Month: June 2025

Diary July 2025

cliveoconnell

MOZART AND THE MENDELSSOHNS

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Melbourne Town Hall

Thursday July 3 at 7:30 pm

What used to be simply called the Town Hall series has apparently been amplified in its geographical scope but the essentials remain the same. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is playing under its chief conductor, Jaime Martin, but the program isn’t as barnstormingly popular as you’d expect., Yes, the forces wind up this evening’s entertainment with Felix Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony in A Major (well, half of it is) of 1833 which can never wear out its welcome from the first frothing wind chords to the emphatic saltarello‘s last belt. But, we begin with a true rarity, even in these anti-misogynist times: Fanny Mendelssohn’s Overture in C, written in 1832 and an intriguing chronological partner for her brother’s brilliant symphony. As for the essential concerto, the MSO offers four of its principals – oboe Johannes Grosso, clarinet David Thomas, bassoon Jack Schiller, horn Nicolas Fleury – as soloists in Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante of 1778 . . . or is it really his? A lot of water has passed under the musicological bridge and the absence of an original score is only the start of questions about this quadruple concerto’s provenance. Standard tickets run from $45 to $105, concessions are a princely $5 lower, and anyone under 18 gets in for $20, but let these last beware of the $7 transaction fee that costs a third of your admission cost – that’s the way to get the young interested.

This program will be repeated in the Frankston Arts Centre on Friday July 4 at 7:30 pm, and at the Ulumbarra Theatre in Bendigo on Saturday July 5 at 7:30 pm.

JESS HITCHCOCK & PENNY QUARTET

Melbourne Recital Centre and Musica Viva Australia

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Monday July 7 at 7:30 pm

I wrote about this event (see March Diary 2025) while still living on the Gold Coast (ah, those halcyon years of heat and humidity) when the program was played at the Queensland Conservatorium on March 4 It seems a long time to be still on the road four months later for Jess Hitchcock and the Penny Quartet but here they are, fleshing out the Melbourne Recital Centre‘s monthly program and still (co-)sponsored by Musica Viva Australia. I have a feeling that the original program was altered before the March recital, but in its present format, nine composers offer arrangements of Hitchcock songs, including three by the singer herself as May Lyon, Matt Laing and Nicole Murphy have disappeared from the original list. It’s to be hoped that the Penny personnel stay the same – violins Amy Brookman and Madeleine Jevons, viola Anthony Chataway, cello Jack Ward – especially for the program’s final offering: a string quartet from American writer Caroline Shaw called Plan and Elevation: The Grounds of Dumbarton Oaks, written in 2015. Admission for your regular patron moves between $65 and $125, concessions on a sliding scale that operates between $56 and $110, the Under 40 bracket get in for $49, while First Nations peoples from any country only have to stump up $15. Your transaction fee at this site falls anywhere between $4 and $8.50 (a riveting exercise in fiscal logistics, reminiscent of Trump’s mercurial tariff rates) which is hard cheese for the Aboriginal, Torres Strait, Maori etc. patrons.

FOLK REIMAGINED: EAST IN SYMPHONY

Ryan Maxwell Event

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Wednesday July 9 at 7:30 pm

What you’re offered here is a transformation exercise: Chinese folk-song into symphonic form. The executants in this enterprise are the Guizhou Chinese Orchestra and a body called The Australia Orchestra. The visiting ensemble was founded in 2003 and is conducted by Long Guohong in its current Sydney and Melbourne appearances. The local group cannot be traced online (well, I can’t find it) but is to be conducted by Luke Spicer, who is a well-known presence in Sydney for work with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Opera Australia. And what do you hear? For openers, there’s the Guizhou Kam Grand Choir which will probably be singing a cappella. Then comes that well-worn fusion classic, the Yellow River Piano Concerto, followed by a symphonic sequence of scenes from four great classical Chinese novels, and more solid orchestra (which one?) work in a fantasy springing from the gaming activity Black Myth: Wukong which itself has to do with an Eastern monkey hero questing in the West. For soloists, you will hear Jiang Kemei playing a concerto called Deep in the Night on her jinghu (two-stringed violin) and Zhang Qianyang on the suona (double-reed oboe/horn) in one of the most famous pieces for her instrument, A Hundred Birds Paying Homage to the Phoenix. Admission costs between $35 and $169 with some piddling concession reductions; groups of ten-plus and students pay between $55 and $107. On top of this, factor in that swinging transaction fee of between $4 and $8.50; could that impost factor in Chalmers’ tax review, I wonder?

