Another wonderful night with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, featuring the ultimate tearjerker, a local violin wunderkind, and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5.
I’ve already been to more classical music concerts this year than any other year, with more still to come. Not that I’m complaining!
I’m used to being one of the younger audience members in a sea of greying heads at this sort of event, but this time around the Hamer Hall crowd was a lot more mixed. There were at least two groups of teenage students from Melbourne’s private schools, decked out in their uniforms. I’m all for inflicting high culture on the younger generation, but I had to feel for the poor boy across the aisle from us, who clearly found the whole thing an ordeal and fidgeted like crazy. Also, the local Chinese community showed up in numbers for seventeen-year-old Christian Li, the star of the first half.
Before Christian took the stage, the orchestra opened the night with Barber’s Adagio for Strings. You can rarely accuse the composers of coming up with memorable and snappy titles, so I was pleasantly surprised that behind the bland name was one of the most beautiful and sorrowful pieces of music ever written along with Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor. It was so ethereal and mournful it brought a tear to my eye.
Performing with the MSO before you hit the legal drinking age is quite a feat for anyone. Christian showed off his exceptional talent and virtuosity with Korngold’s Violin Concerto, a piece I’ve never heard before but which instantly made me think of lush Old Hollywood movie scores. Fair enough, when I looked him up Erich Korngold turned out to be one of the most celebrated and influential film composers, with the concerto pulling melodies from his 1930s movie scores. For his encore, Christian played a slower violin piece; he was so soft-spoken when he introduced it that the conductor Benjamin Northey had to step in and re-introduce it.
(I don’t always pay attention to the conductor during an orchestra performance, but Northey was somehow especially expressive and charismatic even with his back to the audience for most of the time.)
After the break, it was time for some Shostakovich. As a Russian-born, I’m a bit embarrassed to say that I’m not all that familiar with his work, save for a couple of pieces that struck me as vivid, dramatic and full of nervy intensity. When I heard String Quartet No. 8 for the first time, it made me feel like I was listening to someone’s full-blown panic attack. His famous Waltz No. 2 is truly gorgeous and easy on the ear, yet it still has a haunting and bittersweet quality.
I rarely heard a piece of music that gripped my insides as hard as Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, given a marvellous, emotive treatment by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. It’s more modern and dissonant-sounding than the classical music I generally like, yet it’s instantly engaging on the first listen. Even in its most mellow and triumphant moments, there’s a strong undercurrent of melancholy and anxiety that just never allowed me to relax and drift away. It certainly made me want to dive deeper into Shostakovich’s back catalogue.
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