Adelaide Festival’s Opera and Music Advisor Toby Chadd has outdone himself with this year’s chamber music and vocal recitals (not to mention the opera Innocence, arguably the jewel in the crown of the entire 2025 Adelaide Festival). As well as commissioning David Harrington’s Horizons and Dialogues in Sound, Chadd also programmed Daylight Express, a two-week series of lunchtime recitals at Elder Hall. I saw six of these, and each one was an exquisitely fashioned gem.
French-Canadian soprano Claire de Sévigné’s From Mozart to The Merry Widow was a heady potpourri which in fact extended from Handel to Lerner and Loewe’s ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’. De Sévigné was in Adelaide singing the demanding role of the Mother-in-Law in Innocence, but here she spread her wings and let her hair down, so to speak, lending her supple soprano to a variegated repertoire with great panache, ably accompanied by Australian pianist Michael Ierace, who was also playing from the orchestra pit for Innocence. The highlight for me was Schubert’s ‘Shepherd on the Rock’, for which they were joined by Australian clarinettist Lloyd Van’t Hoff, whose liquid tones were a match for those of de Sévigné.
The next day the Affinity Quartet took a break from their residency at UKARIA to play Shostakovich’s First String Quartet and Beethoven’s String Quartet No.10 Opus 74 ‘The Harp’. They gave a committed and incisive account of both works, with a dark and rich European sound that reminded me of the Alban Berg Quartet.
Wednesday’s concert was more of a conversation/lecture/demonstration by Horizons curator, American David Harrington with guest composer/viola/viol d’amore player, Irish-born Garth Knox. Among other things, Harrington shared how he was inspired to found Kronos Quartet during the American war in Vietnam in order to play George Crumb’s terrifying Black Angels, and how they have made a point of playing it in subsequent decades whenever the US has started another war. For his part, Knox gave us a vivid demonstration of all the sounds he could make on the viol d’amore.
Thursday saw another recital by a visiting guest singer, with Swedish-Finnish mezzo Jenny Carlstedt (who sang the even more demanding role of the Waitress in Innocence) gracing us with her presence the day after the opera’s closing night (once again accompanied by the indefatigable Michael Ierace). She presented a thoughtful program entitled From the Bliss of Song and Lyre and devoted to the theme of song itself. Her repertoire ranged from Britten’s arrangement of Purcell’s ‘If Music Be The Food Of Love’ and Gluck’s ‘Che faro senza Euridice?’ to Debussy’s cool Trois Chansons de Bilitis and a charming Vaughan Williams setting of Shakespeare’s ‘Orpheus With His Lute’; but for me her singing truly ignited when she turned to works by Nordic composers, especially those in her native Swedish (including two glorious songs by Ture Rangström) and a monumental performance of Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Rilke setting, Five Sonnets to Orpheus.
Friday saw another lively conversation-lecture-demonstration by Australian writer and pianist Anna Goldsworthy in dialogue with fellow author Robert Dessaix, who shared anecdotes about his love of music, peppered by readings from his recent memoir Chameleon, while Goldworthy deftly alternated between the role of interviewer and musician, and treating us to some of Dessaix favourite works, including a tantalising selection of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, one of Prokofiev’s brittle Sarcasms, and a sparkling rendition of Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau.
Read: Performance reviews: Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Camille O’Sullivan: Loveletter, Adelaide Festival
I returned the following Tuesday for one more Daylight Express recital, by mercurial French-German cellist Nicolas Altstädt. He opened and closed the concert with Bach’s First and Fifth Cello Suites, the latter requiring a swift scordatura re-tuning in order to achieve maximum resonance from an open fourth string. Both were delicately played with eyes closed and in a state of rapt concentration, though the darker sound and tonality of the C minor Suite took us to more sombre emotional depths.
In between these two towering masterworks were two less well-known (but no less masterly) modernist contributions to the solo cello repertoire: Henri Dutilleux’s rigorous and demanding Trois Strophes sur le nom de Sacher (dedicated to a wealthy patron who commissioned several major modernist composers, and using the letters of Sacher’s name as musical building blocks for the score); and unjustly neglected twentieth century Hungarian-Swiss composer Sándor Veress’s gripping and at times wrenching Sonata for Cello Solo. The latter work proved to be the ideal segue to the C Minor Suite by Bach – who was also, as Altstädt rightly reminded us, a modernist.
Daylight Express
Claire de Sévigné: From Mozart to The Merry Widow
Affinity Quartet: Shostakovich and Beethoven
David Harrington’s Listening Party
Jenny Carlstedt: From the Bliss of Song and Lyre
Robert Dessaix: Music in My Life and Work
Nicolas Altstädt Plays Bach
As part of Adelaide Festival 2025
Elder Hall, University of Adelaide
Tickets: $20 – $39
3–10 March