PASTORALE

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall

Thursday July 10 at 7:30 pm

Since I’ve been away, Sophie Rowell has taken over the artistic directorship of the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra as well as having recently been posted to the role of associate professor of violin and chamber music at the University of Melbourne. She’s been busy over the years, what with the Tankstream/Australian String Quartet and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra co-concertmaster position for eight years. Tonight, she takes her charges through two string masterworks at either end of the program: first, Barber’s Adagio for Strings of 1936 – a favourite when Americans want to be serious or funereal – and Tchaikovsky’s lush Serenade for Strings, written in 1880. Both of these are more than familiar, so it’s as well that the central works offer some variation. Aura Go will be soloist in Doreen Carwithen’s Concerto for piano and strings which the British composer wrote in 1948 and which is probably here enjoying its Australian premiere. The work’s three movements appear to be worked out in solid neo-classical style with definite tonalities obtaining across its half-hour length; there’s even a good old-fashioned cadenza in the Moderato e deciso conclusion. And the program takes its title from a Peter Sculthorpe excerpt, the central segment of his String Quartet No. 4 written in 1949, then upgraded to string orchestra standing in 2013. It has an even more checkered history in Sculthorpe’s own recollections. but it might well be his last ‘composition’, as the MCO publicity has it. Still, as it’s only about 4 minutes long, who wants to argue? Adult tickets range from $72 tp $124 with some reasonable concession reductions and a flat charge of $30 for students and children. The booking fee on the seat I selected was $7, which – to put it mildly – is excessive for the work involved.

This program will be repeated on Sunday July 13 at 2:30 pm.

YINYA DANA: LIGHTING THE PATH

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall,, Arts Centre Melbourne

Friday July 11 at 7:30 pm

In honouring the 50th anniversary of NAIDOC Week, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is paying an exceptional honour to Deborah Cheetham Fraillon whose compositions are the focus of this event. I’ve not encountered any of her music but I suppose that’s because her recent grounds of operation have been in Melbourne, particularly with the MSO who appointed her to a five-year tenure of their First Nations Creative Chair in 2021; I did experience her work as a soprano with Short Black Opera but that was some time ago. Details about what is actually being performed tonight are hard to find. but the range operates between her 2018 Eumeralla: a war requiem for peace (two movements of which were recorded by the ABC in 2020) and last year’s Earth. A pair of conductors share the honours: Aaron Wyatt and Nicolette Fraillon. as for soloists, Cheethem Fraillon will be singing, as will vocalists Jess Hitchcock and Lillie Walker. That sine qua non of Aboriginal serious music events, William Barton, brings his didgeridoo to the mix of colours and the MSO Chorus is joined by members of the Dhungala Children’s Choir, an offshoot of Cheetham Fraillon’s opera company. Standard tickets range from $68 to $113; concession prices are $5 cheaper which should bring on a chorus of that old favourite, Thanks for Nothing. Mob Tix are available for $25, but how do you prove your standing? Just be prepared to hand over the $7 transaction fee, whether you’re a member of the First Nations or a Johnny Come Lately like me.

BENAUD TRIO 20TH ANNIVERSARY CONCERT

Melbourne Recital Centre

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday July 12 at 3 pm

Yes, it’s a celebration of a kind, if a short one as it’s only an hour long: no interval, quick in, quick out. The members of the Benaud Trio – brothers Lachlan Bramble (violin) and Ewen Bramble (cello), Amir Farid (piano) – still maintain a relationship; although the brothers are both associate principals with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and Farid is based in New York. They’re playing two works: Dvorak’s Dumky of 1891, which they have played here before in the heyday of their Benaud-Melbourne years; and Jakub Jankowski‘s Piano Trio No. 2. The latter is an Adelaide composer with a modest body of work to his name. The Benauds seem to have premiered this particular trio in 2018, a few months after the debut of Jankowski’s Piano Trio No. 1 from the Seraphim Trio. Now the piece is back for another airing. It would be handy if more information was available about the piece, but background is sadly lacking. Entry is a flat $50, concession $40, and you have to negotiate the Recital Centre’s odd ‘Transaction Fee’ charge that runs from $4 to $8.50 according to some criterion that escapes me.

This program will be repeated at 6 pm.

FIESTA! DVORAK’S CELLO CONCERTO & CHINDAMO

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday July 17 at 7:30 pm

This was originally labelled ‘Journey to the Americas’ but has since been recast more sensibly so that it covers the entire night’s work. Yes, there is some emphatically relevant-to-the-Americas music on the program in Peruvian composer Jimmy Lopez’s Fiesta! Four Pop Dances for Orchestra, written in 2007 and the writer’s most popular work, here promoted by tonight’s conductor (and fellow-Peruvian), Miguel Harth-Bedoya who commissioned it. Joe Chindamo’s Americas connection might emerge in his Concerto for Orchestra of 2021, composed for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra; most of us would associate him with the field of jazz, and so easily American. And then we come to the large-framed Cello Concerto by Dvorak, completed in 1895 and written while the composer was living in New York during his last unhappy months directing the National Conservatory of Music. Here is a rich score loaded with melody and a splendid vehicle for its soloist, who on this occasion is German musician Raphaela Gromes; I believe she has made tours of North and Central America. Standard tickets range from $51 to $139; concession card holders might as well pay full price because their deduction is only $5. If you’re under 18, you are charged $20, which makes the compulsory transaction fee of $7 sting all the more sharply.

