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Doherty / Milton / Adelaide Symphony Orchestra Master Series 11 - Scottish Air Prokofiev / R.Strauss / Mendelssohn Adelaide Town Hall, Thurs 2 Sept Diana Doherty has gained a fantastic and thoroughly deserved reputation as Australia's premiere oboist through her work as a soloist and desk member of the Sydney Symphony. And it was whilst living in NSW that I came to appreciate Doherty's brilliance as a soloist - in not only Richard Strauss' autumnal masterpiece (featured in this programme), but also in works by Koehne and Ross Edwards. However the Doherty performance that sticks uppermost in my memory was that of Hans Werner Henze's difficult Doppio Concerto given with harpist Alice Giles, conductor Markus Stenz and the SSO at Sydney's Town Hall a couple of years ago. Like the Strauss concerto, the Henze calls for the stretching of a formidable technique, which Doherty has in spades. However what made the Henze so special was the fact that Doherty's formidable breath control, despite the fact that she was heavily pregnant at the time, came to the fore, as it did again in these local performances where Strauss' long and lyrical lines posed no problems at all for this rare and masterly musician. When watching Doherty in performance, one soon realises that the oboe becomes an extension of her as she evokes a deep and inner dance that draws the music from somewhere deep within her being. In fact the only other wind player to whom I can compare her, is the great clarinettist Sabine Meyer - who by way of a similar evocative spiralling dance, brought similar mastery to the fore in a treasured performance of the Mozart concerto. This local performance of the Strauss was the equal of the earlier performance I'd heard with Edo De Waart in Sydney, with the ASO's winds again proving admirable - particularly in the finale. EMI's impresario Walter Legge has referred to Strauss as being 'Romanticism's long coda' and it is in his late works (from the 1940s) - like the oboe concerto, the sublime Four Last Songs and his final opera Capriccio - that this position is consolidated. And the idea of presenting his masterly concerto with Prokofiev's 'Classical' symphony and Felix Mendelssohn's 'Scottish' Symphony is an inspired choice. Milton's approach to the podium is a rather histrionic one owing much, no doubt, to his invaluable United States based training and focussed on clarity of line rather than lushness of tone and this is the one area that I found lacking, particularly in the accompaniment to the Strauss. But with a soloist of the calibre of Doherty, this is a rather small caveat. Yet in their recent Elder Hall concert, conducted by cellist and rising conductor David Sharp, it was in the short work for strings Crisatemi by the operatic composer Giacomo Puccini, which the orchestra truly shone. The opening arrangement for brass by Elgar Howarth of an Elizabethan keyboard piece by William Byrd lacked in contrapuntal clarity, whilst the suite from Brecht and Weill's Threepenny Opera, though sympathetically played, was hampered by silences between the various movements of the work thereby interrupting the flow of the music.  |
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