Music / “Much Ado about Nothing”, Phoenix Collective, Wesley Music Centre, December 17. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD

THIS was the final Phoenix Collective performance for the year, in one that has seen most of its 2021 program compressed into the last couple of months. 

It was supposed to be the first of four concerts, with another in Canberra, one is Sydney and the other on the Central Coast, but once again covid has made things difficult for touring musicians.

The Phoenix Collective on this occasion were the ensemble’s director Dan Russell playing violin and pianist Edward Neeman with a program spanning 150 years and three musical eras. 

The concert opened with Sonata No.21 in E minor for violin and piano by WA Mozart, written in 1778 when he was 22 and shortly after his mother died. It is the only of his violin sonatas in a minor key and considered by some scholars to convey grief and sadness. On the other hand, there is a playful back and forth of melodic themes throughout the work that does have a certain jauntiness with Russell and Neeman seeming to enjoy the interplay.

Erich Korngold is better known as a writer of film scores through the ’30s and ‘40s such as Errol Flynn’s 1938 “Adventures of Robin Hood” and “The Sea Hawk” a couple of years later. The incidental music for a stage production of “Much Ado About Nothing” in 1920 consists of four short pieces originally scored for a small pit orchestra and later re-done for violin and piano when the orchestra became unavailable. They are cleverly written to evoke characters and emotions and a precursor to his later work with film scores. Again, Russell and Neeman approached this work with relish, enjoying all the flourishes and musical effects written into the music.

The final work for the concert was Sonata No.1 in G major, Op 78 by Brahms written in the late 1870s. It is nicknamed the “Rain Sonata”, as Brahms recycled the main melodic motif from one of his songs, “The Rain Song”. Russell told the audience that he played it as part of his graduation recital in 2008 and this was the first revisiting of the work since. As expected from these two skilled musicians, the performance was excellent and this late 19th century work balanced out the two other quite different works on the program. 

After a difficult year just past, the Phoenix Collective has planned a diverse program for 2022. It has established itself as the premier small chamber ensemble in Canberra, based around a string quartet with the ability to bring in additional musicians and sometimes just the piano and violin, as with this concert, but always with a musical curiosity and sense of adventure in the music it presents.