This Utzon Room Sunday afternoon concert curated by Genevieve Lacey introduced us to American cellist Annie Jacobs-Perkins. She is a delightful young virtuoso, with multiple awards, and razor sharp playing. Annie plays with starry uplifted eyes and a beguiling smile as she enjoys the music. An intriguing miniature kicking horse tattooed on the left shoulder trots along with the beat.
Annie introduced the program as ‘old and new’, with a theme of fantasy. Two caprices by Joseph dall’Abaco and Les Voix Humaines by Marin Marais represented music from the early days of the cello.
The new music in this program had a southern Californian flavour. Sabina by Andrew Norman is gentle, mysterious, sometimes lively, and beguiling. Arabesques for Olly by Esa-Pekka Salonen, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, came to the audience as a two-part piece, with Annie playing on stage, accompanied by her recording of the second part. This worked very well.
Pamela Marsden’s work Why Women Weep: It Is the Quickest Way to Rejoin the Ocean combined cello and a recording of spoken words of controversial American diarist Anais Nin, reminiscing about sea voyages across the Atlantic. Unfortunately the audio quality in this performance was bad. The audience had a triple battle, trying to decipher the words, trying to nlisten to the live cello, and trying to connect words and music. Thankfully, the concert had a reassuring conclusion with Bach’s Cello Suite no 3.
One of Annie Jacobs-Perkin’s interests is ‘writing engaging program notes’. We heard her brief spoken introductions to the works, but a program with more information about the unfamiliar pieces in this concert would have been appreciated.
