Month: July 2024

Variety with a rich French seasoning

cliveoconnell

THE CHOIR OF KING’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

Musica Viva Australia,

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Thursday July 25, 2024

Choir of King’s College, Cambridge

This distinguished group is making its ninth tour for Musica Viva Australia, and this time around it is playing to its strengths – at least as far as the Brisbane program is concerned. One characteristic not on show in this Program 1 is British music; whereas the second bill of fare includes pieces by John Bull, Tallis and Judith Weir, the solitary sample of home-grown art for us was Edgar Bainton’s Revelation Chapter 21 setting, And I Saw a New Heaven. For the rest of this event, the accent fell on France, the main element being Durufle’s Requiem of 1948, with two Messiaen organ solo side panels. A bit of German British maybe in Handel’s Zadok the Priest, a Venetian excursion with Gabriel’s O Magnum mysterium setting of 1587, followed later by an American detour for Martin Laurindsen’s 1994 popular version of the same text, and a friendly antipodean nod through Sydney-based composer Damian Barbeler‘s recent setting of Charlotte, a poem by Judith Nangala Crispin.

Not that you can complain about facing a mixed program because it shows the versatility of the executants – well, it’s meant to do so. But a real practical problem arrived when trying to work out which of the organ scholars – Harrison Cole and Paul Greally – was actually playing specific items. I found out later from the organization that the pair both contributed in the first half while Greally performed the Durufle. My eyesight is certainly not what it was and the players were a fair way up the back wall of the Concert Hall, but I had the allocation of labour completely wrong. Time for the opera-glasses, I suppose. Even so, I can’t specify who accounted for the two Messiaen extracts.

Warming up the listeners with a golden oldie, director Daniel Hyde and his singers opened the night with Zadok the Priest, one of the organists having to work through that long introduction with an abrupt shift in dynamic (keyboard?) early in the process and without the benefits of a true slow crescendo or the initial fluorescence of three violin lines, not to mention the original’s instrumental explosion of three trumpets and timpani when the choir begins its work at bar 23. On top of all all that, the sopranos were unusually faint (drowned?) in the opening choral strophes and the interpretation sounded effete and over-studied, especially when compared to sturdy, top line-reinforced performances like that at the recent British coronation ceremony.

It was unexpected to have an organ supporting the double choir Gabrieli motet, especially as I couldn’t find an edition with such underpinning. What you can come across are readings where some of the vocal lines are given to instruments (those trustworthy Venetian trombones), but who’s to determine what universals obtain when dealing with the Renaissance-to-Baroque crossover years? Here was a much more telling sound despite the work’s eight vocal lines, probably because of the disposition of these voices into a treble-dominated group set against a middle/bass-heavy complement-partnership. Further, the approach was informed by an attractive suppleness, notably in the shifts to the congruence of all parts, as in its first occurrence at bar 10. As with Zadok, the output sounded very well-mannered and lacking any European coarseness of dynamic or fracturing of the ensemble’s cool temper.

Whichever one of the scholars gave us Les anges from Messiaen’s La Nativite du Seigneur generated a mobile series of phrases and harmonic shocks (oh, those multiform modes of limited transposition) and a striking suggestion of ethereal animation, the specifically designated birth corps dancing on the heads of a plethora of needles – in this instance, to celebrate a very pointed moment of transubstantiation.

For a soft leavening, the choir sang the Laurindsen setting of O magnum mysterium which gave the audience a recovery space through its deft concordances and fluent part-writing. This is a gift to any choir with sufficient breath control and the Cambridge musicians made a strong case for its quiet benevolence, although to my ears the finest interpreters of this music are American university bodies whose sopranos yield little to these British boys in intonational exactness but whose basses are, at their best, more full-bodied and supportive. While the attack on the work’s two opening phrases was clumsy, the conclusion proved to be as spellbinding as ever.

Time now for the second Messiaen. This was the toccata specially written to replace the third movement of the orchestral version of L’Ascension when the composer decided to transpose it for organ: Transports de joie d’une ame devant la gloire du Christ qui est la sienne – always the man for a catchy title. One of the Cole/Greally partnership worked through this with some of the improvisatory eloquence shown by the composer in his own recording, even if a couple of manual changes were awkward (when are they not?) as the Swell sounded under-powered. But that might have come from an unfamiliarity with the Klais instrument, not much time elapsing between this appearance and the two Melbourne opening stops on this eight-session national tour. However, the executant made a brave showing in the final stanzas from the Plus vif to that exuberant final cadence.

Back to a more prosaic vision of bliss with Bainton’s treatment of the first four verses of St. John’s towering vision of the new Jerusalem. This is standard Anglican content from the venerable Parry/Stanford tradition (the composer was a pupil of the latter) and the level of ecstasy is kept to a restrained level; more noticeable when coming after the French organ master’s confronting excesses. As you’d expect, these singers were quite comfortable with this elegantly phrased anthem; you can see this in operation on an Easter 2020 performance under Hyde on YouTube which has the benefit of the rich acoustic in the College’s chapel.

Finishing the night’s first half was the new work by Barbeler, Crispin’s poem concerned with searching for information about her great-great-grandmother. The composer is fond of single chanted lines that can intermesh or stand in contrast with each other. These tend to be static while his harmonized passages alternate between sweet and discordant: a fair mirroring, then, of the poet’s journey to a kind of fulfilment. The more white civilization is referred to, the more strained the harmonic vocabulary – or so it seemed to me – but the work rises to an angry. declamatory climax. At the end, the singers throw sheets of paper into the air, a piece of theatre that seemed to this observer to represent a suddenly disturbed flight of white cockatoos. I found the gesture rather disturbing, but one old fellow a few rows back cackled with delight; as with our varied reactions to the Voice referendum, you just can’t tell. Still, Barbeler constructed a definite atmosphere reflecting the poem’s desolation in the search for and discovery of Charlotte’s photo.

The Durufle Mass features regularly on the King’s College Choir performance schedule at home, alternating in November with the Faure Requiem. You’d therefore anticipate an ease with its textures and dynamic stability, and this facility was pretty much in evidence, right from the plainchant Requiem aeternam setting up to the death-mollifying In paradisum. After the placid Introit, the choir’s Kyrie enjoyed some welcome Christe eleison angst. You were pressed to find fault here, as in the following Offertorium which distinguished itself with a memorably affecting final Quam olim Abrahae.

The organ ripples that sustain the Sanctus opening didn’t so much misfire as miss an ecclesiastical ambience; put simply, the Concert Hall acoustic proved too dry for many parts of this Mass, in particular these pages. But that deficiency was apparent even from the opening Zadok ritornello which has become familiar to us form performances recorded in more reverberant spaces.

