Classical
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday March 11, 2000
LARRY SITSKY
Piano Concerto (The Twenty-Two Paths of the Tarot)
Woodward/Adelaide SO/Porcelijn
(ABC Under Capricorn)
A concerto in the grand virtuoso tradition, with mystical overtones you can accept or discard.
LARRY Sitsky is an Australian composer whose formidable gifts as a solo pianist were developed by study with Egon Petri, one of the inheritors of traditions derived from Liszt and Busoni. He writes for piano with skill and authority and in a manner that takes heed of 19th- and 20th-century virtuosity of a dominatingly romantic kind.
The impulse to invent this concerto arose out of a lunchtime conversation the composer had in Canberra with Roger Woodward, who indicated he would be happy to play a concerto composed by Sitsky and specified only that he would like it to be romantic in manner and to contain ``lots of bell sounds".
That was enough to set Sitsky working with his usual fierce vigour. As someone long interested in many kinds of mysticism, he decided to shape the concerto as a series of episodes related to the characters and associations of the 22 cards described as the major arcana of the tarot pack.
Listeners can follow these episodes by name and number. Each of the 22 episodes, equipped with a Hebrew letter and a description of the fateful associations of an individual card, has a cue number on the disc. Most of these episodes run for only a minute or two, some for a much shorter time, so you have to be quick to follow them.
As an example, the concerto opens with Aleph: the Magician, a slowly gathering, mysterious episode. Then comes Beth: the High Priestess, which is fast, turbulent and exciting. Gimel: the Empress turns back to quiet mystery until Daleth: the Emperor insists on an overwhelming grandeur. The bell sounds Woodward asked for make a prominent appearance in episode six, Vau: the Lovers.
The match of label and music is not always obvious. The 14th episode, Noon: Temperance, is anything but temperate in its explosive orchestral writing, but is entirely in accord with its musical direction, Tumultuoso.
The episodes are usually linked closely in musical terms. If you wish to ignore the mystical associations of the piece, you can simply listen to it as a series of variations on a few central ideas and enjoy it as a highly effective piano concerto in one movement. Its original ABC recording by Woodward, with the Hunter Orchestra directed by Roland Peelman, was one of 10 radio tapes recommended by delegates to the International Rostrum for broadcasting in Paris and was played on 24 radio networks.
This recording, in which David Porcelijn directs the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in collaboration with Woodward, deserves to make Sitsky's Tarot concerto familiar to a wide circle of Australian listeners. That the disc plays only as long as the concerto, just less than 27 minutes, may well induce some buyer resistance, even if the price is adjusted for a CD of short duration. Woodward's performance, mercurial in mood and volcanic in attack, should win over many listeners, however, to a piece of impressive clamour and mystery.
© 2000 Sydney Morning Herald
