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By
HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
Sydney Morning Herald p 10 I 28 February 2011
PAUL DYER’S latest find on his travels through baroque music is Accordone, an eccentric duo made up of harpsichordist and music boffin Guido Morini, and singer and showman Marco Beasley. Accordone made their Australian debut this week with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra in a program entitled Amore Italiano – the love of Italy.
Morini and Beasley take inquiry into the music of the past to another level. They do not just re-create it. They compose new, old works, using the forms, rhythms and harmonies of the 16th and 17th centuries. They have already composed several operas (with music by Morini and words by Beasley) and their
program was made up of extracts from these interspersed with authentic – as it were – Renaissance works. Their approach throws up a multitude of questions, not least ”why?” For as they ably demonstrated, there is still plenty of original work from that era to explore.
Monteverdi’s Si dolce e il tormento was a fine example, full of vivid word-painting and chromaticism, while Giovanni Stefani’s Amante felice hinted at the expressive range of Beasley’s supple tenor voice. He revealed more in two 15th-century frottolas, a gentle confection of poetry and guitar or, in this case, the wonderfully dense lirone, played by Laura Vaughan.
His full expressive range, however, was saved for two numbers from their recent opera, Solve et coagula, based on the life of a famous Neapolitan alchemist. In Compianto del Cristo velato the four square ground bass formed a mesmerising backdrop to Beasley’s melodramatic outbursts, while Luna had a glowing stillness. Beasley’s voice is an ear-opener – it can sound heady and unsupported, drifting into the nose at times, but it is unerringly accurate and thrillingly versatile. Accordone was not to everyone’s taste, with the audience thinning out after interval. The early risers, however, missed a real treasure in the final encore, a Neapolitan soldiers’ song, with a spectacular surprise at the end.
This concert will be repeated in Sydney on March 2, 4 and 5 at 7pm and March 5 at 2pm, with a live broadcast from Melbourne on ABC Classic FM at 7pm on February 28.