I believe the solos in this reading – for the Offertorium, Pie Jesu and Libera me – were sung by groups, not individuals. Certainly the contralto Pie Jesu solo was handled by a group of boys who gave the final sempiternam a finely poised decrescendo. The return of full forces for the Agnus Dei brought us some of the night’s best concerted work, even if the organ’s swell-box manipulation sounded awkward at one point. And there is little left to say of the final three movements, except to note some intonational discomfort in a unison passage during the Lux aeterna, a worthy demonstration of reserved ferocity when Durufle gets around to the Dies illa of the Libera me, and a sense of regret for us all that the In paradisum is so short.

Very little drama disturbs the progress of this Requiem which is packed with soft floating passages, the composer avoiding the passions roused in so many other writers by the Sequence and the desire to make a visceral experience out of a mass for the dead. Like its Faure counterpart, it suits boy sopranos in its sober tranquillity. Despite lengthy stretches of calm meditativeness, the work’s standard of accomplishment pleased a well-packed Concert Hall which showed a desire to be gratified throughout – even by those striking organ solos. Sadly, this popular approval resulted in most of the Mass’s movements being greeted by applause – in many another case, not such a bad thing but, with this work, these interruptions disturbed the score’s cumulative effectiveness.

By the way, one of the sopranos – fourth from the left, facing the stage – embodied a delight that you sometimes come across in choirs: a lad who is transported by his work, slightly weaving in sympathy with the musical complex, lowering his score often enough to convince you that he knows the material thoroughly, ever alert to Hyde’s direction.

Dark and light juxtaposed

cliveoconnell

NORDIC MOODS & BAROQUE ECHOES

The Marais Project & Duo Langborn/Wendel

Move Records MCD 656

Not the longest of CDs, this one comes in under 40 minutes. Marais Project regulars – Susie Bishop (violin and voice), Tommie Andersson (guitar and theorbo), Jennifer Eriksson (viola da gamba) – collaborate with the duo of Catalina Langborn (violin [baroque violin]) and Olof Wendel (cimbalom).

As for their music, it’s an eclectic combination, as you’d expect from the Marais organization. For the oldest serious music, they have lighted on Charpentier: his Sans frayeur which is an amiable chanson of unrequited love that might have something to do with Corneille’s play Melite. There’s a little bit from their eponymous hero: three movements from his opera Alcione. As well, we hear a sonata for violin and continuo by Johan Heinrich Roman, a Swedish composer from the first half of the 18th century. This four-movement work I can only find in print as an oboe sonata but the composer was a professional player of both instruments and, let’s face it: we’re talking about the Baroque where anything goes, doesn’t it?

A little closer to our time is Pavane: Thoughts of a Septuagenarian by Esbjorn Svensson who was a formidable jazz pianist and composer before his unfortunate death through a swimming accident in 2006. This is a homage/arrangement by Andersson, who also worked with Wendel in re-scoring the three Marais opera scraps.

The CD begins with a traditional Swedish song, Death of the beloved, which eventually transmogrified into the country’s unofficial national anthem. It ends with another Swedish lyric: The crystal so fine. Both of these have been arranged by Wendel – the first for everybody, the second for his own duo. More from Wendel comes in his composition A leaf falls, which involves both ensembles, and there are two works by Eriksson: the first simply called Anna, written for a sick friend; the second a kind of binary product called Marais Echoes & Nordic Moods which initially takes the French viol master’s La Mariee and a Menuet as a jumping off point before yet another Swedish folksong arrangement, The flowers of joy, that the composer-arranger thinks has some resonances with the second Marais dance.

As you can see, this is a miscellany with several bearings on the CD’s title. As with most collections, some segments work well, while others struggle to find a relevant place in the mix. The opening track sets a sombre tone, as it describes the process of a young man riding home to find that his wife is dead. Bishop handles the insistent, march-suggestive vocal line with excellent clarity of output and a persuasive directness of emotion. The result is suggestive of Scottish or English folk-songs with a morbid bent; perhaps not as bloody-minded as The twa corbies, nor as eerie as the Lyke-Wake Dirge but running along similar tragic lines to Mary Hamilton. Wendel’s cimbalom makes a striking colour contribution to the keening, trudging accompaniment.

Anna unfolds over a ground bass and could have been written in the late Renaissance or early Baroque. Each of the five instrumentalists enjoys a solo (the composer pairing her violin with Langborn’s, Andersson continuing with his guitar) as the work unfolds in a sequence of predictable progressions, yet it lives up to the proposed semi-descriptor of echoing the Baroque. The real thing follows in the Menuet, Prelude and Gigue from Marais’ opera; the first of these concludes Act IV, the second introduces Act 3, and the third I can’t find anywhere, although it’s jaunty enough to come out of the sailors’ scene as well as being unexpected enough to form part of the final chaconne. All these scraps repeat their material several times and their content is charming and plain-speaking – unlike compositions by the composer’s better-known operatic contemporaries. Eriksson and Langborn make finely-matched upper lines, while cimbalom and theorbo reinforce each other with admirable discretion.

Svensson’s slow dance moves gently past, with just enough exposure for all in the quintet even if the violins are favoured. The composer sustains a quiet, nostalgic atmosphere across his blues-suggestive piece which follows an orthodox modulatory chain and ends with a quiet, mildly regretful four-bar coda that contrives to encapsulate the downward-heading nature of the pavane with the resigned consolation of reaching the title’s specified age; a pity that the composer only made it to his mid-forties.

La Mariee comes from Marais’ Book 5 of lute pieces and is an amiable bouree-of-sorts, here given to Erikkson (of course) in partnership with Wendel’s cimbalom and (I think) Andersson in a reinforcing bass role. The brief Menuet seems to feature the Marais Project personnel only; Andersson on theorbo, if those resonant bass notes are any guide. The version offered here of The flowers of joy is in three sections: the first an outline of the tune from Duo Langborn/Wendel, then a stanza sung by Bishop with Andersson’s guitar, finally an everybody-in with two violins and Andersson (I think) back on theorbo. All three pieces are presented as a harmonic compatibility but you’d be struggling to find much other connection between the Marais pieces and the folk song – in mood or melodic shape. Also, in other readings of The flowers of joy you hear a good many more stanzas, but I’m thankful for the timbral variety offered here.

Langborn plays the top line in Roman’s pleasant G minor sonata with Eriksson’s viol and Andersson’s theorbo serving as joint continuo. Across the opening Largo, the violinist was happy to cut a few notes short and not sustain others which led to a somewhat erratic output. The movement’s first part comprising 7 bars was repeated; the second section, 12 bars long, was not. Neither half of the following Allegro was repeated, but the jerkiness that interrupted the first movement’s second part was here more evident with several over-curt phrase endings.

