FESTIVAL GALA #3
Brisbane Music Festival
FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.
Monday December 4 at 7:30 pm
This isn’t the start of Alex Raineri‘s annual galaxy of recitals; they began last month but details came too late to be included in November’s Diary. However, there’s plenty to report for this month’s exercises, which have been condensed to a one-week span. We start with this triptych of stage works, opening with Menotti’s venerable The Telephone of 1947 with soprano Katie Stenzel and baritone Jon Maskell in the thankless role of the suitor trying to be heard by his mental rag-tag girlfriend. No orchestra, but two pianists accompanying in Francis Atkins and the omni-present Raineri. Poulenc rears his sixty-years-dead head with Le bal masque, a 1932 song cycle/cantata with a Stravinskyesque chamber accompaniment, here reduced to Raineri’s piano with baritone Jason Barry-Smith taking on the work’s vocal line. And for the third course we enjoy a new work: Staged, by Raineri and Finnian Idriss which involves soprano Ali McGregor, cellist Daniel Shearer, and Idriss manipulating electronics. Pace Poulenc, I think this last may be the most interesting element of the evening even if – as usual – contextual details are completely absent. Admission to all events in the Festival costs $25 a time; don’t know if any concessions are on offer or if a booking fee is added but I suspect this last is a reality because the handling agency, Humantix, is donating all such fees to disadvantaged children’s charities. Is that any excuse for charging such an impost anyway? Not in my book.
SCHUBERT’S LAST SONATA
Brisbane Music Festival
FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.
Tuesday December 5 at 7:30 pm
This is, of course, the big Sonata in B flat – well, some of it’s in that key. The work is substantial, even without observing the first movement repeat, and its repetitions and elongations can both inspire and irritate. Whatever you think, it’s a beast for any pianist; few of the great can offer a complete fabric in the outer movements but there’s always hope. I don’t know this evening’s executant, Laurence Matheson; at least, I can’t recall any of his Melbourne appearances. He put in his time at the Australian National Academy of Music, studying with the estimable Timothy Young, but whatever he played there passed me by. Still, he’s a young man and you might as well smash your aspirational head against this sonata as anything else. Which he is also doing by prefacing this Schubert with Chopin’s Grande valse brillante: a rather amorphous title, given that it could refer to the Op 18 or any one of the three Op. 34 compositions. As a gender differential, Matheson has inserted the middle one of Fanny Mendelssohn’s Funf Lieder Op. 10, which is called Abendbild and for which the pianist will doubtless incorporate the original’s vocal line to a text by Lenau. Tickets are $25 with a booking fee.
LIGHTS DOWN LOW # 2
Brisbane Music Festival
FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.
Tuesday December 5 at 9 pm
Put those lights down too low and everybody will go to sleep. At this recital – focused for some, diffuse for others – festival director Alex Raineri will perform Morton Feldman’s For Bunita Marcus of 1985 – all 75 uninterrupted minutes of it. The composer’s penultimate piano composition, the work hymns his pupil/colleague/partner Marcus while also being a tribute to his mother; as an insight into either woman, it serves as a voluminous veil. Nevertheless, these days few of us have the opportunity to hear a Feldman work live. I’ve heard a few from the Australian National Academy of Music performers of which little remains in the memory but gratified surprise that the experiences proved more incident-rich than I’d expected from a brief encounter with this standard-bearer of the American avant-garde in the 1960s. Full marks to Raineri for expounding this work that sounds so simple and yet keeps the performer on the edge of disaster with its constantly moving time-signature changes and seemingly endless transpositions of limited material. To get in, you pay $25 plus the usual extra fee for daring to exercise your state-given right to a credit card.
ANGELUS
Brisbane Music Festival
FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.
Wednesday December 6 at 7:30 pm
Four performers in four works, two of which enjoy their premieres in this country: exactly what you want from a chamber music festival offering a wide range of experiences. First up is the evening’s title work from approaching-Grand-Old-Woman-status Mary Finsterer; written in 2015, it was inspired by Millet’s painting of two field-workers pausing for the mid-day prayer and will involve the talents of clarinet Dario Scalabrini, cello Katherine Philp, and pianist Alex Raineri. An Australian writer working in London, Lisa Illean wrote fevrier to a commission for Radio France (hence, you suppose, the linguistic barrier-crashing title) and it involves the same instrumentation as the Finsterer composition. Next comes a world premiere from local jazz saxophonist Rafael Karlan; no details yet (isn’t that always the way with your true improvisation-wielding performer/composer?) but I’m almost certain it will involve the clarinet and piano. Finally, it’s just a local premiere for Irish writer Judith Ring. Her fine feathers far below the blue floor makes plenty of contemporary sounds and involves Scalabrini, Raineri and viola Nicole Greentree as well as the airing of a supportive tape. Tickets are $25, plus a booking fee of unknown proportions.
