While Australia is not exactly the first country that comes to mind in terms of classical music, the Australian Chamber Orchestra has distinguished itself internationally for much of its 34-year history.
During a visit Thursday evening to Gates Concert Hall as part of the Newman Center Presents series, the ensemble impressed again with its technical brilliance, laser focus and all-out intensity.
Indeed, its performance ranks among the most memorable of the season. Given that, the half-full house was surprising and disappointing.
More than worth the price of admission was the rare opportunity — at least away from the coasts — to see Andreas Scholl, a countertenor (a highly trained falsetto).
And after hearing him perform, it was easy to believe that he is the greatest countertenor in the world, a virtually perfect technician who achieves an unexpected, entrancing marriage of power and delicacy.
He performed six arias from the operas and oratorios of George Frideric Handel, bringing to each a sense of lightness and profundity, timelessness and utter newness.
Strong and expressive across its entire range, Scholl’s voice has a sweet, floating quality, and he uses it to exquisitely haunting effect in the tormented love aria “Dove sei? Amato bene.” In “Vivi tiranno!” he showed off his superb technique, dashing off its complex ornamentations with every articulation in place.
The musical plenitude, indeed almost overabundance, continued with another tour de force, a knockout performance of an orchestral arrangement of Pavel Haas’ String Quartet No. 2, Op. 7, “From the Monkey Mountains.”
The Czech composer, who was killed in a Nazi concentration camp, wrote this vastly underappreciated masterwork in 1925. While it possesses an avant-garde taste of that time, it feels totally contemporary.
The piece has a strange, alluring and constantly shifting musical language, with its ghostly opening giving way to a range of sounds and effects, from the swoopy, almost drunken slides of the second movement to the jazzy modernism of the last section.
Also on the program were works by Franz Joseph Haydn and Roger Smalley.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
