythms perhaps saying goodbye to the old 19th century orchestral style, with Stravinsky’s dramatic shifting metres, and new orchestrations where every instrument was heard cleanly as individually spaced soloists. New pairings of instruments, quirky and colourful demands on extremities of instruments, big, broad crescendos and touches of fragmented ragtime marching elements took us to a Vivace close.
After interval, Jumppanen returned to Debussy’s Etudes, explaining informally that the Book 2 pieces can be seen as chaotic. No. 7 Pour les degrés chromatiques was a feast of gorgeous lyrical warm shapes almost disguised in contrasting sections of spaced, sustained and well-pedalled tone colour in long low bass registers, and illusory fragmented upper patterns. No. 10 Pour les sonorités opposées and No. 11 Pour les arpèges composés did indeed expand the architecture with layers of shimmering upper ripples and descending themes, with sensitive flying buoyancy and silvery myriads of notes. Jumppanen truly emphasised the percussive and dramatic No. 12 Pour les accords in the highly accented and heavily punctuated final Etude. A central introspective section continued to freely shift gentle patterns between extreme pitch levels, with surprising bass patterns announcing further surges of the percussive opening theme heading to a dramatic climax with heavily accented chords closing this set.
Dario Scalabrini (clarinet), Maria Zhdanovich (flute), Peter Gjelsten (violin) and Noah Lawrence (cello) joined Jumppanen to present a vibrant tapestry of colour and energy in Schoenberg’s rhythmically complex Chamber Symphony, Op. 9 (1906, then arranged by Webern in 1923). Rising motives were certainly forward looking and marching the audience into the future. This ensemble admirably maintained a powerful feeling and emotional expression, balancing extreme moments of intensity with calm. Schoenberg had said in 1913: “One must go on without asking what lies before or behind”. When he heard this Chamber Symphony at its first performance over 100 years ago in Vienna, where it received public hostility, Mahler publicly defended the creativity of the younger Schoenberg.
Tonight we appreciated three of the most influential composers of their time, fully immersed in this highly exciting program that accelerated to a triumphant close and much applause.
Near me an audience member summed up this concert: “It had everything!”
Photo supplied.
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Julie McErlain reviewed “That Moment in Time”, presented by the Australian National Academy of Music at the Rosina Auditorium, Abbotsford Convent on August 2, 2024.