This program will be repeated in Costa Hall, Geelong on Friday July 18 at 7:30 pm and back in Hamer Hall on Saturday July 19 at 2 pm.

AXIS MUNDI

ELISION Ensemble

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Friday July 18 at 7 pm

The ELISION Ensemble is almost 40 years old, which puts into perspective a fair few of us who were around in its heady early years. Speaking of the few, some of the original musicians survive, including founder Daryl Buckley who remains one of the most adventurous guitarists I’ve come across. A fair bit of tonight’s program is up-to-date, beginning and ending with 2025 compositions. Melbourne-based academic Charlie Sdraulig‘s fresh Air opens us up in a septet (possibly) for flute (all three played by Paula Rae), bassoon (Ben Roidl-Ward), saxophone (Joshua Hyde), trumpet (Tristram Williams), trombone (Benjamin Marks), violins (interesting as there’s only one such player listed: Harry Ward) and contrabass (Kathryn Schulmeister). Then clarinet Richard Haynes performs John Rodgers’ Ciacco solo for bass clarinet of 1999 before we encounter Mexican-born Julio Estrada‘s yuunohui’ehecatl (2010?) to be played by trumpet, trombone, bassoon and contrabass. After interval comes the program’s title work, written for solo bassoon by ELISION evergreen Liza Lim in 2012-13, followed by indigenous composer Brenda Gifford‘s new score Wanggadhi for saxophone, trumpet, trombone and bass. Then we hear Victor Arul‘s Barrelled space featuring bass clarinet, saxophone, bassoon, trombone, percussion (Aditya Bhat and/or Peter Neville), and bass. If you haven’t had enough, you can wait around for a post-recital performance of Double Labyrinth v2, a new construct by British writer Bryn Harrison that calls for alto and bass flute, clarinet d’amore (Haynes had one made about five years ago), clarinet in A, flugelhorn (Williams, presumably), harp (Marshall McGuire), percussion and violin. Tickets are $55, concession $45, and don’t forget that peculiar transaction fee of between $4 and $8.50 that slugs every order you make.

MOZART’S CLARINET

Musica Viva Australia

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Tuesday July 22 at 7 pm

A trio of specialists take us through a set of works by Mozart and Beethoven in this latest Musica Viva recital. The entertainment features Nicola Boud on ‘historical’ clarinets, Sydney Symphony Orchestra cellist Simon Cobcroft, and Erin Helyard playing the fortepiano. I think their combined aim is to give us the experience of listening to this music as it would have sounded when it was written – a delight for musicologists, an aural adjustment or three for the rest of us. We begin with Beethoven’s Sonata for Fortepiano and Horn Op. 17 of 1800, arranged for basset horn (with the composer’s approval, apparently) by Josef Friedlowsky in about 1802. A touch earlier in his life, the composer wrote his Variations on Ein Madchen oder Weibchen from Mozart’s The Magic Flute for cello and piano in 1798; a puzzle as it’s catalogued as his Op. 66. All three players are involved in Mozart’s Kegelstatt Trio of 1786, even if the original called for a viola, not a cello. Back to Beethoven for the Aria con variazioni (four of them, with a coda) tacked on to the Three Duos for Clarinet and Bassoon WoO 27 and written somewhere between 1790 and 1792; you assume Cobcroft will stand in for the lower voice. Helyard then performs the familiar Sonata in C K. 545, composed for all piano learners’ delight in 1788, and the ensemble concludes this exercise with Beethoven’s Gassenhauer Trio Op. 11, written in 1797 with clarinet, cello and keyboard as the designated players. Tickets range from $20 to $153, and, on booking, you will encounter the $7 transaction fee: a disappointment we have always with us.

A GHOSTLY AFTERNOON

Selby & Friends

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre Wednesday July 23 at 2 pm

This recital features two young musicians in the latest Selby & Friends recital. Violinist Natalie Chee, Sydney-born and recently nominated as the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s concertmaster for 2026, and cellist Benett Tsai, fresh from delivering the Saint-Saens Concerto No. 1 with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, will partner with Kathryn Selby in three piano trios. First comes an arrangement by the Linos Trio from 2001 of Debussy’s Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune – one of the more formidable works that ushered in a new musical era as far back as 1894. From the program title, you would have guessed that Beethoven’s Op. 70 No. 1 was on track for a hearing, and so it is although perhaps not as spectral as it seemed to listeners in 1809. To end, the group takes on the gripping Shostakovich Piano Trio No. 2, a 1944 work that never fails to absorb its listeners from the keening cello harmonics of the opening to the three last bars of soft E Major chords that offer a close but no consolation. Entry ranges from $63 for a student (and a concession card holder), to $79 for a senior, to $81 an adult. You’ll also pay between $4 and $8.50 if you order online or by phone. What if you show up at the box office, cash in hand? Worth a try.

