The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra made history last night, marking the first time the 118-year-old orchestra has performed every bar of Clara Schumann’s riveting Piano Concerto.
Exploring works that express doomed romance and the intense emotions that come with it, the MSO’s Forbidden Love concert at Hamer Hall presented a soaring tempest of anguish and ecstasy.
Commanding the storm was French conductor Fabien Gabel, opening the night with a work from fellow countryman Claude Debussy, the suite of his opera Pelléas and Mélisande. The piece served as a dreamy introduction to the evening’s programme of love-laced works, decorated throughout with beguiling sonic textures.
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Under Gabel’s baton, playful brass trills and swift eddies of flute infused with shimmering metallic elements from xylophone and harp. It was a gentle, ponderous work and a strong demonstration of Gabel’s ability to interweave opposing call-and-answer melodic lines for strings.
The sense of mystery evoked by this piece was answered by the dazzling entrance of pianist Alexandra Dariescu, floating across the stage in a glistening, floor-length sea-green gown. As Dariescu said in her brief address to the audience, history would be made tonight in this inaugural performance of Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto by the MSO.
The first movement saw a charming dance between solo piano and cello, as though the two instruments were sharing love letters in brief, jovial outbursts.
It was in solo passages that Dariescu excelled in demonstrating the speed, expression and agility of her performance. Compared to the more appropriate acoustics of the Melbourne Recital Centre, the larger arena of Hamer Hall resulted in a dampening of the piano against the deeper gloss of the orchestra.
It was as Dariescu surged through the concerto’s second and third movements that she was able to balance herself against the volume and depth of the strings. Here she utilised the full range of the piano, where the first movement had registered those higher, sharper notes that were lost in the expanse of the hall.
Culminating with a thunderous performance of the Symphonic Fantasy from Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, an expression of the orchestra that sounded like the sky tearing open, the evening surely served every height of emotion – as befits a concert with such an anguished and romantic title.
For more information on Forbidden Love and to get your tickets, head here.
