Sunday December 1
BRISBANE SINGS MESSIAH
The Queensland Choir
Brisbane City Hall at 2:45 pm
The choir is one of the country’s oldest, on a par with the Hurlstone Choral Society of blessed memory and the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic. Despite its venerable status, the northern body seems to be pretty focused on this one exercise: a seasonal observance that probably obtains in every Australian state. The choral forces number about 100 and their Handel appears to be a popular event in which certain members of the Brisbane public are invited on board. Which makes it a cross between your regular orthodox performance without surprises and those odd occasions where the soloists are professionals but the choir comprises anyone who turns up with a score. Conductor this afternoon is QC’s long-time director Kevin Power; his soloists are soprano Eleanor Greenwood, mezzo Sarah Winn, tenor Phillip Costovski and bass Sam Hartley. Supplying the instrumental component will be the Sinfonia of St. Andrew’s, which is associated with the city’s central Uniting Church.
Tuesday December 3
AUSTRALIAN WORKS FOR PIANO TRIO: #1 HERITAGE
Ian Hanger Recital Hall, Queensland Conservatorium at 6:30 pm
Kilpatrick is fulfilling part of the requirements for her Doctorate of Musical Arts from the Queensland Conservatorium (I assume) with a series of recitals. This evening, the pianist is accompanied by violinist Jason Tong and cellist Kirsten Tong in Australian ‘heritage’ works by Percy Grainger (that field is wide open: I don’t know anything for piano trio by our GOM but God knows the possibilities are myriad) and Miriam Hyde who wrote a Fantasy Piano Trio. As well, we are promised pieces by ‘others, including unpublished works’, which suggests the programming of a few products of academic research that may have lain dormant for some time and might be worth resurrecting. Still, any attempt to bring part of our fast-fading historical record to light is well worth encouraging. Further, the 90-minute recital is free.
Saturday December 7
Queensland Symphony Orchestra
Queensland Symphony Orchestra Studio at 9:30 am
I reviewed a few concerts of this genre from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra before the administration had the good sense to stop inviting me. The musical fare on offer is essentially populist – tunes everyone knows or pap that won’t stress the brain-cells at all. And nothing too long, either. This methodology continues with the QSO’s family-oriented series of matinee concerts which features music by conductor (and QSO cellist) Craig Allister Young and five collaborations with his song-writing partner, Donna Dyson. Young contributes the exercise’s Overture, conducts the whole event and plays Santa Claus; Dyson has paired up with him to produce Sneezy the Reindeer, I Won’t Believe It’s Christmas, Santa’s Christmas Cake, Santa Boogie Woogie and Lucy and the Orchestra – that’s half of the music-making today. As well, families get to experience Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Silent Night, all in Young arrangements. The odd man out is Stephen Lawrence‘s The Incredible Shrinking Clarinet. Helping the versatile Young in his endeavours will be QSO horn player Vivienne Collier-Vickers as Mrs.Claus. Zac Parkes playing Sneezy, and Ashleigh Denning as Izzy the Elf.
This program will be repeated at 11 am a/nd 1 pm.
Saturday December 7
MESSIAH
Queensland Symphony Orchestra
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre at 7:30 pm
A more polished version than that from December 1 above, I’m guessing. Is this venerable oratorio out of vogue here in the north? The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra manages to attract two pretty full houses to its Messiah renditions in Hamer Hall (and an extra one this year at Costa Hall in Geelong); the QSO seems content with one. Tonight’s conductor is Stephen Layton, a well-known visitor down south, and his soloists are soprano Sara Macliver. mezzo Helen Charlston, tenor Gwilym Bowen and bass Laurence Williams, with the brunt of the work’s argument falling to the Brisbane Chamber Choir. It’s useless to rail any more about the suitability of this choral monument to Christmas when its central matter and conclusion centre on Easter, but it might be time for more consideration to be given to Bach’s massive Christmas Oratorio as a more suitable seasonal celebration. Mind you, such a change would mean doing without your annual overdose of hearty musical plum pudding.
Sunday December 8
JOURNEYMAN
Brisbane Chamber Project
Old Government House at 5 pm
It’s not clear to whom the title of this recital refers. It might be to the Chamber Project’s guest artist, baritone Jason Barry-Smith, although this musician has progressed well beyond the post-apprenticeship stage of his life. More probably, ‘journeyman’ refers to one of the works that feature on Barry-Smith’s bill of fare: Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer, whose narrator has made a profession out of Weltschmerz. A wind quintet and a speaker (Barry-Smith?) are required for Berio’s 1950-1970 Opus Number Zoo; its gestation length seems inordinately long when you consider that it only lasts for a fraction over 7 minutes. As for the rest of the night, details are scant although the Project organizers seem to be particularly gratified in announcing the inclusion of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah which has, for inexplicable reasons, attracted continued popular acclaim since its 1985 debut. I saw Cohen once in the State Theatre during a Melbourne International Arts Festival many years ago; ‘underwhelmed’ comes close but I didn’t know how impressed I was meant to be until much later. Tonight, this journeyman work comes under the generic heading of ‘festive music’, which might have surprised the composer.
Sunday December 8
METAMORPHOSIS
Brisbane Music Festival
St. Mary’s Anglican Church, Kangaroo Point at 7:30 pm
This is a remarkable series of recitals that brightens up a usually barren time of year across the country. Living up to its title, tonight’s program is a thoroughly Austro-German affair featuring masterpieces from both Viennese schools (the more extraordinary metamorphoses coming from the Second) but the chief burden of the players’ output comprises work by Brahms. To open, Alex Miller from the horn corps of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra partners with pianist Alex Raineri in Beethoven’s Horn Sonata; no, I don’t know it, either. Raineri then has the joy of providing the keyboard part for two glorious Brahms scores: the F minor Clarinet Sonata with Luke Carbon, followed by the A Major Violin Sonata with Anne Horton. Carbon returns after interval for Berg’s Four Pieces Op. 5 and Raineri enjoys a solo with Webern’s transparent Variations for Piano. Finally, Miller, Horton and Raineri have the enviable task of outlining the Brahms Horn Trio in E flat – packed with melancholy in balance with vibrant good humour and the outstanding example of this format (not that Brahms has much competition).