This program will be repeated at 7 pm.

Mixed stop-gap

cliveoconnell

ACO UNLEASHED

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Sunday June 22, 2025

Satu Vanska

Something of a grab-bag, this program. That’s understandable since the original guest director, violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, bowed out due to an injury of some kind and the Australian Chamber Orchestra had to come up with something else that appealed to its clientele. Pushing forward the ensemble’s personnel in another celebration of the organization’s 50th birthday, artistic director Richard Tognetti absented himself from this particular felicity and gave three violinists and the principal cello a generous exposure in two concertos, as well as granting Satu Vanska the opportunity to outline her interpretation of Ravel’s Tzigane of 1924 with a reduced orchestra of strings, celesta and timpani/percussion.

As well as flaunting some front-line talent, the ACO demonstrated its collective skills in two arrangements: one by Tognetti of Beethoven’s String Quartet in F minor of 1810, the other the C minor Quartettsatz by Schubert from ten years later which was string-orchestrated by an anonymous musician. Both are short but the players attacked them with that carefully honed brusqueness which is a characteristic of this body when confronted with composers of this stature in curt mode. And Tognetti obviously takes pleasure in transcribing masterworks of this level for his forces who usually make them seamless accomplishments.

But you come across a different creature when you move from the single line to the many, no matter how determined and aggressive the groups of five violins, for example, in Beethoven’s opening Allegro. The first violin octaves leaps that start in bar 3 lose bite, as does the all-in-together menace of bars 18 to 20 when four whip-cracks become a sound-wall. The listener can sense the communal determination of output in the string orchestra format but you sacrifice an individuality of character that generates the main interest in string quartet recitals.

Well, I’ve made this comment before and it probably borders on the pointless, particularly because it could be worse. We could be hearing arrangements of music that relies on large-scale and diffuse orchestral timbres, like Rimsky’s Scheherazade, the Pines of Rome, or Berg’s Op. 6. Actually, no: we couldn’t: that’s several bridges too far. But there’s nothing to stop a spread into the Schubert Quintet which I’ve heard in full orchestra format; or the Brahms sextets which have also been converted for the larger string-rich palette.

And on you could go. But this predilection for regular and familiar quartets by Beethoven, Janacek, or Bartok is all more than a little disappointing as the repertoire for string orchestra is large. And, if you’re going to faff around with the pre-existing, I’d welcome a bit more adventure – like reducing Penderecki’s Threnody for your available forces, or doing the same for Boulez’s Livre pour cordes, or expanding the Schoenberg quartets, especially No. 2.

In any event, much of this afternoon’s activity comprised arrangements. We started with Bach’s Concerto for three violins, a reconstruction of a work using three keyboard soloists. Vanska, Helena Rathbone and Anna da Silva Chen (the ACO’s latest full-time member) performed the individual lines with an agreeable self-appreciation of their function in the complex, yet not slavishly imitating each other in the frequent staggered entries with which Bach peppers his work. Vanska gave us a firm exhibition across the opening movement, including two striking exposed solos (bars 63 to 72, bars 115 to 119), while Rathbone and Chen made exemplary complements, to the gratifying point where you could experience three differing styles of attack and release.

Still, the intriguing movement of this concerto is its finale with the potent solo for Violin 1 from bar 141 to bar 174, although not before some eloquent exposed passages for her partners. By the time we arrived here in this second public rendition of the program, the ensemble showed at its best through a forceful oscillation between ritornello and solo, all three of them vaulting into action with gusto, especially Chen who exercised an attractive personality here, both earthy and buoyant.

Vanska bowled into Tzigane without waiting for the greeting applause to die away, making fierce work of that vigo4rous opening of 27 bars on the G string only. You were left in no doubt that this player had the mastery of the thing as she handled its challenges with a precise ferocity and demonstrated for one of the few times in my experience how cimbalom-like that moment of left-hand pizzicato could be. Yet, behind the bravura and theatricality, I couldn’t help wondering if the player was showing us how satirical this piece of Gypsy music is with its fits and starts, not to mention its employment of all those Liszt-to-Sarasate Romany tropes that Ravel was utilizing to construct such a clever exercise in brittle musical frivolity.

Bernard Rofe, the ACO’s Artistic Planning Manager, carried out the arrangement of this exuberant gem and gave a large part of its colour spectrum to the celesta, here handled by regular ACO violinist Ike See. I suppose nobody in the ACO doubles as a harpist; that instrument sees far more action in the original than the 16 bars of light colour contributed by the celesta between Nos. 14 and 15 in the Durand score of 1924. Not that this imbalance in the back-drop matters that much when the spotlight shines almost uninterruptedly on the soloist and Vanska showed plenty of flair and apparent enjoyment in her work right up to the rather brutal three pizzicato quadruple-stop chords that finish the piece.

