The Melbourne Chamber Orchestra really is the musical gift that keeps on giving. A tantalising Melbourne Recital Centre Series, radio broadcasts, an annual Spring Chamber Music Festival in Daylesford – these are just a few of their extensive and diverse concert events. In mid-winter, we were given a very warm and beautiful escape from the cold with the MCO’s themed “Pastorale” program suggesting a slower-paced time, and perhaps a feeling of the old-fashioned ways of a “simple” rural life in the countryside, gentle and unhurried.
Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings took us immediately to an introspective place, as concertmaster Sophie Rowell established a sensitive and delicate opening, then urging small, surging increases in the ensemble’s growing volume and power, very long-held silences, and a lightly melancholic, thoughtful and very beautiful atmosphere. We are so used to hearing this piece performed by large and almost emotionally overpowering string ensembles in dramatic and funereal settings, that it was a captivating experience to hear a lighter textured approach, artistically spacious and sweetly profound, still intense and emotionally connecting.
With MCO always featuring new or rarely heard repertoire, there was a buzz of anticipation for popular pianist Aura Go, who enthralled us with what was possibly the first Australian performance of Doreen Carwithen’s Concerto for Piano and Strings. Opening with strong assertive chords and cheerful activity, thematic interplay echoed between piano and strings. Solo strings added a flowing grandeur allowing contrasting solo piano sections to spread into the imagined pastoral English countryside, with folk-like themes bringing beautiful lyricism that surged and ebbed in the orchestral strings. Aura Go delighted us in quirky accelerations, full keyboard glissandos, and sparkling high and prominent low earthy tones especially when she was at full strength playing the extremes of the Steinway concert grand’s keyboard. Composed 1946-1948, the work evoked a sense of post-World War 2 anguish, when soft, solemn marching rhythms were used under the very touching, searching and contemplative solo violin melody opening the second movement Lento. With most expressive solo violin (Sophie Rowell) and cello (Blair Harris), we felt the loneliness and sorrow of the times and appreciated Aura Go’s detailed colour and range of expression. Varying orchestration contrasted both passion and dark deep moments, with heavenly rising ethereal strings adding a surreal touch.
It is interesting that Carwithen’s first composition as a 16-year-old was a setting of Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud” for voice and piano, and that she became a trailblazer as a full-time female film composer. Certainly, in the third and final movement a cinematic grandeur could be felt as, again, strings and piano surged forward to a scene of brightness and promise, exchanging and echoing musical phrases, leading to a very sparkling cadenza and an exciting rhythmic cadenza for piano.
Sadly, the original full scores of Peter Sculthorpe’s first four string quartets no longer exist, but a re-working of a movement from Quartet No. 3 became the second movement entitled “Pastorale” in his String Quartet No. 4 (1950). This finely structured piece “tells of the passing of summer and the arrival of autumn” and was inspired by Sculthorpe’s personal feelings from holiday time in Tasmania. Certainly, MCO violist Matthew Laing elicited a warm and richly timbred effect as a lyrical waltz melody then developed on upper strings, nicely followed by Emma Sullivan’s impressive double bass lines that added depth, power and earthiness. Most interesting harmonic suspensions in ensemble chords added a fresh and sunny tonal landscape to this contemporary pastorale setting.
Always the MCO provide most erudite program notes, reminding us that Serenade – in the title of the next well-loved and familiar work by Tchaikovsky – describes a classical form typically played or sung in the open air to one’s beloved, or to friends for affection and entertainment. With its powerful opening chords, the MCO gave this Serenade for Strings in C major a fervent, gorgeous, joyful, broad string tone. Director Sophie Rowell led this concert finale with infectious energy and happiness, and the ensemble responded with the required gusto in allegro sections and elegance and grace in waltz passages. Forte tones were particularly strong and passionate from the combined celli and double bass instruments. I found the third movement, Elegia. Larghetto elegiac, to be a concert highlight, where Rowell’s sensitive and advanced leadership united the ensemble in extremely soft pianissimo playing in both the opening and closing moments. Accelerating melodies in the Finale took on a fine singing quality with a true Pastorale feeling of buoyancy and renewed energy. Again, celli produced a strong tonal intensity and dynamic, this heart-warming ensemble gave us an abundance of colourful and exceptionally sensitive string playing.
If we had felt that this was a winter of discontent, a very warm and enthusiastic audience loudly applauded this fine ensemble.
Photo credit: Catherine Turner
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Julie McErlain reviewed “Pastorale”, presented by the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra at the Melbourne Recital Centre’s Elisabeth Murdoch Hall on July 12, 2025.