Wednesday December 11
SLOW FLIGHT
Brisbane Music Festival
356 Bowen Terrace, New Farm at 7 pm
In this admirable series, artistic director/pianist Alex Raineri serves as a fulcrum for several programs. Tonight, he works with double bass Marian Heckenberg in Suspended Preludes by Andrew Schultz, a seven-movement work from 1993 by the fertile Adelaide-born composer. Swiss writer Beat Furrer has not crossed my path previously; his Phasma of 2002 is one of only four works for solo piano in Furrer’s voluminous catalogue. The Sonatine for flute and piano by Boulez still gives me nightmares. I had to play the keyboard part for a Master’s concert by an ambitious flautist friend back in the 1960s and our necessarily sporadic preparation took months of labour; even the recorded version by David Tudor and Severino Gazzelloni from 1957 was little help as the players’ congruity proved to be a moveable feast. On this occasion, the flautist will be Jonathan Henderson. To end, we hear Liam Flenady‘s Oikeios Topos (Inbuilt/Interior Theme?) which will here enjoy its world premiere and, as a consequence, the composer is withholding its elements or trace constituents from public gaze.
Friday December 13
DIALOGUES
Brisbane Music Festival
Old Museum Building, Bowen Hills at 7:30 pm
This festival’s artistic director, Alex Raineri, sees the four components of this program as two-way streets: it’s instrument talking to instrument in a set of duos, or composer addressing listener in a set of four vignettes. The latter comes to life in Debussy’s early Suite bergamasque for solo piano which proposes four discrete scenes, the most famous being Clair de lune. A fledgling musician’s staple, this opulently arpeggiated gem shines out in some odd surroundings, although the concluding Passepied has an attractive falling note to its whimsy. Cellist Oliver Scott works with Raineri through Prokofiev’s Ballade Op. 15, a lavish sectional rhapsody with plenty of spiky dissonances to smarten up a surprisingly conservative harmonic backdrop. Jonathan Henderson‘s flute returns to the series for another Sonatine for flute and piano, this one by Pierre Sancan and the most famous work by this composer who remains pretty much an unknown quantity outside France. In case Scott didn’t feel as though the 12-minute Ballade had given him ample exposure, he works with Raineri through Rachmaninov’s weighty G minor Sonata of 1901, a product of the months after the famous hypno-/psychotherapy treatment of the composer’s depression by Nikolai Dahl.
Sunday December 15
THE TROUT
Brisbane Music Festival
Old Museum Building, Bowen Hills at 3 pm
You see this fish and your thoughts automatically turn to Schubert, unless you’re gastronomically monomaniacal. In this penultimate recital of the festival, Alex Raineri provides the pivotal piano part for Schubert’s evergreen quintet, in partnership with violinist Anne Horton, violist Yoko Okayasu from the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, cellist Oliver Scott, and double bass Marian Hackenberg. This composition, even for Schubert, is remarkably splayed out with a good deal of potential tedium inbuilt because of the bank of repeats that are involved in a ‘true’ performance. But the fourth movement variations are always a delight, especially in confident hands. By way of prelude to this score, flautist Jonathan Henderson appears in his third recital across four days to perform the Bach A minor Partita: one of the cornerstones of this instrument’s repertoire and as impermeable in its surfaces as the composer’s output for solo violin.
Sunday December 15
CAROLS ON THE CLIFFS
St. Mary’s Anglican Church, Kangaroo Point at 5:30 pm
A regular seasonal contribution from the well-regarded Brisbane choir, this seems to a newcomer to be a good old-fashioned service of Lessons and Carols, if probably a bit more free in format than those re-creations that cling with fidelity to the King’s College tradition. Founder Emily Fox is not slated to direct but then neither is anybody else. Some community singing is advertised as part of the proceedings; fine, as long as those members of the public who choose to participate can actually stay on pitch. As a warm-up, Cox’s husband, Christopher Wrench, is playing a short recital starting at 5.10 pm; don’t know how much he can get through in 20 minutes on the state’s oldest organ but it would be a pleasure to hear this musician after a long hiatus (I’ve not heard him play since he won the Melbourne International Festival of Organ and Harpsichord Bach Competition in 1985) and, as a bonus, working at the instrument of a church where he was organist for 18 years.
Wednesday December 18
PASSING BELLS
Brisbane Music Festival
Old Museum Building, Bowen Hills at 7:30 pm
You’d think that the title of this final Festival event would owe something to Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth. But maybe not: it doesn’t do to second-guess composer Christopher Dench, one of this country’s more intellectually agile composers. His new composition – here enjoying its first exposure under the hands of Festival artistic director/pianist Alex Raineri – builds on an earlier work from 2004 called passing bells: night which presents a resonance-rich range of tintinnabulations to the listener and a challenge in rhythmic capsules for its interpreter. Raineri surrounds this premiere with Ginastera’s Piano Sonata No. 1 which shows that you don’t have to give up your nationalistic vitality when you employ 12-tone writing; and he ends the night with Chopin’s 24 Preludes Op. 28 which offer a round trip through all major and minor keys as well as displaying an astounding emotional variety.
O'Connell the Music 