If you accept the character change of the string quartet arrangements, then you would have been impressed yet again by the ACO’s outlining of the Beethoven and Schubert program components. As you might have expected, the most persuasive section of the Serioso came in the Allegretto where the key is to keep the piece in fluid motion. I think the texture cut down at one point to a series of solo entries – the fugato at bar 34? – but the quiet, filled-out nature of the movement’s harmonic movement with its sideways slips gave us a welcome tranquillity between two driving sets of pages.

I enjoyed the Schubert movement because of its innate qualities that seem to lend it more easily to the orchestral framework, like the oscillation between bustle, as at the start, and the sudden soaring aspiration of the second subject in bar 27. Later, the rapid outward and inner surges between bars 77 and 80 proved striking in their unanimity of production and dynamic management, as were the transparent first violins’ step-by-step gradual descents across bars 105 to 124. It’s a striking fragment in its mode of address, making a virtue of simplicity . . . which is probably why it seemed more suitable for an expansion of forces.

To end, Timo-Veikko Valve fronted the Australian premiere of his compatriot/relative Jaakko Kuusisto’s Cello Concerto of 2019 which is scored for an orchestra of strings, timpani (here played by Brian Nixon) and percussion (the evergreen Daryl Pratt). This proved to be a gracious, expansive construct in an orthodox three movements, its progress outlined with exemplary earnestness by the soloist. The most lasting impression from this new (to us) composition is of a lyrical fluency coupled with harmonic sophistication, but Kuusisto’s vocabulary impresses as conservative: there are no disruptive signs in this work which takes its place in a long chain of such concertos which offer expressive gifts for their soloists while the orchestral support holds some challenges. Will we hear it again? Possibly, I suppose, but in my gut I think that this concerto might remain a local rarity.

Nevertheless, it was refreshing to hear an unmediated composer speaking his original tongue without reconstruction from any other source. Further, it brought this celebration to a satisfying conclusion, giving the ACO the opportunity to engage with a contemporary voice, sadly stilled before reaching its full complement of years, yet fortunate in these exponents who take up their work with exemplary devotion and relish.

No cease from exploration

cliveoconnell

FLUTE PERSPECTIVES VOLUME 4

Derek Jones, Jerry Wong, Joshua Hyde

Move Records MD 3476

Following his own particular path, flautist Derek Jones presents a fourth collection of music written for his instrument by (generally, in this instance) living local composers. His associate pianist is a carry-over from the preceding album, Jerry Wong, and the works on this particular CD cover a wide time-span. The oldest work is venerable Sydney composer Anne Boyd‘s Bali moods No. 1 of 1987; Boyd has also featured on the first and second in Jones’ Flute Perspectives discs. She is closely followed in time by Keith Humble’s five-movement Sonata for flute and piano of 1991, written four years before this notable writer’s death. Alan Holley‘s River Song and Rosella date from 1997 and 1999 respectively. Then we jump to Harry Sdraulig‘s Sonata for flute and piano of 2014, before coming to last year’s Firefly’s Dream by Linda Verrier (a writer who also featured on the previous Flute Perspectives CD) and Folding outward into traces by Joshua Hyde who features on the CD itself, escorting Jones electronically through his score.

Boyd is of the school that sees this country’s musical creativity as indebted to/part of Asia. I don’t know if this creed has maintained its former strong influence; there’s little sign of it in the current crop of younger composers, but Boyd has maintained the faith which also formed part of the inspiration for her teacher, Peter Sculthorpe. Bali rounds No. 1 is part of a triptych of flute+piano pieces that take their impetus from Indonesian sounds and modes. In form, it’s like a rondo with a gamelan-type scene-setting from the piano before the flute enters to toy with the piece’s opening pattern. This atmospheric segment recurs after two cadenzas for flute, one of them with some piano gong-chords, the whole coming to a fade-out conclusion.

As with several of Boyd’s works, this Indonesian-Balinese character is deftly accomplished in a score with a quiet attractiveness, its peaceful progress brought to stasis at the two cadenzas which sound free-form as far as rhythm is concerned. Worlds away in every respect is Humble’s sonata which is more attuned to the world of Boulez’s Sonatine pour flute et piano of 1946 in its bursts of action from both performers. You might expect suggestions of twelve-tone and you’d be right, but the disposition of the series is free-form, as far as I can make out – at least in the opening movement..