Luckily, Roman’s Intermezzo is only 16 bars long, so both halves enjoyed repeats for an evenly distributed reading of this placid, courtly E flat Major interlude. A recurrence of the curtailed note-length practice emerged in the final Allegro which sounded more brusque than necessary, e.g. the truncated minims in bars 5 to 8. It might have been that the executants were trusting in the considerable echo that prevailed in their noticeably resonant recording situation at Atlantis Studios, Stockholm last July. Whatever the case, Roman’s score came across as spasmodic in its fast even-numbered movements.

Wendel’s melancholy autumn-scape brings in the whole ensemble, Andersson moving to his guitar. There isn’t much to this piece which has an appealing central figure and a prominent cimbalom solo. But the composer sustains his aural ambience well enough, right up to the last leaf’s settling, Perhaps the landscape has a touch of the Orient rather than the maudlin world projected by Joseph Kosma and Johnny Mercer that falling leaves always bring to mind. Still, you might just take it as a straightforward illustration of a Nordic mood. It partners neatly with Charpentier’s bouncy chaconne that begins and ends with Andersson’s theorbo setting out and finishing off the constant bass line. Bishop’s light soprano is a treasure in this mobile construct for which the instrumental lines are lithe and restrained, especially Langborn’s sinuous violin.

The last track features the guest duo in a specially soulful instrumental setting of a song about longing for a girl from the singer’s village. But he also addresses her as ‘most noble rose and golden chest of treasure’; she is also ‘outstanding in virtue’, which to me puts the beloved on a Marian level. The melody as outlined by Langborn is wrenchingly sad, like all the best love songs, with the cimbalom offering a decorative, original backdrop. So this CD ends in a minor key and suggests a bare physical and emotional world where hope is grounded in disappointment. Not exactly Nordic noir but, as a musical equivalent, coming close. Thanks to all for those extracts from the flashy Baroque – a fortunate complement/antidote.

Organ at both (historical) ends

cliveoconnell

PERTH CONCERT HALL RONALD SHARP ORGAN

Jangoo Chapkhana

Move Records MD 3464

We do live in two different countries. I’m not alone in knowing very little to nothing about serious musical activity in Perth, except that we share in the big travellers, i.e. the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Musica Viva. If you listen to ABC Classic, there’s every chance that the West Australian Symphony Orchestra will be heard at some time during the day and most individuals who come to Australia for a capital city tour will include the country’s most isolated one in their visitation rounds.

But I’ve never heard the Sharp organ in the Perth Concert Hall, although the leaflet that accompanies this CD gives a fair amount of information about its construction, its maker and its registration. Sharp built the organ in the Sydney Opera House, and this West Australian instrument is the maker’s second-largest creation; that’s by a long way, incidentally, as the Sydney organ has over 10,200 pipes while its companion has about 3,000. Also, I’ve not encountered Jangoo Chapkhana either, but a simple online check shows that he’s a considerable presence on the Perth music scene, a veteran choral conductor as well as an expert jazz pianist.

You might be puzzled by the choice of repertoire on this disc. Chapkhana pays homage to some of the grandfathers of organ composition: Sweelinck, Buxtehude, J. S. Bach and Balbastre. All fine and perfectly acceptable – just what you’d expect of a compendium to show off the organ’s capabilities at an apical point in composition for the organ and its surrounds. But then we leap forward two centuries from the Balbastre work of 1749 to a couple of Messiaen works of 1939 and 1951/2, a Langlais oddity of 1977, one of Eben’s Four Biblical Dances of 1990, a very short scrap from British organist Gary Sieling, and Chapkhana’s own seven variations on the chorale Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring – the CD’s most recent music dating from 2006.

The CD opens with Buxtehude’s chorale fantasia on Te deum laudamus which falls into five sections, the post-Praeludium segments based on fragments of the Gregorian chant. Chapkhana’s output speaks a forward language, the pedal register exceptionally clean and welded into the fabric of the mini-fugue that makes up the Praeludium‘s second part. A slight misstep occurs at the fourth bar of the Te deum laudamus but otherwise the movement proceeds with unstoppable forthrightness, the pedal line now dominant as it handles the melody line with reed-rich reinforcement. As for the long Pleni sunt coeli et terra setting, apart from the felicity of the part-writing, a good deal of interest comes from the manual chopping and changing, even if the overall timbral mix difference is slight in this reading.

For the In Martyrum, the pedal is again entrusted with the chant material, for which Chapkhana employs a resonant brass/reed stop (trumpet or trombone, I can’t tell) which is neatly balanced by the busy and sparkling upper lines. Last of all comes the four-subject fugue (not very elaborate) that blossoms during the Tu devicto arrangement. Both these latter stages continue along the firm, determined path that the interpreter traces with considerable eloquence throughout this happy harbinger, written when Bach was approximately 5 years old.

There’s no end to the arguments about the instruments you can use for Sweelinck’s keyboard music and I’ve heard the Fantasia Chromatica on organ, piano, harpsichord, even arranged for strings. Chapkhana’s interpretation is welcome for its clarity of line and, as with the preceding Buxtehude, an authoritative directness of address, the alterations in timbre respectful and organized in a manner that stays within the possibilities of an organ from the composer’s time. You will find it hard to fault the supple understatement of the lower lines and the dearth of encrusting ornamentation.

Suddenly, we hit the big time with Bach’s Komm, Heiliger Geist Fantasia BWV 651 and Chapkhana does it proud with a powerful full organ for the manuals and a splendid, full-bodied pedal outline of the cantus firmus. The interpretation manages to make an eloquent fusion of the three-part fugue and its thunderous underpinning, where the line-concluding note lengths follow traditional editions. This track kept drawing me back to revel in its digital agility and the welcome lack of delay in the pedal work; mind you, that attraction might also have been due to the buoyant image of the Paraclete’s endlessly beating wings over the resonant hymn of appeal and adoration from a militant humanity.

This is followed by another of the Eighteen Chorale Preludes: Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, BWV 659 – the first of three settings in that publication. As every Bach-committed organist knows, in this setting the chorale tune is given by the right hand but is decorated to within an inch of its sustainability, here riding high above its placid, walking support with nasal penetration, probably helped along by a mixture stop (can’t be sure, it’s so long since I had access to an instrument of substance). What is also distinctive about this reading is its lack of self-indulgence in the face of the linear ornamentation; the organist sticks to his last and preserves the metrical pulse without any rubato, as far as I can hear.

Concluding the Golden Oldies section, Chapkhana airs one of Balbastre’s noels, specifically Votre bonte Grand Dieu from the Second Suite. I’m more familiar with the same type of composition by Daquin but this track shows a similarity between these contemporaries. The score comprises the tune itself and five variations with a rustic 6/8 interlude between the last two. Once again, the approach to this piece proved metrically consistent and packed with variety as the variations’ repeated halves swung round (except for the Leger Sans vitesse interruption). I came across only one flaw in this dangerously clear-voiced account: at the bar 96 repeat, a muffed right-hand A.

