Music review: ASO’s Titan
Japanese conductor Keitaro Harada’s bold originality throughout the ASO’s final Symphony Series offering of the year was startling to witness, and exceptional playing from Kate Suthers made this a remarkable concert.
Each conductor brings something new or different to an orchestra. In the case of Keitaro Harada, it was several quite remarkable things. In his first appearance with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, this Japanese conductor made a singular impression, and one hopes some of what he brought might last.
First, he is a most athletic young conductor. The way he moves on the podium is impressive, bringing entries in with lightning quickness and the tautest, sharpest gestures of arm and upper body. Enthralling to watch, his approach brings immediate dividends in the right kind of repertoire. Fortune favours the brave, as they say, and Harada throws everything at the music when things become exhilarating. With Mahler, it can be tremendous.
Then there’s his gracious manner. At the opposite end of the energy scale, Harada falls still and lets the orchestral players decide matters. Rarely has one seen the ASO allowed to rely so fully on its own musicianship than in this concert. That happened to great effect not only in Mahler’s “Titan” Symphony but more intriguingly in the first item.
With its clapsticks, growling cellos and haunting atmosphere, Buckskin and Goldsmith’s celebration of country, Pudnanthi Padninthi, is by now a familiar opener in many of the ASO’s concerts. However, Harada didn’t even appear on stage for this but rather allowed the players to morph this piece into existence. Led at the beginning by percussionist Steven Peterka, it took on the spirit of a corroboree. So insightful, so uniquely rewarding. It’s an easy enough piece for conductor-less playing to work fine, and it did.
This concert, entitled Titan, was to have had Grace Clifford playing the Berg Violin Concerto, but a program change saw ASO concertmaster Kate Suthers stepping into the breach with Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, Op.64. What multiple joys came in this, a reading of exceptional lyrical purity. Her hushed yet clear tone immediately gave its opening the quality of a gentle lullaby. So often this work is treated as a vehicle for bravura display, but Suthers put ostentation to one side to reveal what is perhaps its truer essence: intimacy and songfulness.
Suthers went out on a limb in this performance and wins enormous respect. How interesting it was to hear this Mendelssohn with an absence of the dug-in, gravelly tone that is commonly brought to it, and instead with the thoughtfulness and clarity of a singer.
The risk was that without special care, the orchestra might drown her in louder passages, but Harada proved an ideal collaborator by bringing dynamics right down and allowing the tempo to yield at every turn. To hear this very standard work of the repertoire being presented in a new light like this was highly refreshing.
An infectiously engaging musician on stage, Suthers continues to be the ASO’s best news in a long time. She is one of its finest ever musicians.
Keitaro Harada proved an athletic and gracious conductor of the ASO. Photo: Saige Prime
Some good programming decisions have made the orchestra’s Symphony Series interesting this year. In this instance, audiences were treated to a work by the English composer Ruth Gipps (1921-99), whose music has only recently been seriously reconsidered. Death on the Pale Horse is an eloquent tone poem from 1943 that fuses biblical imagery with wartime fear and foreboding. Inspired by William Blake’s illustration of a crazed horseman bringing death to humanity, it moves in undulating waves of harmonically sophisticated drama. A piece definitely worth hearing again, it was well played.
Primary interest in this concert was Mahler’s Symphony No.1 in D, Titan. By now, Harada had revealed enough about his conducting approach for one to know he would bring vigour to it, and indeed this turned out to be the case. In the stormy tumult of its fourth movement, the intensity was fabulous: an expanded ASO of some 85 musicians rose to great heights under his energetic rhythmic push in this part of his symphony. The surpassing strength and power of their playing in the blazing finale was one of their most thrilling achievements of the year.
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Some of Harada’s interpretative choices earlier on, though, did have one scratching one’s head. In the second movement, Mahler falls into a Ländler vein of folksy charm, but its opening notes on cello and double bass were mystifyingly gruff and elongated. It took a while for its simple dance rhythm to find a groove. But it did so, and there was wonderful zing in other moments where Mahler introduces the common touch, as in the third movement’s Klezmer music.
The extraordinary thing about Harada was again how he deferred to the musicians’ decision-making ability for enhanced effect. In that same movement, Mahler casts “Bruder Jakob” (aka “Frère Jacques”) in the minor key and transforms it into a funeral march. Here, Harada stood absolutely still for a full two minutes while the double basses, bassoons and cellos circulated over and under each other with this children’s round. The result seemed all the stranger and more startling.
Harada’s originality is in a class of its own.
This is a review of Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s Titan concert on November 29. The ASO performs Handel’s Messiah on December 6, 7 and 8 at the Adelaide Town Hall.