The abrupt fits and starts in an improbable rhythmic scheme dissipate near the movement’s end, which is dead slow and sombre. Much the same process occurs in the brief second movement which opens with splashes of sound that seem more formally organized than in the preceding pages. But there is a similar reduction in action to a quiet, brooding conclusion. With the third movement, you first encounter a similar landscape to those of its predecessors, if the process appears to be more prone to an even keener (or more practicable) synchronicity. The players’ mutual mobility comes to a halt for a long flute solo which again moves us into darker-hued territory with few signs of freneticism. A near-funereal coda from Wong concludes this pivotal segment of the work.

Humble’s brief fourth movement sees an ongoing juxtaposition of the leap-frogging calisthenics of post-Webern chamber music and a placid oasis or two of firm pulse and support rather than the bleep-and-commentary nature of the mise-en-scene in the score’s separate parts so far. Yet again, the final stages of these pages are more restrained, near-formal in some scale-like steps from Jones. And the not-quite-as-brief Final follows the same format with a pointillistic opening that gradually gives way to murmurs from both instruments. Not to say that all five movements are replicas of each other but the shape of each one has much in common with its fellows.

Still, this sonata shows the composer in a sharp-edged light with a more placid emotional aspect than in the handful of his works that I’ve encountered over the last near-60 years. But it speaks a European language in its active moments, as you’d expect from a writer who spent a significant amount of time and enjoyed success in France. Jolley’s two solo flute pieces are of a different heritage, one that sounds local in its suggestions of Australian Bucolic, as in River song which sets up its central motifs and more or less elaborates on them without straying too far from the originals. It’s a French-indebted work also, but more Debussy than Dutilleux and making no claims to rhythmic spasms or aggressive sound-splays.

The second of Jolley’s solos, Rosella, is just as concentrated in its material disposition with some more florid outbursts and its concentration is more noticeable as it’s less than half the length of River song. You won’t heard rosella sound transcriptions but a series of images that suggest the bird’s mercurial change of life-pattern, if delineated in a tautly stretched aural canvas. Both pieces show a solid workmanship in construction, as well as the composer’s talent at suggesting aspects of the bush and its denizens. Jones gives eloquent and sympathetic readings of these scenic pieces, engaging them both with a calm authority.

The sonata by Sdraulig is an early work, if his online catalogue is any indication as it comes from his second year of compositional operations. It’s in four movements – Prelude, Badinerie, Romanza, Finale – and the first two are brief while the last is the longest and something of a mixed bag. Nevertheless, the work has a clear shape and direct mode of address even while the composer explores his possibilities. For instance, the Prelude sets up a bitonal piano pattern of soft semiquavers in 5/8 before the flute enters with high sustained notes that acquire rapid-fire ornamentation. But despite a central complexity before reverting to the opening Moderato e molto misterioso, these pages have a firm character and ease of utterance.

The only badinerie I know is the final movement from Bach’s Orchestral Suite in B minor with its grasshopper flute line. Sdraulig applies a light fragility to his at the start with a repeated note in 6/8 (I think) to begin, skirmishing with the piano before setting out on a rapid-fire journey that offers stronger affirmations of the opening pattering and some assertive striding around for both players. Not that the performance here is forced but there are a few passages that come across as laboured and I can’t determine whether it comes from the performers’ determination or some awkwardness in Sdraulig’s writing. But the movement’s bookend pages are feather-light and deft.

Sdraulig’s Romanza presents as a slow waltz, one that meanders harmonically through the piano’s initial statement, immediately mirrored by the piano. Gradually, the intensity deepens and the movement rises to an emphatic climactic point before receding and returning to its origins in a kind of resigned leave-taking that eventually comes to a settlement. You could view it as a song, a lyric of both casualness and intensity. But the last movement is an assemblage where you can pick out some recurring features but the dynamic and emotional landscape is highly varied: fom a rapid-fire opening that recalls the Badinerie to long melodic arcs for the flute (including one exposed solo) that recall the Romanza. I think any listener can detect six or seven sections that are juxtaposed but, despite this variety, the effect is not really successful. Jones and Wong sound stodgy in some of the quick-fire passages and a lack of light touches, of sparkiness prove disappointing.

A more successful blending can be found in Linda Verrier’s piece where the atmosphere is pervasively melancholic. Where, in the summers of her youth, the composer saw fireflies galore, returning years later she finds only one. In any case, she celebrates the insect with a mobile line for alto flute, realized through plenty of trills and repeated notes to suggest a visible presence. At the same time, she seems to be lamenting its solitariness in strophes that come close to an elegy. To her credit, Verrier contrives to keep these two strands in balance in a score that taps into this instrument’s capacity for darker, chalumeau-type colours.

Hyde’s construct is the longest track on this CD, even if to my ears it splays out a limited amount of substance, some of which is extended well beyond its power to engage. Jones plays multiphonic chords or intervals while Hyde treats the given material electronically. For the first half of the work, the emphasis is on amplifying or subduing different layers of the flute/electronic construct. Sound strata come and go as lights do in an aurora. Later, additional sounds enter the mix; one sounds like a chainsaw but might only be an agglomeration of pitches; towards the end, we are hit with what sound like motorcycle exhaust noises.