Then we jumped to our times, beginning with one of Langlais’ Book 1 Mosaiques: Sur le tombeau de Buffalo Bill. I believe that the famous bison killer was buried at Lookout Mountain, Colorado and the composer might have visited the site on one of several tours across the United States. In any case, the work was written in 1977 and begins with a gentle, melancholy theme that is subjected to several variations which become increasingly elaborate melodically before the work ends with a quiet reminiscence of the initial melody – a conclusion that might suggest Western plains and the wide open spaces that the dead man inhabited. It’s a rarity, a piece about which little has been published, but this account imbues it with a certain whimsical appeal.

Messiaen is represented by two works: Joie et clarte des Corps Glorieux from (unsurprisingly) Les Corps Glorieux, and the most well-known of the movements from this 1939 compendium; then Chants d’oiseaux from the centre of Livre d’orgue of 1951/2. It’s always enjoyable hearing how organists adapt what they have to the specifications that the composer asks for; in the first of these, the problem is less demanding because the work stays on an even keel for most of its length, but the changes asked for the orgy of bird-calls is ridiculously demanding.

It strikes me that Chapkhana is a sympathetic spirit when faced with Messiaen’s insistent ecstasy in fast mode. He invest the first of these excerpts with a disciplined excitement, even when dealing with its less voluble moments, as when the composer alternates two chords repeatedly. But the basic opening pattern and the following recitative-like flurries come off with infectious elan; it’s like listening to a more focused elder brother to the exuberant Transports de joie from L’Ascension of 1933/4. In contrast, the Chants d’oiseaux is a minefield requiring agility and control of the necessary resources. It has more timbral variety than the slightly later Catalogue des oiseaux – which is stating the obvious – and Chapkhana works carefully through its flurries of action and many punctuating points d’appui.

The composer is an intriguing character, mainly because of the arcane characteristics of his language – the Oriental rhythms, birdsongs, modes, febrile athleticism alongside super-slow meditations. I saw him once, in Hamer Hall, at a performance of the Turangalila-symphonie which he followed with a score; the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra had to import a last-minute player for the ondes Martenot because the originally scheduled artist couldn’t handle the work’s demands. But my favourite anecdote came from colleague Anna King Murdoch who accompanied the composer and his entourage to the Dandenongs in pursuit of a lyrebird’s song. At the crucial moment, Anna trod on a twig, which silenced the bird – to the chagrin of the squawk-fancier who was unable to transcribe the call into his lengthy collection; yet another case where love’s labour’s lost.

It’s inevitable that the Czech composer Petr Eben should be compared to Messiaen in that both were formidable players and composers for the organ. Juxtaposing the Chants d’oiseaux with Eben’s The Wedding at Cana from his Four Biblical Dances made sense, although the extract from Les Corps Glorieux sounds more relevant. Eben doesn’t go in for those pages of unbarred bird-song recitative or abrupt three-chord ejaculations but is more likely to treat with a full-blown melody. Mind you, he can do so with the same riotous facility that the French composer relishes, but this particular work sits in a more comfortable, orthodox framework. The dance is a lively one – no reverential pauses for water-to-wine miracles – and seems to feature a virtuosic role for pedals towards the end.

Gary Sieling’s Pavan differs from most of its kind by running to the pulse of 5/8. Chapkhana employs flute stops for this placid 2004/5 exercise in charming inoffensiveness where an ordinary harmonic vocabulary is spiced up by the gentle presence of a mild dissonance (see the piece’s last chord). The composer is something of an all-rounder in the best British tradition: he’s credited in the CD’s liner notes as Director of Music at Bromley Parish Church in London but no, he’s moved on from that to Reading and seems to be a mobile force in the UK’s organ world. His Pavan is a well-constructed bagatelle, a welcome pause on the way to this recording’s finale.

Which comprises Chapkhana’s set of variations. He states the chorale in a setting notable for crawling chromatics which manages to raise the unlikely combination of Ives and Reger. Moreover, you can forget that lilting 9/8 metre used (twice) by Bach in his Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben cantata, as well as those amiable concordant memories associated with Myra Hess’s arrangement(s) because here the chorale is given in 4/4 time. Variation 1, Alla Danza, is a saltarello for the right hand with the chorale – now in its original triple tempo – below it; the whole effect is bitingly bitonal, thanks to insistent treble dissonances above the imperturbable tune. Then we have Alternating Chords which are really thirds that set the theme as a quick-step duet for flutes.

A Scherzino follows, pitched at the top of the instrument’s range and passing very swiftly in a variant unflustered by any deviation from utilizing the melody straight. The canonic Variation 4 puts the chorale back into 4/4 in a prominent left-hand role while the softer upper line offers an elaboration of the tune with piquant harmonic clashes. A Plenum movement flattens the tune out into a march with plenty of filler to produce a thoroughly British ambience, suggestive of a fast voluntary heard in a provincial cathedral. Next comes a three-line Contrapunctus where the interplay is suggestive of an Art of Fugue exercise written by Hindemith: disciplined, possibly over-cerebral, cheerful.

Bringing the disc to a close is the final variation, a Toccata with the chorale thundered out by the pedals while a coruscating dance, like Variation 1’s gigue, bounces around in what I think could be octaves – a single line with occasional cadential moves into two independent parts. This strikes me as the most substantial segment of the score and it gives us a buoyant conclusion to a work that doesn’t take itself too seriously but shows a very able mind at work – and an excellent musician, as evident in the totality of this enjoyable CD.

Diary August 2024

cliveoconnell

HEROIC TALES

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Friday August 2 at 11:30 am

There’s an obvious candidate to fill us in for this concert and your first guess is the right one. It’s Richard Strauss’s musical self-portrait Ein Heldenleben during which the composer goes to great lengths to show you the nobility of his publicly constructed life – a hero from start to finish. Along the way, from bold opening flourishes in the most positive ‘Look at me! salute you’ll ever hear to the benign finale where the hero relishes his successful and oh-so-well-deserved retirement from the field, Strauss spends time on his critics (through the rather odd figure of satire embodied in parallel 5ths), on his beloved (the composer’s rather horrible wife, Pauline de Ahna), on his conflict with the world (yeah, especially after 1933), and on his triumphs (recognizable in about 28 quotes from his own previously written scores – Look on my works, ye mighty . . .). It’s probably worth pointing out that the composer had about 51 more years left to live, so the leben in consideration here is not even half over. The morning’s other content is Ravel’s three-part song-cycle Sheherazade which uses texts by Tristan Klingsor written in response to Rimsky’s famous suite. The required (soprano) soloist will be Siobhan Stagg, the whole program to be conducted by Nicholas Carter who is still on the right side of 40 but who will always be to me the fresh-faced young twenty-something-year-old musician I first came across in Melbourne several decades ago. Entry costs from $76 to $109 full price, with plenty of concessions so that a child can get in for $35 to a really awful seat but still, like everybody else, pay the mandatory $7.20 booking fee/compulsory excess.