MAHLER 4
Brisbane Music Festival
FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.
Thursday December 7 at 7:30 pm
We’ve become habituated to Erwin Stein’s reduction of this symphony which omits the bassoon and horn lines but introduces piano and harmonium (shades of Herzgewachse). Nothing so flash here. The instrumental forces are reduced to two pianos – Laurence Matheson and Alex Raineri – with Katie Stenzel‘s soprano taking on that theologically glutinous finale. The arrangement is for two separate instruments by Jestin Pieper, an American organist, conductor and arranger who published this version in 2010. At least it’s not another version that I came across written for piano four-hands, which would have condensed the action to the point of claustrophobia. Still, not much is gained by Pieper’s reduction, least of all the variety of timbres that Mahler crafted, especially for his concertmaster in the second movement. But it will make the last movement lied all the more welcome and Stenzel will enjoy minimal dynamic competition. Then there’s the point of mounting this work in the first place, with its hints at the composer’s smaller-scale-than-most technical schemata and instrumental arrays. Anyway, good luck to all concerned with this slightly-less-than-an-hour complex; it will certainly be of interest to those who know the original well. Tickets are $25 each, with the usual handling fee superimposed.
DECLASSIFIED
Brisbane Music Festival
FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.
Friday December 8 at 7:30 pm
Adam Herd is an Australian musician, originally from Coffs Harbour, who is currently living and studying in Finland. Well, he’s not alone in following that path as the Helsinki-Australia connection seems to get stronger as the years pass. Today he is presenting a piano recital, one that will already have been performed at the Espoo Cultural Centre in Tapiola country on November 12. What do we and the more aesthetically aware Finns get? Herd begins with three of the 1984 Eight Concert Etudes by Russian writer Nikolai Kapustin: Pastorale, Intermezzo and Toccatina. This composer fused classical and jazz, they say, although that was probably a big deal in his country. We move to the politically polar opposite with some Earl Wild versions of Gershwin songs, now become 4 Virtuoso Etudes: Embraceable You, Fascinatin’ Rhythm, The Man I Love, I Got Rhythm. A bit of a Scandinavian detour gives us three pieces (all preludes) from Norwegian composer Trygve Madsen’s 24 Preludes and Fugues Op. 101. Back in Finland, Herd plays two folk-song arrangements by Oskar Merikanto: Jos voisin laulaa kuin lintu voi (If I could sing like a bird can), and Iso lintu merikotka (A big bird, the white-tailed eagle). Finishing off an avian trilogy comes the pianist’s own arrangement of McCartney/Lennon’s Blackbird from the 1968 White Album. All that certainly denotes declassification . . . unless Herd is simply asking us to detour into non-Classical zones. Admission is $25 plus the usual ticket tax.
POULENC TRIBUTE #2
Brisbane Music Festival
FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.
Saturday December 9 at 10:30 am
Good luck for the French composer who is being celebrated just on his own merits, not for any notable anniversary of birth, death or lifetime achievement. This program comprises works that I’ve never heard live – a situation that I believe may also be the case with other festival patrons. Cellist Daniel Shearer appears tonight in order to play the Cello Sonata with either Alex Raineri or Francis Atkins; the score occupied the composer off and on between 1940 and 1948 and the result is generally considered disappointing. One of the pianists (or perhaps they’ll divide the labour) will play two of the 15 Improvisations: No 7 in C Major and No 13 in A minor. Then one of them will outline the Soirees de Nazelles: eight variations and a cadence, surrounded by a prelude and a finale, all of which occupied Poulenc between 1930 and 1936 and comprise portraits of friends in the best Enigma mode. At night’s end, both pianists will be engaged in the Sonata for four hands of 1918, a three-movement and brief (6 minutes?) product of the composer’s late teens. That’s the point of a tribute, I suppose: you have to take the not-so-good as well as the outstanding – following our national trait of being all-inclusive as witnessed by the recent referendum. Tickets retail for $25 with an additional charge for having the cheek to buy them.