Not that this welding of live and electronics is that novel a concept or practice. But there’s something endearing in Hyde’s exercise where you can hear the effort involved in his and Jones’ folding outward, taking notes and welding them into an unusual composite. Well, these days there’s not much that’s unusual but this work pursues its traces with determination and invention. In its concluding phases, Jones is subsumed into the texture, his original sounds mere trace elements in the sound environment. It’s a fine way to bring us up-to-date, concluding this latest exploration in Jones’ corner of Australian music.

Canons by the score

cliveoconnell

A THOUSAND BEAUTIFUL AND GRACEFUL INVENTIONS

The University of Queensland Chamber Singers

Move Records MCD 663

As you can see from the cover, this CD is concerned with canons from the eras when this device was integral to choral composition. What we hear comes from research conducted by Denis Collins and Jason Stoessel; both are academics with Collins an associate professor of musicology at the University of Queensland, Stoessel also an associate professor of musicology and digital humanities at the University of New England. In combination, these two are the CD’s artistic directors, even if the actual man out front is Graeme Morton, senior lecturer at Queensland University and probably the most well-credentialed choral conductor in that state.

In its display of canons, the CD holds 17 tracks. Six of these feature works by Palestrina and Agostini: first, a Sanctus and Agnus Dei from the former’s Missa Sacerdotes Domini; then, from Agostini’s Missa Pro vigiliis ac feriis in canone, the Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus Dei and Sit nomen Domini which is a pontifical blessing that sends everybody home in high ecclesiastical spirits. Preceding these samples of canon in late Renaissance choral music, the University of Queensland Chamber Singers wend their placid way through another Kyrie and Sanctus from a 14th century manuscript found in the Cathedral of Tournai, written by anonymous hands (or a hand); the original manuscripts found between the pages of the celebrated Mass of Tournai. Then follows a group of three canonic pieces by Matteo da Perugia, Du Fay and Okeghem, a set of three chansons by Jean Mouton, before another triptych by Prioris, Josquin and Willaert.

It’s with reference to the last of these that the CD finds its title: a quote from Gioseffo Zarlino, the 16th century composer/theorist who was one of Willaert’s pupils and who wrote of his teacher in glowing terms: ‘One can hear daily many compositions by the most excellent Adrian Willaert which, in addition to being full of a thousand beautiful and graceful inventions, are eruditely and elegantly composed’. Well, you can’t say fairer than that, can you? But, as with every composer here, the emphasis is on a particular type of invention – the use of canon and the complexities that involves

Such complications start straight away. The Tournai Kyrie is for three lines but the canons are eventually sung simultaneously so that, despite the linear mesh, everybody sings the same words at the same time. It all works out neatly with nine sections – three Kyries, three Christes, three Kyries – and you can hear repetitions of patterns as the lines wind around each other, more obvious with some rapid semi-ornamental work in the final pages that is shared across the parts. When we get to the Sanctus track, your reception becomes easier as the entries into the canon are staggered (as in the Kyrie) but the canonic material is rather plain. Still, the same principle applies about the words which are (generally) sung simultaneously.

These opening tracks offer the UQ singers in exposed fashion, the Kyrie involving female singers, the Sanctus/Benedictus given to the males. Both groups are solid enough, the females having one individual whose timbre shines through at certain points, while the men have all the emotional control of a French monastery group from those mid-20th century recordings of Gregorian chant.

Matteo da Perugia’s Gloria Spiritus et alme presents as a simple section of the Common of the Mass but with interpolations at the end of certain lines which stand as praises to the Virgin; rather exceptional in the context of this extolling of the Triune God. Like a rather striking sample of conductus, this piece speaks with remarkable vivacity, clear in all its parts, but I think that might be due to the two dancing upper lines being sung by individual sopranos. Here, the canon is located in two slow-moving bass parts; for this impatient ear, you’d need a score to trace it.

Dufay’s Gloria ad modum tubae sets up two canons: the first is between two upper voices who follow each other without trickery or, for that matter, much melodic intrigue, while a pair of bass lines sing the same two notes in imitation of those promised trumpets; might have been better to use the actual instruments. But the effect is breezy and forthright: one of the quickest Glorias I’ve come across and handled with excellent pitching by the Singers’ women.

We move to the secular with Okeghem’s Prenez sur moi, a buoyant canon for three voices in which the UQ tenors acquit themselves very well, as do the sopranos, although the alto line is very restrained in volume. This is a sample of that generous well-crafted language, musical and literary, that exemplifies good old-fashioned cortoisie, if with a dose of cynicism, but expertly delivered here – twice, as it happens, as the singers repeat the piece.

