In an interview included with this set, Richard Tognetti, the violinist-director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, remembers a concert of the three last Mozart symphonies the great Frans Brüggen conducted with the ACO, not long after Tognetti joined the orchestra as leader in 1989. Up to that point the ACO had been a rather traditional chamber orchestra that had paid very little attention to how the period-instrument movement had been influencing Mozart interpretation in the previous decades. Working with Brüggen, who had been in the vanguard of that movement, was clearly a revelation and a watershed; the way he combined a respect for historical style with an insistence that the players still project performances through their own imaginations became one of Tognetti’s guiding principles when he became the ACO’s artistic director a few years later.
As these performances demonstrate, with Tognetti directing from first violin, that combination of imagination and precision has epitomised the ACO ever since. They are taken from a concert in Sydney’s City Recital Hall last year, which marked the 25th anniversary of the orchestra’s appearance under Brüggen. The approach is typically large-scale and imposing: this 21st-century fusion of modern instruments with period ideas creates a fullness of sound that sometimes belies the fact that it is a chamber orchestra (though unfortunately the sleevenotes give no indication of the number of players involved), but which is always combined with a transparency and litheness that make it constantly engaging and worthwhile.
There’s a sense, too, that these performances have been left exactly as they were on the night, without any post-concert patching, and the security and sense of ensemble in the playing are marvellous to behold – movements such as the finales of the E flat Symphony K543 and the C major Jupiter K551 are breathtakingly nimble, with every detail perfectly defined. Occasionally there’s some uneasy intonation from the wind – passages that might have been redone had these been studio performances; but they are few and far between. What you have here is one of the greatest chamber orchestras in the world at its most joyous and inspirational.
