Cover Image: The Australian Chamber Orchestra. Photo by Nic Walker.

Australian Chamber Orchestra
Winthrop Hall, 13 August 2025

What at first glance seemed like an eclectic mix of disparate works made perfect sense when you dug a bit deeper. A Canadian outsider’s view of an ancient land. Two Ukrainian exiles. A Russian composer who fell foul of the Soviet authorities.  An American Jewish composer whose music resists easy classification. 

Memory and its literary counterpart, history, are central. Biographically, nostalgia for one’s homeland or the way things used to be; musically, a sense of irony, which is fundamentally about the distance between reality and perception.

Led by the band’s director, violinist Richard Tognetti, the ACO opened with Canadian composer Claude Vivier’s 1980 work Zipangu (the title refers to an archaic name for Japan). Saturated with elements of Kabuki theatre and Carnatic music, Zipangu presents a mesmerising textural and timbral unfolding in space and time. I’d previously heard it only in recording and hadn’t taken to it. Hearing it performed live by one of the world’s finest string ensembles was however a vastly different experience. I’m now sold.

You couldn’t have asked for a more contrasting work than the next item on the program, Ukrainian composer’s newly-commissioned Moments of Memory (VI), written in exile from Kyiv in 2024. Here’s the composer himself on this exquisite composition: 

“The music of this cycle consists of a chain of moments, where a moment has a beginning but no end. It doesn’t break off but listens attentively, awaiting a continuation that is lost in infinity… Musicians and listeners of this kind of music are invited not to just listen but to listen attentively not only to the sound but also to the silence between the sounds.”

For the most part played with strings muted, the ACO beautifully pointed up the sweet sense of irony and wistfulness for a remembrance of things past, a ghostly waltz inhabiting a refracting hall of mirrors compelling one gently towards a deeper reflection of heartbreak and loss.

Another contrast followed with Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No.1 in C minor, Op.35, written and first performed in 1933. Essentially a double concerto for piano and trumpet, it’s also another exercise in memory and nostalgia, a witty pastiche of romantic melodrama and jazz. 

Making their return to Perth for this concert, Ukrainian-Australian pianist Alexander Gavrylyuk and trumpeter David Elton had an absolute blast with this work, negotiating the virtuosic and lyrical passages alike with an engaging sprezzatura while metaphorically winking at the audience the whole time. The ACO were more than willing co-conspirators.

Still in party mode following the interval, the same performers reassembled on stage for ACO house composer and arranger Bernard Rofe’s fine arrangement of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Here, Elton enthusiastically availed himself of a variety of trumpets and trumpet-like instruments such as the flugelhorn, as well as various mutes, while Gavrylyuk threw everything he had at Gershwin’s at times idiosyncratic keyboard writing (the substantial piano solo in the middle was improvised by Gershwin at the 1924 premiere and only written down afterwards). Tognetti and his band were having so much fun that one of the cellists was even inspired to spin his instrument around on its spike.

However all parties must end, in this case with Rudolf Barshai’s arrangement of Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet, composed in Dresden in 1960, more than a decade after the composer’s denouncement by Stalin. Officially, it’s “dedicated to the victims of fascism and war,” but privately, Shostakovich admitted it was his own epitaph, filled with quotations from his earlier works and his personal DSCH motif.

It’s an extraordinarily powerful and intense work, here vividly brought to terrifying life by the ACO – thus bringing the evening’s parade of contrasts and contradictions to a sombre, sobering close.