CANBERRA — Every premiere arrives with a reservoir of goodwill. Audiences, performers, and critics alike want a new work to succeed, particularly when it comes from a musician of Garth Knox’s stature. As a pioneering violist and composer, the Dublin-born Knox has had a multi-faceted career and worked with such groups as Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Arditti Quartet. Similarly, the Australian Chamber Orchestra has built its reputation on reimagining the concert experience, making it an ideal partner for a work conceived as “semi-staged instrumental theatre.”
Yet Knox’s The Ancient Mariner: Concerto for Viola and String Orchestra, which had its Australian premiere by the Australian Chamber Orchestra under a guest director, British violinist-violist Lawrence Power, on June 13 at Llewellyn Hall, exposed the central challenge of an otherwise ambitious evening. Despite an elegant curatorial premise, the program, part of the orchestra’s Isles of Light tour around the country, often felt less like a unified artistic journey than three separate concerts sharing the same stage.
Part concerto, part narrated theater work, and part literary adaptation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epic poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Knox’s opus occupied an uncertain territory between concert performance and music drama. The ideas were abundant and sometimes intriguing.
At Llewellyn Hall (located on the campus of the Australian National University), the orchestra was arranged in the shape of a ship, Power assumed the dual role of soloist and narrator, and the program notes promised a voyage in which audience and performers would set sail together. Yet the theatrical concept proved more interesting than dramatically effective. Power, alongside his role as the solo violist and conductor, delivered the text with earnest conviction, but Coleridge’s haunted sailor requires a performer capable of projecting the text with psychological depth. One found oneself imagining an actor of the caliber of Ralph Fiennes bringing greater dramatic weight and rhetorical command to the narration.
Musically, Knox’s score frequently illustrates the poem literally, with a sound voyage of wind and waves and instrumental representations of the albatross at the forefront rather than evoking its emotional core. The result is a work that neither fully inhabits the mystery of Coleridge’s supernatural world nor exploits the possibilities of staged performance. What emerged felt less like a failure than a work still seeking its final form, one that would benefit from the intervention of a dramaturg and stage director.
This was unfortunate, because the curatorial premise behind Isles of Light was both intelligent and persuasive. At the heart of Power’s concept lay a concert in September 1910 when Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis premiered at the Gloucester Cathedral. According to Power, the performance constituted a “new sonic experience” that was witnessed by fellow British composers Ivor Gurney, Edward Elgar, and Herbert Howells, whose subsequent works would be shaped by the possibilities Fantasia revealed on that night.
From this moment, Power traced a lineage through British musical history stretching from Purcell to the present day. The opening sequence functioned as a musical mixtape, threading a path from Purcell to Jonny Greenwood and from Elgar to Kate Bush. Remarkably, these juxtapositions felt organic rather than merely eclectic.
The highlights of this opening section were Richard Birchall’s arrangement of Ivor Gurney’s Sleep and Brett Dean’s exquisitely inventive reimagining of Kate Bush’s “The Man with the Child in His Eyes.” In both works, the removal of the sung voice created unexpected expressive possibilities. As the viola assumed the role of singer, the burden of emotional communication shifted onto the instruments themselves. Long sustained lines, fleeting harmonic tensions, and moments of suspended uncertainty exposed the human vulnerabilities usually embedded within the text and vocal delivery. Here Power was at his persuasive best, his cantabile viola at times singing as deeply as a cello.
The Australian Chamber Orchestra is particularly adept at inhabiting music that exists between genres and styles, and nowhere was this more apparent than in its performance of Jonny Greenwood’s Popcorn Superhet Receiver: Pt. 2b. Drawing on the sonic worlds of Penderecki, Ligeti, and the post-war avant-garde while simultaneously acknowledging Greenwood’s background in popular music, the work occupies precisely the kind of artistic crossroads at which the ensemble excels. The musicians negotiated the extended string techniques that contribute to Greenwood’s complex textures and shifting color palettes.
After intermission, however, the audience seemed to enter an entirely different concert. Here was the British string-orchestra tradition in its purest form: Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis; Herbert Howells’ Elegy for Viola, String Quartet, and String Orchestra; and Elizabeth Maconchy’s Symphony for Double String Orchestra.
This was arguably the strongest section of the evening. Vaughan Williams’ masterpiece unfolded with patience and restraint, its antiphonal exchanges and waves of sound shaped with disciplined control. The dynamic arc — from silence to fullness and back into silence — created a space of contemplative stillness that felt inviting and quietly spiritual.
Howells’ Elegy extended the emotional atmosphere through its luminous textures and deeply personal language of remembrance, while Maconchy’s 1953 symphony provided a striking contrast. Influenced by Janáček and Bartók, her double string-orchestra work announces itself through argument rather than meditation. The muscular writing of the Allegro, the quicksilver energy of the Scherzo, and the unfolding lines of the Lento were delivered with the ACO’s characteristic conviction.
Viewed separately, each of these components succeeded on its own terms. The opening overview of English musical influences was imaginative and engaging. The central sequence of Vaughan Williams, Howells, and Maconchy was well played and intellectually satisfying. Knox’s The Ancient Mariner contained enough compelling ideas to suggest a work of potential.
The difficulty was that these elements never entirely coalesced. Yet even in its unevenness, Isles of Light testified to the virtues that have made the Australian Chamber Orchestra a distinctive ensemble: intellectual curiosity, a willingness to experiment, and a refusal to treat the concert hall as a museum. Not every experiment succeeds. But few orchestras continue to ask such ambitious questions.
