Music that challenges but still welcomes

By WILLIAM DART

I met Australian violinist Dene Olding a few Sundays ago in a Queenstown pizzeria, buying his son a gelato, between instalments of the Michael Hill competition semifinals. A week later, we look back at the repertoire and Paganini drifts into the conversation.

"You're bedazzled by the brilliance of it all, but there is a kind of operatic undercurrent there," Olding says. "It's natural in Italian music, I suppose, but I think a lot of people don't make enough of that operatic element."

It's not Paganini on the bill tomorrow, when Olding plays with the Auckland Philharmonia, but the Australian composer Ross Edwards whose Maninyas concerto receives what the violinist describes as "its first performance outside Australia by a non-Australian orchestra".

If Paganini was "no slouch in the composing department", nor is this Australian when it comes to performing, combining a busy solo career with first violin duties in the Goldner String Quartet and the role of concertmaster with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

Each is important. "It's an amazing adrenalin rush to turn up in front of an orchestra and play one of the great masterpieces of the literature. In a concerto you are the protagonist, the individual coping against the world represented by the orchestra," Olding enthuses. "In the string quartet you are hopefully an intelligent member having a long discourse about a subject; with orchestral playing it is the unlimited colour of a symphony orchestra that is inspiring. If you do a lot of each you can synthesise the best of everything into your own playing."

As a soloist, in 1986, he was chosen to give the Australasian premiere of Lutoslawski's Chain 2. "I'd just got a bronze medal in the Queen Elizabeth Competition in Belgium and was being noticed a little more."

The composer conducted and the young Australian asked Lutoslawski if there were any more pieces to be written in C major. "The answer was a resounding no."

There are more than a few familiar harmonies in Philip Glass' Concerto, which Olding premiered for Australia in 1999. "It's refreshing to play a concerto which is not ultra-difficult, but is quite challenging in its own way, especially with intonation. If you're playing a D minor chord for five minutes, one of the notes is going to be out of tune somewhere along the way and someone's going to notice. But audiences really love it."

The audience matters. Olding feels that in searching for more approachable idioms composers are following a general trend worldwide. "People are realising we can't alienate the audiences for ever and ever with complex, aggressive music."

Fellow countryman Edwards made the decision to write in a more welcoming style some years ago, and you can hear it in Maninyas. The score is dedicated to Olding and the violinist takes "partial credit" for the slow movement. "Originally most of it was fast and dance-like, and there were only a couple of shorter moments when the music relaxed. I told Ross the piece needed a proper slow movement and he went away and produced the central intermezzo."

Olding's 1994 recording won the violinist the premier classical award at Cannes. "I think history will remember Ross Edwards very fondly. He's got a poetic streak and a sense of colour, and writes music that is instantly recognisable. I guess we were both pleased at the success of this work. It's not often that one gets asked to repeat a contemporary concerto and I've played it more than a dozen times."

Olding sometimes wishes "Australia and New Zealand were one big country. We could look to each other for inspiration as well as looking overseas. I feel there's a greater emphasis on education here, a greater desire for the finer things than in Australia".

Performance:


* What: Auckland Philharmonia

* Where: Auckland Town Hall

* When: tonight at 8