This program will be repeated on Saturday August 3 at 7:30 pm, with the addition of Helen Grime’s Near Midnight: a 12-minute evocation by the contemporary Scottish composer/academic of a D. H. Lawrence poem which occupies four stanzas – just like this score. You’ll pay from $95 to $135 full price here for the thrill of enjoying the extra Grime product and as a means of compensating the companies involved for staff overtime.

BOOTS & ALL

Ensemble Q

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Sunday August 4 at 3 pm

You’ll find a great many samples of folk music in this expansive recital that features mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean as guest artist. Her major contribution to the afternoon will be Berio’s Folk Songs of 1964, that strange collection of 11 works, four of them written by either Berio himself or the American John Jacob Niles. The singer’s instrumental escorts are flute/piccolo (Alison Mitchell), clarinet (Paul Dean), harp (Emily Granger), viola (Christopher Moore), cello (Trish Dean), and percussion (Jacob Enoka and A. N. Other because the composer asks for two of them). The night starts with Betts-Dean singing a Gaelic lament, Chaidh mo Dhonnachadh ‘na bheinn, arranged by Stuart Macrae and which the singer recorded last year with the Sequoia Duo (violin and cello); tonight she’ll be partnered by Adam Chalabi or Anne Horton, and Trish Dean. Nielsen’s three-part Serenata in vano of 1914 will call on the services of Paul Dean, David Mitchell‘s bassoon, an as-yet unknown horn player, Trish Dean, and Phoebe Russell on double bass. The Rashomon Confessions, composed by James Ledger in 2009, are based on Kurosawa’s film, which is also in four movements, and calls for Paul Dean’s clarinet and the string quartet of Chalabi, Horton, Moore and Trish Dean. About the Ash Lad, nine mini-movements following a Danish-Norwegian story and a source for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, was written by Melody Eotvos in 2020 and requires Mitchell, an oboe (unknown at this stage), violin (Chalabi? Horton?), Moore and Trish Dean. Next come Dvorak’s Op. 47 Bagatelles, five amiable scraps from 1876 for string trio and harmonium (or piano if you’re faint-hearted), here arranged by Trish Dean for an unspecified septet. Finally, we experience an Ensemble Liaison delight in Osvaldo Golijov’s Lullaby and Doina from 2001, to be performed by Mitchell, Paul Dean, Chalabi or Horton, Moore, Trish Dean and Russell. All tickets are $75 (concession $55), with the inevitable $7.20 charge for somebody pressing a button.

MAXIM VENGEROV IN RECITAL

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday August 5 at 7:30 pm

The formidable Russian violinist is appearing in a role that would be unfamiliar to many in this country. I’ve heard him perform the Beethoven concerto at the 1999 Melbourne Festival and the Tchaikovsky 18 years later, both in Hamer Hall. For the latter, he also took on the role of conductor post-interval to direct the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in Rimsky’s Scheherazade. Yet, even though he has given recitals here over the past two decades, I’ve not heard him in that format. Tonight he teams up with pianist Polina Osetinskaya for the first of three appearances in the country. According to the promotional material of his publicity machine, these recitals celebrate Vengerov’s 50th birthday – a milestone of some importance although what it has to do with his performance appearance is opaque. To begin, we score two Prokofiev works: the Violin Sonata No. 1 in F minor that is under-performed when compared to the very popular No. 2 (originally a flute sonata); and the 5 Melodies Op 35 which was also re-composed from a set of vocalises for soprano and piano. Then it’s on to a recital regular with Franck’s Sonata in A, a superbly urgent showpiece for both executants and blessed with a chain of memorable melodies; followed by Ravel’s Tzigane which showers its listeners with fireworks and colour, best appreciated in this no-contest version (original) for violin and piano. The QPAC ticket information claims that prices range from $88 to $188; they don’t – the cheapest you can get is $108. As far as I can see, there are no concessions available and you have to stump up the hall’s over-inflated $7.20 handling fee; great to see another unfettered triumph of capitalism, but what else would you expect from a resident of Monaco?

POSTCARDS

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St., Brisbane

Saturday August 10 at 7 pm

Artistic director of this festival, Alex Raineri, is launching his annual series of chamber music recitals with a one-composer program. Connor D’Netto‘s name rings a bell but not one I can trace easily as far as detecting performances I’ve heard; currently he’s working as a lecturer at the University of Queensland (and at his art, of course). Bringing D’Netto’s works into the light are pianist Raineri, mezzo Lotte Betts-Dean and guitarist Libby Myers. The focal point of this program is a new work: Postcards, written this year. Commissioned for these performers, it comprises five movements to texts by different authors, the whole lasting 25 minutes. As well as that premiere, patrons will also hear the first performance of a 2020 creation, Seen from Above; a 6-minute piano-guitar duet, the work attempts to aurally suggest the process of observing a landscape photo which you can manipulate to bring its dimensions and their suggestions into play. Fleshing out the experience will be Glenro, written in 2019 for piano and tape and lasting a bit over 3 minutes; this recalls the composer’s original home in India and a house of the same name which his family established in Brisbane. Memories of Different Homes from 2021 was written for Myers as a 6 minute solo, finding correspondences between the guitarist’s one-time homecoming and the composer’s similar experience, both returning here after extended residences in Europe. The Humanitix booking process shows one price fits all – $25 – with extra costs of $1.99 for computer science classes (what? why?where?) and a GST add-on of 20 cents not incorporated in the ticket cost.

CHAMBER PLAYERS 3

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Queensland Symphony Orchestra Studio, South Bank

Sunday August 11 at 3 pm

This afternoon musicale features three works: one standard, one obscure, one completely new. The freshly minted but as-yet-unnamed composition is a string quintet by one of the QSO’s violas: Bernard Hoey. From the QSO site’s layout of information, I think it’s possible to work out who will participate in this score: violin Natsuko Yoshimoto, viola Imants Larsens, Hoey also on viola, cello Hyung Suk Bae, double bass Phoebe Russell. All of which argues for an emphasis on middle-to-low range output. Then comes Mozart with the String Quartet K. 387, called ‘Spring’ for no apparent reason as it was written in mid-summer 1782; it was the first of the Haydn Quartets set. Here I’m guessing the participants will be violins Alan Smith and Jane Burroughs, viola Nicholas Tomkin, and cello Andre Duthoit. Bringing up the rear is Max Reger with his Serenade for Flute, Violin and Viola in D: a three-movement frolic written in 1915 and at odds with everything you think you know about this writer of turgid chromaticism (see any of the organ works). This should feature flute Kate Lawson, violin Rebecca Seymour, and viola Charlotte Burbrook de Vere. The event is scheduled to last for 1 hour 20 minutes, which seems to me to allow considerable space for Hoey’s new piece; good luck to him. Prices range from $35 for a child to $59 for an adult with the QSO’s ridiculously over-the-top extra fee of $7.95 for handling your card; at that rate, you could be dealing with a bank.