HELLISH CELLIST
Brisbane Music Festival
FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.
Saturday December 9 at 1 pm
What can we make of this? The cellist in question, Daniel Shearer, is taking, as the basis of his expedition, Bach’s Suite No. 1 in G. He is theatricalizing it, promising us a journey to emulate that of Virgil and Dante, while he himself (presumably: no other performers are cited) takes on an ‘unadulterated character’ – which throws up all sorts of questions, the chief one being: who says you were adulterated in the first place? Whatever shape the dramatic interpretation takes, the musical one is going to give Shearer a big problem in that the suite itself lasts about 20 minutes. As the recital is scheduled to stretch between 1 pm and 2 pm, is he going to work through it three times? Or will there be infernal interludes to illustrate the Nine Circles? That would be a big ask of a composer who was known to be Lutheran conservative, not given to Italianate excess. By the same token, Bach could arrive at gripping depictions of Hell’s menace (Sind Blitze, sind Donner, for instance) and the consequences of sin. All of this speculation does nothing to prepare us for the reality which could be truly disturbing; I hope so. If you want to see this, it will cost you $25, along with a booking fee for your impertinence.
NOTES FOR TOMORROW
Brisbane Music Festival
FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.
Saturday December 9 at 2:30 pm
In this recital, patrons are treated to three works of some relevance to the program’s title and one definite throwback in Poulenc’s aggressive Bagatelle in D minor of 1932 for violin and piano; in this performance, Courtenay Cleary and Alex Raineri respectively. As for the prospect of tomorrow, we’re greeted by Gerard Brophy‘s new score that gives the evening its title; this also involves Cleary and Raineri. Composed in 1995/6, Olga Neuwirth‘s Quasare/Pulsare also asks for violin and piano (prepared); there’s no hesitation in my mind at nominating Cleary and Raineri for the performance. Now, the odd one out is a song cycle by American writer/guitarist David Leisner. His Confiding for high voice and guitar, written during 1985-1986, sets ten poems ‘mostly Emily Dickinson and Emily Bronte’, that have to do with fluctuating relationships. In fact, Leisner sets four Dickinsons, four Brontes, and one each by Americans Elissa Ely and Gene Scaramellino. To handle this work, we’re to hear Blue Stockings – luckily, a voice-guitar duo comprising Alison Paris and Chloe Hasson. For this partly-futuristic cornucopia, you’ll be charged $25 admission, with an extra fee on top to show that – like the world to come – nothing is as it seems.
THE FIREBIRD
Brisbane Music Festival
FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.
Saturday December 9 at 4 pm
Plainly, the high-point of this recital should/will be Stravinsky’s ballet suite. Actually, you won’t hear all of it: just the Infernal Dance, Berceuse and Finale in a colossal transcription by Guido Agosti which should test the recital’s executant, pianist/festival director Alex Raineri. Before entering this maelstrom, he’ll perform Rachmaninov’s Sonata No. 2 in one of its various incarnations; no matter which, this is a much-neglected marvel for the instrument that I must have heard only once live in a long span of concert/recital exposure. A few Poulenc gems are embedded as a continuation of the festival’s homage to the French writer; in this case, the Pastourelle of 1927 (the composer’s contribution to the ten-composer ballet, L’eventail de Jeanne), and the 1934 Humoresque in G Major – both brief and illustrative of the composer’s brilliant facility. To open his innings, Raineri will play the Australian premiere of Jakob Bragg‘s latest production for piano solo: Fourteen piano transcriptions from across the plane (plain). This was given its first outing during February of this year by Raineri in Huddersfield where the composer is writing his Ph. D. Bragg describes the work as ‘a surveying of the geography of the piano across a unique x-y axis notational model’; well, you can’t say fairer than that. You want in, it’ll cost you $25, as well as the usual churlish booking fee.
COURTENAY CLEARY IN RECITAL
Brisbane Music Festival
FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.
