UK audiences know Richard Tognetti principally as the invigorating lead violinist who has made the Australian Chamber Orchestra into the gang every string player wants to be in. But his two-part Barbican residency this season – the ACO visits in March – started with a conventional recital, with pianist Polina Leschenko.
Relatively conventional, that is. The second half began with the evening’s highlight: Peter Sculthorpe’s Irkanda I, written in 1955. Tognetti, spotlit and alone, played to a microphone that created a cathedral-like resonance, with a muted, throbbing echo that emphasised the piece’s heat-hazy atmosphere, all open space, outback birdsong and itchy dance rhythms. Leschenko, who had crept on in the dark, joined him as he segued into a fiery performance of Brahms’s Sonata No 3. The conjunction worked surprisingly well, shaking the Brahms out of its familiarity. Music with an element of theatre is what Tognetti excels in, and Leschenko was a sparky, sympathetic partner all evening.
The first half had been less striking, partly because Arvo Pärt’s Fratres, with its would-be mesmerising repeated harmonies, is a less interesting piece than the Sculthorpe, partly because Tognetti’s playing in Beethoven’s Spring Sonata was less consistently compelling; in this and in the Brahms, Tognetti’s ear for a striking effect at times distracted him from the pursuit of long, clean lines. His encores were a lovely romance by Clara Schumann and a tricksy waltz by Georges Boulanger, which sounded as though Paganini were serenading cocktail drinkers through the fronds of a potted palm – nicely judged afterwords from a violinist who is never boring.
• Richard Tognetti performs Tognetti: Electronic at the Barbican, London, on 24 November.