CONCERTOS FESTIVAL

Conservatorium Symphony Orchestra

Queensland Symphony Orchestra Studio, South Bank

Friday August 16 at 7:30 pm

Tonight consists of a series of movements from concertos; as far as I can see, no participant gets to go the whole hog. In this showcase for high-achieving Con students, pianist Lavinia Lee attempts the Liszt Concerto No. 1; that is, parts of it although each of the four movements is brief. Luke Hammer fronts the eloquent Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 2 from 1935 – with luck, the first movement. Then, a true novelty in Alyssa Deacon‘s account of the Koussevitsky Double-Bass Concerto No. 3, first heard in 1905; probably the third movement only because the first two are linked. Hanuelle Lovell sets her sights on part(s?) of the Bartok Violin Concerto No. 1, written in 1907/8 and which is even less heard live than the once-popular No. 2; but then it wasn’t discovered until well after the composer’s death. Catherine Edwards takes her clarinet to the Finnish-born composer Bernhard Crusell’s Concerto No. 2 in F minor of 1815; either the opening Allegro, or both the Andante pastorale and Rondo. Finally, Isabella Greeves fronts Oskar Bohme’s Trumpet Concerto of 1899 which does for the Romantic era what Haydn’s concerto did for the Classical; bad luck for the German composer however, as he spent most of his working life in St, Petersburg and was shot in one of Stalin’s anti-foreigner purges. Anyway, Greeves will probably play either the opening Allegro moderato, or both the following Adagio religioso plus the concluding Allegro scherzando. Prefacing all this, the Con orchestra, under Peter Luff for the night, performs Dale Schlaphoff‘s That Night the Universe Breathed which will probably act as a kind of shock to the system, this composer an explorer of ‘contemporary, electro-acoustic musical landscapes’: the sort of music that will surely provide the perfect lead-in to Liszt. This evening is meant to last for 90 minutes with an interval thrown in; sounds like over-optimism to me. Students can enter for $25, concession holders for $35, adults for $45; there appears to be no sign of any ubiquitous, iniquitous booking fee.

MAHLER 1

Queensland Youth Symphony

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Saturday August 17 at 7 pm

As with any orchestra, the QYS will be sorely tested by this symphony which bristles with challenges, not least the continuous one of cumulative dynamic levels as the composer swells and surges along a lengthy path that usually falls just short of an hour. Simon Hewett conducts – not only this large-scale score (if not as massive as some of the composer’s later symphonies), but also the five Ruckert-Lieder of 1901-2 with their strange changes in instrumentation across the board; not to mention the prodigality of asking for an oboe d’amore in only one of the pieces, Um Mitternacht. Still, it will be interesting to see if Hewett cuts down on his string numbers to suit the chamber dimensions that Mahler wanted for these brief songs (on average, 3 minutes 30 seconds each). Fronting these will be soprano Nina Korbe, the QYS’s current artist in residence. As for the 1887/8 symphony, you’ll expect an orthodox performance without the Blumine movement that wandered in and out of favour during the work’s first performances. And there’s enough drama and tunefulness to satisfy most audiences, especially those who expect a storm-to-triumph finale which this score delivers fully. Students get in for $18, the concession charge is $40, and your full adult pays $47, Never forget the additional QPAC extra fee of $7.20 which must surely put off any students who have to add on between a half and a third of the original cash needed to buy a ticket.

DREAMS & STORIES

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Sunday August 18 at 11:30 am

Plenty of space here for your imagination to take flight, as the organizers hope it will. Hosted by Ashleigh Denning, matters begin in a strait-laced fashion with Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream of 1826; still an inextricable colour supplement to the play and an astonishing accomplishment from the 17-year-old composer as it encapsulates with brilliant skill so much of the characters and action. A gap of 42 years brings us to Johann Strauss II’s Tales from the Vienna Woods waltz which will have an imaginative effect on us more senior audience members, although I understand the Wiggles put out a bastardized version for children’s consumption in 2008, which might have some reminiscence-value for today’s 20-year-olds. Then conductor Katharina Wincor will have the QSO cope with the Infernal Dance, Berceuse and Finale from Stravinsky’s Firebird ballet of 1910 which remains the most popular work – and one of the earliest – in the composer’s vast catalogue. One of the touches of Australian dreaming comes through Peter Sculthorpe’s 1988 symphonic essay Kakadu, a sturdy sample of the composer’s talent at suggesting landscape, to which he later added a didjeridu part, here played by guest William Barton. Then, entering an imaginary world with which we’ve all perforce become familiar, the musicians play part of John Williams’ score to the 2001 film Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone: Harry’s Wondrous World, which encapsulates plenty of the composer’s sweeping melodic flights. Bringing us right up to date with the most ancient instrument and music-making will be Barton’s own composition Sky Songs which I’m fairly sure was compiled in about 2022 and which, at its last Brisbane appearance in 2023 with the Australian Pops Orchestra, featured the composer’s mother and partner as front-liners along with Barton. A child’s ticket costs $35, a student’s $49, a concession holder’s $65, and a full adult’s $76: all these in the back row of the stalls and balcony. Adjust the last two upwards for better seating, but never forget your obligation to stump up QPAC’s $7.20 surcharge on every order you place.

