So Young review, Australian Chamber Orchestra review

It’s the perfect ensemble to fill this cauldron of questions with tentative Scottish accents. Waters, with his big eyes and wide movements, portrays a sweet man who is a little lost in life, prone to making gaffes. McGlynn does a significant job of overcoming her character’s morally upright vixen stereotype.

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Henry Nixon, with his boyish appearance and friendly presentation, does not come off as somehow seedy or delusional. Aidara certainly helps in this regard: her Greta exudes natural strength, lively intelligence, and fearless confidence.

When characters strip into pairs of opposing partners, it foreshadows some tawdry horror. Subtle blocking and body language indicate that we may be about to witness actual “bad behavior” on display. It was a great, laudable relief that the plan did not collapse to this apparent crisis point.

Two surprisingly poignant symbols are at work in Maxwell’s story. One of these is a wine-soaked anecdote of a lion’s paralyzing roar. The other is an unopened bottle of Japanese whiskey. It may be served a little too neatly in the end, but very young It is a powerful, precious thing that pits the “malleable present” against the “irreconcilable past.”

MUSIC
Cocteau’s Circle
Australian Chamber Orchestra
Municipality Recital Hall, 8 November
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★½

In 1918, as a shocked France was adjusting itself to the possibility of peace, writer, filmmaker, and general avant-garde polymath Jean Cocteau produced a small collection of opinionated aphorisms: Le Coq and l’ArlequinFor a time, it became the unofficial manifesto of six composers (George Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Germaine Tailleferre and Francis Poulenc), then known as: Carrion New Jeunes, but was later simply christened as: Les Six.

Cocteau argued that French music should resist the seductive influence of Debussy, Stravinsky and Wagner, preferring the simplicity discovered by Satie. Informality, carefree, irreverent and music hall spirit should always be preferred to the type of music listened to “with head in hands”.

In fact, the collective aesthetic sense among these composers quickly faded away, but the spirit of the moment remained.

The Australian Chamber Orchestra under Richard Tognetti, director Yaron Lifschitz, distinctively dressed singer and conductor d’ Le Gateau Chocolat, and real-voiced soprano and talented chanteuse Chloe Lankshear have joined forces to revive this spirit.

Quotations from some of the pieces Les Six and its contemporaries, brought together with commentary by Le Gateau Chocolat and five subtly allusive interludes by Elena Kats-Chernin.

Bearded, 198 centimeters tall and wearing outrageous clothes of different shades in each appearance, Le Gateau Chocolat linked the anarchic irrationality of the time with modern gender distortion and drift.

Mixed deep bass and falsetto in Bess’s song I love you Porgy from Gershwin Porgy and Bessbut his difficulty in weaving melodic lines with nuances made Gershwin’s earlier slower rendition more difficult. Oh, Lady Be Good! less successful.

Lankshear sang Bien Chapeautee From the operetta by Swiss composer Henri Christine Phi-Phi with a pure, richly colored sound of vibrant flexibility. his reading Pie Jesu Written by Lili Boulanger, one of the tragically short-lived and truly emerging geniuses of the period, the song was dark and striking and was the musical highlight of the programme.

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Lankshear closed the night with a poignantly simple comment: L’Hymne a l’amour By Edith Piaf, who died the day before her close friend Cocteau.

One of the highlights of the instrumental numbers was the first movement of Jean Francaix’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, delivered with light agility by pianist Stefan Cassomenos. With the wind instruments and percussions they visited, Tognetti and the ACO captured well the way composers of this period created disorientation and detachment through unusual mixes and unconventional balance.

They started with one Overture Written by Auric, he contributed angular quotes from Stravinsky and concluded with Milhaud’s multi-tonal energy and enthusiasm. Le Boeuf sur le toit (A ballet by Milhaud and Cocteau named after their favorite nightclub).

The first movement of Tailleferre’s String Quartet was caressingly breezy, but the arrangements of parts of Ravel’s and Debussy’s Quartets were less sensitive in pitch. The limitation of the music to cabaret-style excerpts caused some disappointment, but whetted the appetite to hear full performances of many neglected gems of the period.

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