Mouton’s three chansons begin with En venant de Lyon which documents a vignette – observing Robin and Marion up to some bawdy congress in a thicket. The canon is for four lines, each following the other in quick succession as though to delineate the rapid nature of the focal pair’s activities. The double canon that follows, Qui ne regrettroit on the death of fellow-composer Antoine Fevin, shows a more serious aspect, the soprano (cantus) in canon with the tenor, alto and bass pursuing each other in this calm, expressive elegy. Finally, Adieu mes amours presents another double canon, sopranos and altos dealing with one, tenors and basses with the other, all matched in a seamless web that sets forth plainly the composer/poet’s humorous farewell to life because the king hasn’t paid him.

The shadowy figure of Prioris (Johannes? Denis?) produced a brief sample of splendour in his Ave Maria setting which is an eight voice work featuring four canons. I have to admit that, while the first two canons can be followed part of the way through this brief score, the other two are almost impossible to pick out, even if you have the four Incipit phrases in front of you. For all that, the Chamber Singers invest it with a placid fervour, their output measured and finely-shaped even if the top sopranos dominate the texture.

Josquin, the master of the canon in every age, is represented in this tour d’horizon by his six-line setting of Se congie prens, which deals with a lover departing the scene before further suffering at the hands of his cold non-inamorata. The program notes speak of a canon between the two middle voices, but I can only hear one between what my score calls the Quinta Pars and the Sexta Pars, and an intermittent one between the two lowest voices (tenor and bass). The construction of his piece rewards study but in actual performance all you concentrate on is the countertenor part, here sung by some confident tenors who cope with a cruelly athletic line to fine effect showing only one sign of strain.

The mellifluous Willaert hits us with a double canon in his motet Christi virgo dilectissima; soprano and bass form one pairing, alto and tenor the other. In this performance, I think the alto line features male voices but I could be wrong, being sadly unfamiliar with the sound quality of the Queensland mezzo voice. This composer moves on from the rhythmic simplicity of his predecessors and has the lines operating in different time zones, adding contrapuntal complexity to the mixture. This is one of the more substantial tracks so far, helped in that by being divided into two segments to reflect the textual matter although both conclude with the same plea for help.

The interpretation is a strait-laced one with the dynamic range kept limited and that serves to underline the composer’s calm pace of inventiveness. Then we come to Palestrina, from whose Missa Sacerdotes Domini we hear the Sanctus and Agnus Dei. I won’t insist that we’ve come to a new plane of creativity, but it’s certainly different in its ease of utterance and the actual presence of six interdependent and independent lines. The opening sounds like a canon involving all the voices, but you could say the same about any number of Palestrina masses that open with the same scrap and then move onto their own paths that imitate details from each other without strictly following the set line.

When we reach the Pleni sunt caeli, the vocal lines cut to three and here the canon is emphatic but the male voices curvet around each other with apparent freedom, the UQ men having an amiable felicity with these pages. And you might be forgiven for seeking canons in the four-part Benedictus but it comes down to imitative entries that veer off onto individual trajectories. With the Agnus Dei, the singers give us only one of the three sentences; understandable as Palestrina apparently didn’t supply a separate dona nobis pacem setting. I think that the canon here obtains between the pairs of tenors because, while everybody takes up the initial bass phrase, several voices dip out on their own excursions by the time we come to Qui tollis.

You think its all going to be plain sailing when you arrive at Paolo Agostini’s Mass which begins with a transparent canon for four voices in its Kyrie, all the more eloquent for its brevity and the clarity of its structure. And so it proves to be with the entries just as plain in the Sanctus, Osanna, and the two settings for the Benedictus – the first without basses, the second without sopranos. As in the Palestrina, the Singers give us only the first verse of the Agnus Dei, a movement in close canonic quarters with a particularly fine amplitude effect at the miserere nobis.

The Sit nomen Domini blessing is notable for the addition of an extra bass line which operates with its partner in a rich sequence of consecutive thirds while your regulation soprano, alto and bass voices outline the canon entries on top in a brief touch of sweet harmony to finish the disc. And, with a few exceptions, that is a lasting impression – one of brevity. The length of each track is not given in the accompanying booklet but my count puts the CD’s length at 47’34”; the longest track is the Willaert motet (7’01”), followed by Palestrina’s Sanctus (6’58”), with Perugian Matteo’s Gloria coming third (5’10). Two offerings come in at under a minute, five at under two minutes, five a bit over two minutes, with the remaining two averaging four minutes between them.

What you get is a well-sung set of choral canons, most of them traceable by the ear alone. It’s a fair mixture of the sacred and profane, although the former predominate. Further, the performances are secure and controlled; full marks to an organization that escaped my notice during the years I spent in the neighbourhood.. And further congratulations to the felicitous ease with which all concerned handle what could have been a dry academic exercise.