SILENCE & RAPTURE

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday August 19 at 7 pm

Here is a collaboration between two moderately progressive Sydney organizations in the ACO and the Sydney Dance Company. The organizations’ respective artistic directors – Richard Tognetti and Rafael Bonachela – have put together a program that features the music of Bach and (God help us) Arvo Part, both familiar territory for the musicians, if not for the dancers. As you’d hope, there’s a scheme to this amalgamation. We have a prelude in the shape of a Bach canon and a Part toccata on BACH. Then we’re taken through three gardens: Eden, Gethsemane, Heaven. Finally we move into the promised silence: always tricky for instrumentalists. But in the Bachian horticultural realms, we’re faced with two violin sonata movements, a couple of cantata solos, the Matthew Passion‘s wrenching Erbarme dich aria and that bounding Et exultavit from the Magnificat, plus a cello suite prelude and a cantata sinfonia. With the Part numbers, we face the inevitable Fratres, a Vater unser, an in memoriam for the Estonian composer/statesman Lennart Meri, and a setting of My heart’s in the Highlands. Then, for Silence, we delight in a Part exercise in the composer’s special field of tintinnabuli called Pari intervallo, an unfinished fugue with three subjects from Bach’s Art of Fugue, and the final Sehr langsam chorale setting from Hindemith’s Trauermusik for George V. As for participants, you have violin Tognetti, viola Stefanie Farrands, cello Timo-Veikko Valve, organ and harpsichord Chad Kelly. The singer is countertenor Iestyn Davies and I expect more ACO members will be assisting. About the dancers, I know no specifics; not even if Bonachela is taking part. You can get a student ticket for $25 in the back rows, and a full adult ticket in the best position for $150 – and each purchase attracts the usual QPAC extortion fee of $7.20

LIEDER HORSE TO WATER

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St., Brisbane

Friday August 23 at 1 pm

Kicking off a hefty weekend of operations for this chamber music festival, clarinet Luke Carbon presents an impressive collection of his own transcriptions of vocal solos, moved whether they like it or not into the range of his normal B flat or A instrument, as well as some forays into bass clarinet territory. Escorting him on the self-imposed, self-choreographed journey is the festival’s artistic director, pianist Alex Raineri. Most of the pieces are true lieder or art songs: Schubert’s Erlking matched with the more benign Elfenlied by Hugo Wolf, Clara Schumann’s Lorelei paired with Bizet’s La sirene, Mendelssohn’s happy spring-delighting Hexenlied preceding everyone’s-favourite-American-woman-composer Amy Beach’s Fairy Lullaby (which leaves out all the threatening animals from Shakespeare’s Ye spotted snakes and just uses the sweetness-and-light chorus). Szymanowski’s six Songs of a Fairy-Tale Princess based on poems by his sister offer more bravura work for both executants, just before the chaste delights of one of Haydn’s English Canzonettas, The Mermaid’s Song. But smack-bang in the middle of the exercise sit two opera excerpts. First is Oberon’s solo I know a bank from Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; don’t know how this will go with the clarinet because it’s a countertenor aria. Still, it continues the underpinning supernatural theme of the recital. But then we get soprano Elektra’s Orest! Orest! Es ruhrt sich niemand! from Richard Strauss’s blood-drenched early masterwork: the point where the heroine at last meets up with her brother who has returned in secret to kill his (and her) mother. It’s probably the lyrical highpoint of the work but more concrete and of this (Mycenean Greek) world than anything else you’ll hear from these artists. Entry costs a base fee of $25, with added extras of the separately applied GST (20 cents?) and $1.99 going towards books for schools (that’s Humanitix for you).

This program will be repeated at 6:30 pm.

BLAZE OF GLORY

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Friday August 23 at 7:30 pm

Johannes Fritzsch, the QSO’s conductor laureate, is directing two of these orchestral fires, both slow-burners. He begins with Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 in B minor, the Unfinished, comprising two movements that hang in ideal balance and ask for an equal control from their executants, lest they turn into a pair of plods lacking the necessary menace and consolation. Still, that score takes only 25 minutes or so; then it’s time for interval. When everybody settles back, Fritzsch launches into the Bruckner Symphony No. 9 in D minor, and we can only hope that there’ll be no attempt to perform one of the fourth movement completions. Bruckner finished three movements over the work’s long gestation of nine years: a Feierlich, a scherzo, and an adagio – the outer segments generally equal in length and the whole lasting about an hour. Even in its incomplete form, like its program companion, this large-frame composition makes for a moving experience, particularly in this instance for its final determination which comes after grating dissonances. The performance has plenty of seats available; judging by Clerici’s last Mahler outing with the QSO, I don’t know whether or not there’s much of a Brisbane appetite for either composer. Tickets range from $95 to $105 full adult, but you can find some unremarkable reductions for concession card holders, with even more substantial ones for students and children (if you can imagine your average 8-year-old writhing through the Bruckner).

This program will be repeated on Saturday August 24 at 1:30 pm.

STAGED

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St., Brisbane

Friday August 23 at 9 pm

Apparently, this production proved very popular on its appearance in the festival last year. Here it is again, brighter and better – well, longer and (you’d suppose) more substantial. The work takes as its basis anxiety dreams from musicians. Not just in Brisbane: these offerings come from everywhere, the common thread being that they are of a performative nature, I suppose; otherwise, why bother? You might just as well take on the nightmares of America’s Republicans, the fearful trauma of Australia’s Olympic swimmers, or the anguished somnambulism of CFMEU members. But here we are with unspecified musicians’ tales of nocturnal disturbance. Or perhaps the libretto is salted with feel-good sleep recollections. You are invited into the world of those performers who usually keep you at a distance; it’s all like a post-Vatican II general confession . . . in public. Our exhibitors are Jenna Robertson (voice and interpretation), Daniel Shearer (cello and interpretation), Finn Idris (electronics) and Alex Raineri (director and concept/composition). It can’t just be self-indulgence, can it? You’d have to hope for a substantial self-examination. Anyway, you’ll pay a ticket fee of $25, plus a cut-price GST of 20 cents, plus $1.99 (so booking agency Humanitix can send books to schools) for a total of $27.19.

This program will be repeated on Saturday August 24 at 9 pm

CLAIRE DE LUNE

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St., Brisbane

Saturday August 24 at 10 am

As anticipated, Debussy’s well-known 1905 evocation of moonlight will feature in this piano recital by Maxwell Foster who is, among other things, a duo-pianist partner with festival director Alex Raineri. The other all-too-familiar piece of lunar poeticism is also on Foster’s program: Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in C sharp minor, the Moonlight, of 1801. We also hear a classic example of the contemporary nocturne in Bartok’s The Night’s Music from his 1926 suite (or so it’s become), Out of Doors. As for the rest, it all comes from the last 35 years, beginning with American writer Lowell Liebermann‘s four Gargoyles of 1989, continuing in the recently late (died last year) Kaija Saariaho‘s 2007 Prelude, and reaching an up-to-date apogee right at the start of proceedings through Melbourne-based artist Rose Riebl‘s In every place, composed during 2023. It’s a well-devised program: following a theme in its well-known elements, and suiting itself with the three recent works, although all of these seem to be speaking a more conservative tongue than that of composers more grounded in real experimentation. As usual with this festival, tickets all cost $25, but that cost swells to $27.19 when you cough up a strange GST of 20 cents and a booking fee substitute of $1.99 that is designated as being earmarked by Humanitix for ‘literacy skills’.

This program will be repeated on Sunday August 25 at 6 pm.

