Augustin Hadelich performs Brahms
★★★★★
Sydney Symphony Orchestra, September 21
Opera House Concert Hall
Before reading any further, just hop on the web and see if there are any tickets left for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s Friday or Saturday night performances with violinist Augustin Hadelich.
His tone on the violin is like no other – a perfectly rounded sound of glowing warmth with complex depth and alluring after-shades. Where some violinists cultivate glistening clarity like a silver thread, his sound is generous and rich, like a golden band which he spins with the greatest elasticity, refinement and control.
Both listener and player become drawn in the pursuit of an ideal of beauty and in the discovery of a vehicle for intangible expression: Augustin Hadelich.Credit:Getty
Yet although it is clear that he pursues this quality purposefully, the endeavour has nothing of narcissism. Rather, both listener and player become drawn in the pursuit of an ideal of beauty and in the discovery of a vehicle for intangible expression.
Conductor Donald Runnicles began the opening orchestral section of Brahms Violin Concerto in D, Opus 77 with a tempo of unrushed breadth, its themes reserved and dignified, allowing Hadelich the space for unhurried expansion and reflection.
When oboist Diana Doherty began the slow movement she matched this approach, not with an oboe facsimile of the violin, which would be as futile as impossible, but with a comparable radiant openness. The last movement grasped Brahms’ cross-cutting gypsy rhythms with glowing energy.
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The program began with Melody Eötvös’s Pyramidion (the top stone of a pyramid), a concise orchestral essay that throws off a short idea at the start (which I took to be the apex), and develops it first in a striving angular way, and then more broadly.
The start was busy and thickly orchestrated, driven by bustling logic and confident energy before new more sustained ideas emerged on flute, violin and other instruments, though still relatable to the initial utterance. Musical form is often thought of linearly, and Eotvos’s pyramid metaphor invited one to think in three-dimensional terms exploring the depth of texture as the work unfolds through time.
from Sydney News HQ https://sydneynewshq.com/a-violin-masterclass-of-glowing-warmth-and-complex-depth/
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