Source : the age
John Adams, one of the world’s most influential living composers, was part way through arranging a string quartet for the Australian Chamber Orchestra when he had a sudden change of heart.
“No, damn it,” the ACO’s Richard Tognetti recalls Adams deciding. “I’m going to write them a piece – a whole piece.”
The result is Gioia, a new work from the master composer created specifically for Tognetti and principal violin Satu Vanska.
“Suddenly we have this extraordinary piece written for us,” says Tognetti. “We’re touring it next year in Australia and the United States. It’s the only piece he’s writing in his 80th year.”
Adams’ generous gift will be one of the highlights of a 2027 season that ranges across J. S. Bach, Part, Cage, Reich and Richard Strauss, as well as Mozart, Haydn and Schubert.
Another marquee event of the ACO’s 52nd season will be an intimate performance of Bach’s transcendent St John Passion in a collaboration with award-winning Belgian vocal ensemble Vox Luminis.
“The St John Passion, it’s got the whole world in it and more,” says Tognetti. “How astonishing that this dude J. S. Bach, all on his own up there in northern Germany, ends up creating music that makes him the greatest composer who ever lived.”
And if the 18th-century German master were somehow to be present in the City Recital Hall to hear the ACO’s performance, what might he think?
“He’d certainly recognise it and I think he’d be delighted,” says Tognetti. “And I think he’d be surprised that his work has astral-travelled through the ages and [is] being played in this strange land of which he wasn’t even aware. Like any composer, he should be delighted his music is being kept alive.”
In June the ACO will also stage its first festival, a four-day event in its Walsh Bay HQ. Entitled Currents, the event will bring together a series of eclectic programs ranging from Missy Mazzoli and Samuel Adams (son of John) to Mozart and Bach.
As part of Currents, audiences will also get the chance to witness John Cage’s 4′33″, the American composer’s infamous (or revelatory, depending on your point of view) work consisting only of silence.
“I did it in Maribor [Slovenia] and I tried to do it in the Adelaide Festival recently,” says Tognetti. “It’s always … a failed attempt at the exploration of nothingness.
“It’s seriously confronting, on a par with trying to get a kid to meditate. You start noticing sounds in your head in the hall. Some people giggle, nervous giggles. Some people just hate it. The Brookner-loving 72-year-old classical music fan wants to kill you. And some people really find something revelatory about it.”
The 2027 season will close with the mouthwatering prospect of young soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha’s Australian debut performing Richard Strauss’ sublime Four Last Songs with an expanded ACO.
The season is classic Tognetti, by turns intriguing, challenging and revelatory. However, with him recently turning 61, I wonder whether the ACO director can still claim the badge of “enfant terrible” routinely applied to him down the years?
“I think you’re born a certain age,” he says. “I’ve always sort of felt 17, so the answer is, ‘Yes, you can’.
“I think the proof of the pudding is that I still get really exasperated by people if they’re not trying to get everything they possibly can from every second of every day. I’m a bit of a hard taskmaster like that.
“And with so-called classical music – and don’t we hate that expression – if a performance comes across as being in aspic, I also get exasperated.”
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