IN THE SHADOW OF EDEN

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St., Brisbane

Saturday August 24 at 12 pm

Here’s a taxing, strangely recherche program from Australian soprano Bethany Shepherd and the festival’s artistic director, pianist Alex Raineri. They begin with an American picture of childhood peace and wonder in Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915: a 15-minute soliloquy set on a hot summer’s night, the writer James Agee’s describing familiar non-events attached to philosophical self-examination while his family sleep outside on quilts. I’ve only heard this in its original orchestrated version but a close-up performance will be revealing. Then the duo performs an Australian rarity and another 1947 composition in Peggy Glanville-Hicks’ 13 ways of looking at a blackbird, settings of brief poems by American eminence Wallace Stevens. Following which we hear a true-blue American song cycle in Jake Heggie‘s 2000 eight-segment Eve-Song, which gives us our direct link to Eden, although you’ll look hard for any Biblical gravity in this smart music. Finally, the duo comes back home with the aria Where? from the 2015 opera The Rabbits by Kate Miller-Heidke and Iain Grandage; watch out for the song’s last lines – so welcome after the maudlin depression of the song’s main body. Tickets go for $25 with the Humanitix booking fee of $1.99 being directed to computer science classes (hopefully for elders), and a slight GST sting of 20 cents brings you up to $27.19.

This program will be repeated on Sunday August 25 at 12 pm.

ZIGGY AND MILES

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St., Brisbane

Saturday August 24 at 2 pm

Ziggy and Miles Johnston are guitar-playing brothers who crossed my path a little while back; I reviewed their CD Sidekick for Move Records last year – a synchronized pleasure, at the very least. Artistic director of this festival Alex Raineri has brought in their talents to play a program of (mainly) breezy music that will be new to most of their Brisbane followers and admirers. They open with Slovakian-born Canberra-based composer Marian Budos‘ Welcome to the Stage: a freshly minted work which is here enjoying its Australian premiere. Then we get to enjoy another Australian piece in Nigel Westlake‘s Mosstrooper Peak of 2011, previously promoted by the Grigoryan brothers. in its two-guitar format. This score comprises six movements, each memorializing a site where the composer and his family set up small remembrance monuments, some destined to disappear, for their son/brother Eli who was killed by a drug-affected driver in June 2008. American musician Shelbie Rassler wrote Notice the Ripples in 2022 to the Johnston brothers’ commission; they have certainly performed the piece at their Juilliard alma mater and here they give its Australian premiere. Another component of that Wilson Theatre recital is the Suite Retratos by Radames Gnattali: the oldest music heard this afternoon as it dates from 1965 and comprises a group of four dances, each dedicated to musical pioneers in the composer’s native Brazil.

This program will be repeated on Sunday August 25 at 4 pm.

WILD FLOWERS

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St., Brisbane

Saturday August 24 at 4 pm

Based in London (but there is/was some connection with the University of Southampton), Mark Knoop is back in Australia doing a round of recitals (well, he’s definitely playing in Brunswick, Melbourne at the end of the month), including this series of part-revelations for Alex Raineri’s festival. He begins with a clutch of Debussy Preludes: Danseuses de Delphes, Voiles, Le vent dans la plaine, Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir, Les collines d’Anacapri – which is to say, Book 1, Nos. 1-5. Then he performs two sonatas by Galina Ustvolskaya: Nos. 4 and 6 from 1957 and 1988 respectively. The latter is particularly intransigent, packed with wide clusters and an extremely loud dynamic, while No. 4 is, in its four movements, a compendium of the extremist sounds this individualistic writer was finding suitable for her piano essays. Neither makes for easy listening, but what strikes you at the end is the writer’s compression. To send us out laughing, Knoop gives us the Australian premiere of Michael Finnissy‘s 1974 work that gives this recital its title. The pianist has been playing this piece for about two decades, even performing the usual two-piano version with the composer. It’s a fitting companion to the Russian pieces that precede it, if far more rhythmically sophisticated. Admission costs the usual base rate of $25; add on the idiosyncratic GST of 20 cents, as well as $1.99 for Humanitix to subsidise books for schools.

This program will be repeated on Sunday August 25 at 2 pm.

BLOOM

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St., Brisbane

Saturday August 24 at 6 pm

With this duo-pianist/two piano recital, Alex Raineri concludes the first of the three stretches that make up this year’s festival. He will be performing with Maxwell Foster, the two musicians having combined for a rapid tour of United States cities (Washington, Chicago, Baltimore) earlier this year. Three of the constituents they are presenting this evening are carry-overs from their American schedule: the recital’s eight-minute title work of 2021 for piano four-hands by Australian writer Natalie Nicolas, Peter Sculthorpe’s three-minute Little Serenade of 1979 (also for piano four-hands), and Anteo Fabris‘ Diffusions written this year, although I’m not sure about this last because the Swiss/American sound artist’s construct is billed on tonight’s proceedings as a world premiere. New matter comes with a Radiohead (beloved of the Australian Chamber Orchestra for impenetrable reasons) number: 2+2=5 – a thriller lasting a bit over three minutes from 21 years ago arranged by Australian-born US-based James Dobinson. Then we hear local Damian Barbeler‘s Night Birds of 2012 for two pianos: a 17-minute composition based on the sounds of the grey fantail. To end comes Kusama’s Garden by Australian writer Alex Turley; 12 minutes long and scored for two pianos in 2017 with a stereo electronics element. Tickets are $25 each, but also account for a 20 cent GST and $1.99 for Humanitix to direct towards literacy skills – to be developed in some unidentified section of the population (musicians?).

This program will be repeated on Sunday August 25 at 10 pm.

THE FLYING ORCHESTRA

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Queensland Symphony Orchestra Studio, South Bank

Wednesday August 28 at 9:30 am

This event is recommended for primary school children, who are being charged $35 each. If you’re an interested member of the public, forget it: the only way you get in is through a school application. As I understand it, the 40-minute entertainment revolves around a picture book by children’s author Clare McFadden, but it’s hard to work out anything from the author’s website which is set in a faint grey print. It seems that the orchestra represents the fact that music is a state of being, as the Buddhists would believe. That is, music is universally present, which is just groovy and oh so real. Whether this will result in 40 minutes of Cagean atmospherics or a series of white noise capsules to entertain the young troops, I don’t know. But it’s more than probable that the QSO will play a more mundane role in the formation of entertaining sounds to brighten an otherwise dull morning. The conductor for this event is New Zealander Vincent Hardaker whom I don’t know but who has been active in conducting circles since 2014. Furthermore, supervising the progress of this saga is Karen Kyriacou of whom I’ve heard through her recent association with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra as a sort of educational artist in residence. And it seems as though McFadden herself will be present at this aural realization of her award-winning magnum opus.

This program will be repeated on Wednesday August 28 at 11:30 am, and on Thursday August 29 at 9:30 am and 11:30 am.