Javier Perianes Performs Saint-Saens

This concert of the last major works by Rossini, Camille Saint-Saen and Shostakovich offers a peek into their final musical journeys over two centuries.

Rossini was still smarting from Beethoven’s intended compliment 40 years earlier that he should stick to opera buffa (‘above all, make more Barbers’).  William Tell, based on Schiller’s play about the historic Swiss freedom-fighter, was Rossini’s last opera. It had a mixed reception and at the age of 38 Rossini inexplicably stopped composing.

His Overture captures a beautifully descriptive sunrise over the Alps, a storm arriving and retreating, pastoral melodies and finally a trumpeting call to revolt. This rousing motif made famous by The Lone Ranger on TV and numerous commercials would for Rossini probably have added insult to injury.

Saint-Saens’ elegant and entertaining Fifth Piano Concerto was inspired by his many travels notably through Moorish Spain and Egypt, drawing on natural settings and local folkloric, with lilting chords and repeated notes high on the piano.

The composer himself was the soloist at its Paris premiere in 1896; in Sydney the unassuming visiting pianist Javier Perianes was masterly twinkling the keys in brief cadenza-like movements. 

Saint-Saen’s Fifth Concerto, rarely heard in Australia, was his last. The classicist was on the loosing side of French musical fashion, and the death of his two young sons and collapse of his marriage prompted his escape into yet more travel.  

Shostakovich described the start of his Symphony No.15 as ‘childhood - just a toy shop, with a cloudless sky above’, with its slow percussive detail, chimes and flute melody. But where is this mix of cheerfulness and turmoil heading? 

As a Soviet composer terrorised by Stalin, Shostakovich was by this last symphony in 1972 supremely artful in his irony, and his cryptic musical quotes, parodies and disguised treatments.  By No.15 he presumably shows the stylistic confidence to quote and extend Rossini’s William Tell Overture (don’t ask why!) and, as desolation mounts, Mahler’s Fifth and Wagner’s Announcement of Death.

German conductor Kevin John Edusei finely weaves the orchestra’s pace with exquisitely sorrowful instrumental phrases, from solo cello (Catharine Hewgill), a whispering violin (Harry Bennetts) and a funeral march heralded by trombone (Scott Kinmont). 

Shostakovich ends his mammoth symphonic series back in the toyshop with just a quiet click and clack. And died three years later.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Ken Leanfore