Saturday December 9 at 6:30 pm
The young violinist is expending her gifts on a solo program that stretches over a lot of ground. She begins with a formal flourish in Bach’s Sonata No. 1 in G minor BWV 1001: all four movements, including that well-used second movement Fuga. Leap forward 300 years and we come to local string teacher Stephen Chin‘s Three Capriccietti which I can’t find in the composer’s voluminous catalogue; perhaps it’s a score confided to Cleary alone. We move to a more senior Australian voice with Ross Edwards and one of the versions of his White Cockatoo Spirit Dance; in Cleary’s version on YouTube, she sets in train an electronic background of high twitters before she starts on the work itself. Anyway, this is familiar Edwards in Maninyas mode, the piece written in 1994. Back a bit to 1947 for Prokofiev’s much-decried Sonata in D Major; actually, I find it remarkably sunny and easy-going, particularly when you consider the constant menace facing the composer at this time. Now come forward two decades for French writer Eric Tanguy‘s Sonata breve in three movements across an 8-minute time-span. In the end, Cleary leaves unexplored the period between 1720 and the end of World War Two; well, it’s performer’s choice and this artist is playing to her strengths. You can hear her for $25, plus a charge for your charging it.
ROMANCE BY THE BOOK
Brisbane Music Festival
FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.
Sunday December 10 at 10:30 am
Here is one of the festival’s more well-organized song recitals in which soprano Katie Stenzel partners with pianist/festival director Alex Raineri. They are working through eleven songs in total, four from musicals/operetta, Britten’s four Cabaret Songs, and an art song each by Liszt, Debussy and (the inevitable) Poulenc. I know Glitter and be gay from Bernstein’s Candide because of the delight that every aspiring coloratura takes in yodeling through its arpeggiated arabesques. No big deal that I know Kern’s All the things you are which has been assaulted by everyone from Ella Fitzgerald to Carly Simon; a favourite of jazz combos for all its 7th chords, or so I’m told. As for Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 by Dave Malloy, it’s clearly a slab of Tolstoy’s novel and No One Else should be sung by Natasha rather than Pierre. Somehow, I’ve seen Into the Woods (Victorian Opera?) but have no memory of On the steps of the palace but, if it’s Sondheim, it’s more challenging than most in the genre. As for the Debussy, it will be C’est l’extase, one of the Ariettes oubliees; the Liszt is Oh! quand je dors; Poulenc’s submission takes the form of a sentimental waltz, Les chemins de l’amour. I’m not as enthusiastic these days about Britten’s Auden settings, probably because they try to hard to be louche and were published well past their relevance date (if there actually was one). But they please popularly – well, a good deal more than the Michelangelo or Donne Sonnets. And they slot in well with the Broadway material. You can have all this for $25, plus the added financial hurdle of a service fee.
CONCORD
Brisbane Music Festival
FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.
Sunday December 10 at 1 pm
Alex Raineri isn’t presenting a peace-inspiring program, filled with charitable wishes concerning conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine or anywhere more local – like Townsville. His Concord is the Massachusetts town, famous denizens of which place made source material for Ives’ massive Piano Sonata No. 2: Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau. I grew up with the recorded performance by Aloys Kontarsky which for me stands out for its authority and impetus amid a plethora of interpretations, from Ives himself to Phillip Bush. Raineri is serious about living up to the composer’s demands by employing the short-lived services of Tim Munro on flute for the Thoreau finale and a viola from Nicole Greentree for the briefest of appearances in the opening Emerson movement. The entire Concord is a draining experience for any listener, but festival director Raineri has added to our aural burden by giving the world premiere of Australian writer Lyle Chan‘s Sonate en forme de cri, which may also employ the services of Munro and/or Greentree (and/or Raineri, so non-existent is the information about this new composition by a writer who apparently delights in giving nothing away). As with several other programs in this second grouping, Concord is a splendid example of real festival fare. All you need to hear it is $25 and a strongly-exercised forbearance in tolerating the credit-card-use fee.
TEN OF SWORDS
Brisbane Music Festival
FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.
Sunday December 10 at 2:30 pm
The recital’s title puts us in in Tarot territory, this card signifying defeat or resignation to your lot – as well as the more optimistic reading (and there always is at least one) of recovering from disaster by pulling yourself together and striving against the world’s negativity. What any of this has to do with the afternoon’s music-making will become clear, I’m sure, as the program continues. To begin, the Blue Stockings duo of soprano Alison Paris and guitarist Chloe Hasson are presenting songs of their own creation. Whether these connect to the Major or Minor Arcana is anyone’s guess but it’s more probable that the Stockings are linking in with the mystical pack than anything that follows. Which showcases clarinet Dario Scalabrini and pianist Francis Atkins in three duets: Elena Kats-Chernin‘s Grand Rag of 2021 and nobody enters into the ragtime spirit with as much enthusiasm as this composer; Schumann’s Drei Fantastiestucke Op. 73, that multi-varied collection which can also be heard with violin or cello as the non-keyboard element; and a Fantasy on themes from La Traviata, Verdi transmogrified by Donato Lovreglio, a southern Italian flautist who arranged several Verdi-based fantasies – none more flashy than this one which treats Ah! fors e lui, the Libiamo with a Di quell’amor from Un di felice interlude, and a final flashy splurge on Sempre libera. In other words, Lovreglio didn’t get beyond Act 1; still, there’s plenty of lyrical matter there, God knows. To hear this split-level program, you pay $25 along with a ticket tax of still-unknown proportions.
