Sorry. I couldn’t resist it. Silly Season. It’s just that every time I go to see an Australian Haydn Ensemble concert — and it’s getting more regular as I get more hooked on their particular brand of bounce — my husband comes up with a new ‘Haydn/hiding’ dad joke. There. I’ve done it now. Out of my system.
Anyway, back to the Utzon Room and the last concert of the year for the afore-mentioned AHE, with guest director and soloist Erin Helyard. A big turn out, and a (relatively) big orchestra taking on the Sturm und Drang of the late eighteenth-century. Helyard describes the sturmunddrangers as the angry young men of their time, artists intent on shaking things up, scaring the horses.
Looking at his stolid, white-wigged portrait, it’s hard to imagine CPE Bach as a renegade, but listening to his Harpsichord Concerto in F major, written in 1772, you get a whole new view. Especially when it’s played with the raw energy and punchy attitude of this ensemble. That’s not to say it’s at all lacking in polish: AHE have pulled their intonation and sound quality together dramatically over the last 18 months. Yesterday was the best I’ve heard them. The rawness was all deliberate, all in the performance. Led by Helyard at the keyboard, the ensemble gave us CPE’s concerto in all its edgy, obstinate difference. No, let’s not finish that phrase, even though a hundred years of harmony is begging for it. Yes, let’s hang onto that note for a bit longer. Even longer. Even though it’s sticking out like a sore thumb. As anyone who’s tried to un-learn a habit can confirm, it’s quite hard to play in a deliberately angular manner, without phrasing off, without vibrato to give that note a final polish. To do it consistently, and as an ensemble, is even harder, but the ensemble brought out all the delicious oddness. Meanwhile, Helyard added lashings of spidery virtuosity at a fearless but never rushed pace.
Before that, CPE’s Flute concert Wq. 22 in D minor, an earlier work, and less torrid but, in the hands of soloist Melissa Farrow, no less compelling. Farrow has a way of making the end of her phrases hang in the air, ready to connect with the next idea, ready to build into one splendid arc, like a brilliantly written novel that you can’t put down. It also helps that the sound coming from ‘Blondie’, her natural boxwood flute, a Martin Wenner copy of an August Grenser original, is unfailingly lovely.
Book-ending the concert, two ‘sinfonia’, one from CPE and one from Papa Haydn. La passione, as Haydn’s Symphony No. 49 is known, brought everything good about the performance so far together: the sustained, mind-spanning phrases, the mercurial mood swings and the impressively consistent quality of sound. Even through the intensity of the first movement there was a wiry tension, a momentum and once they hit the allegro spirituoso the motor rhythm powered on through with an invigorating vitality. One of those moments when you think 2016’s not all bad.
Many thanks to the Australian Haydn Ensemble for inviting me. If you like my blog, please support my book, crowdfunding now at unbound.com/books/sanctuary! A pledge would be wonderful. I also accept social media shares, spreading the news by word-of-mouth, best wishes and chocolate.