JINGLE FINGERS
Brisbane Music Festival
FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.
Sunday December 10 at 4 pm
A Christmas concert of sorts, to give the festival an emphatically seasonal spirit, this program comprises works for two pianos, with artistic director Alex Raineri and Adam Herd taking us through the late afternoon. They begin with a work by the newly-discovered American composer Amy Beach who has been transformed into a significant figure in that country’s musical development by people who should – and probably do – know better. Here is her 1924 Suite for Two Pianos Founded upon Old Irish Melodies. Four movements – Prelude, Old-Time Peasant Dance, The Ancient Cabin, Finale – give you a virtuosic set of arrangements on some defenceless tunes that get subsumed in the composer’s generously applied decorations/ornamentations. Then comes the festival’s final Poulenc salute: the Sonata for Two Pianos of 1953. This is a solid, sometimes clangorous construction that raises for me the spartan concentration of the Dialogues of the Carmelites, begun in the same year. It certainly makes for a bracing contrast with the ephemeral nature of the other Poulenc pieces we’ve heard in this second tranche of the festival. To end, we are treated to traditional Christmas Carols arranged by pianist Herd; perhaps he’ll confine himself to Finnish ones, including (if the recital’s title is being taken into account) a Scandinavian equivalent to Jingle Bells. On the bright side, you can hope for a sing-along to really get you in the mood for the commercial orgy that is to come. All this is available to you for $25 plus a handling fee to Humanitix for charitable purposes – the only way to do business.
THE SOUND OF CHRISTMAS
The Queensland Choir
The Old Museum, Bowen Hills
Saturday December 16
You can’t purchase tickets for this event until December. I can understand such reticence; who would want to be organized too far ahead? A little more worrying is the lack of decision about a time of day. But, by means of intrepid research, I’ve concluded that this will have to be an afternoon concern because Josh Daveta and the Sequins are taking over the space at 7:30 pm. Also, the organization’s previous two concerts have been presented at 3 in the afternoon and I can read a pattern as closely as the next code analyst. Still in the guessing game, I’d propose that the conductor will be Kevin Power, since he’s one of the two choir personnel noted on the group’s website. By exactly the same token, the accompanist (no organ at the Old Museum, so it’ll most likely be piano) is Mark Connors. There’s no way of predicting what these office-bearers and their forces will consider to be Christmas sounds but the outcome will most likely be the usual collection of British standards with some forays into the American seasonal repertoire. All seems rather vague? Well, what I know, you know – and, at present, that’s all there is to know.
4MBS CHRISTMAS SPECTACULAR
Brisbane Chorale
Brisbane City Hall
Sunday December 17 at 3 pm
The Chorale is not alone at this concert but will be in collaboration with the Brisbane Symphony Orchestra under conductor Stefanie Smith. This afternoon’s soloist will be soprano Mirusia Louwerse, familiar to many from Andre Rieu’s extravaganzas. And what will patrons hear? As with The Queensland Choir above, details are lacking. Everything will fall under the generic heading of ‘Christmas Carols and other traditional Christmas fare’, which last seems to be a promise of food appropriate to the feast-day. At least this event has a definite time of day, unlike the concert listed above. But I note that this event isn’t listed online among the concert activities of the orchestra; either their contribution is too slight to bother mentioning, or perhaps their administration is unaware of the ensemble’s participation. However, counterweight that with the booking of the Town Hall – so they’re expected. Once again, I’m predicting the customary stolid British content that prevails during this country’s Christmases: comfortable, Anglican, spiritually numbing. Tickets are available for between $25 and $85; wherever you sit and whatever your concession/status, you attract a $1.25 tax that is just applied without explanation or justification.