Author: 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.

BY THE WINDING RIVER

Lachlan Brown

Move Records MCD 652

I think this is the shortest of the three CDs of Lachlan Brown’s music issued recently in one fell swoop by Move Records; By the Winding River comes in at about 44 minutes. The 13 settings are of Chinese poets: six by Tu (Du) Fu, three by Ou Yang Hsiu (Xiu), two by Su Tung P’O (Su Shi) and one each from Li Ch’ing Chao (Qingzhao) and Mai (Mei) Yao Ch’en. As for participant musicians, these have appeared on one or both of the preceding Brown CDs: tenor Lyndon Green, soprano Jenna Roubos, pianist Len Vorster, and violinist George Vi.

Kenneth Rexroth’s translations are used, with no Mahler-like interpolations from the composer, even if the promotional material for this CD mentions Mahler and Das Lied von der Erde – the go-to score for a fusion of Chinese poetry and Western music. Indeed, Brown’s first song, Chang’s Hermitage by Tu Fu, the second-longest track on the album, speaks a kind of pentatonic language in both piano and vocal lines for long stretches, the piece a steadily pulsing commentary on self-isolation and its benefits as seen by an envying visitor. The song is dynamically restrained to match the quietly angular accompaniment and a vocal part full of repeated notes. It could be likened to Ravel’s La flute enchantee except for the absence of harmonic adventure.

Both this work and the following Green Jade Plum Trees in Spring (Ou Yang Hsiu) involve Green’s plangent tenor with Vorster accompanying, opening the second track with a one-hand (right, I suspect) outlining another pentatonic-suggestive melody that meanders pleasantly before the vocal entry, signalled by a more conventional underpinning. This song falls into two parts: the first a calm observation of the season’s fruitfulness; the second, a quieter evening scene where the human (tempting girls) appear and tint the landscape with warmer, more bass-heavy textures. This split personality of content is mildly mirrored in Brown’s harmonic vocabulary which enjoys the best of both worlds – suggestive Orientalism and French harmonic richness.

With the next song, Su Tung P’O’s Spring Festival, Green and Vorster come to a more straightforward compositional landscape where, for much of the time, three strands weave around each other, the keyboard being more mobile and steady in its regular quaver progress, the harmonic language firmly major key-centric. There’s a brusque shift of tonality in the last two lines, while the last itself – a kind of envoi – is unexpectedly passionate after an otherwise staid series of observations. The tenor’s output is framed by substantial prelude and postlude excursions.

Fisherman by Ou Yang Hsiu evokes a bleak scene, Green employing a small range while Vorster sets up a chain of drooping chords in a setting that attempts to depict a vague picture of a lone fisherman who can be faintly discerned in a landscape of high reeds, shrouding rain and secreting mist. This piece has a surprising effect: clear in every respect but emotionally veiled.

Apart from a short hymn-like passage near its conclusion, Farewell once more to my friend (Tu Fu) maintains the same pattern across its length of a left-hand rising arpeggio in pentatonic mode which works as a kind of binding cord for a lyric which is essentially nostalgic and regretful, the poet/singer happy for the meeting but almost in despair now that the good times have come to an end, probably never to be repeated. Brown doesn’t wallow in these depressing observations, although his low-pitched setting of the final line mirrors the poet’s pointed nihilism.

A change of pace now as soprano Roubos sings We Are Apart by Li Ch’ing Chao, the only female poet to grace the disc but her lines generate the composer’s longest response, albeit the concluding postlude is remarkably long. Here is an art song with no nationalistic colourations which might have been produced by a Delius aficionado if not for the chains of thirds that occur in Vorster’s right hand. Here you notice a peculiarity of Brown’s vocal line – repeated notes as the syllables glide past. You hear flickers of movement at some lines’ endings but you also come across a single note used for an entire line of these touching verses. The piano enjoys an extended solo before the final quatrain which finishes off the poet’s juxtaposition of nature and longing with luminous grief – and that, I suppose, is the rationale behind the lengthy concluding piano solo which offers its own harmonic ambiguity.

After this, naturally, we hear the CD’s shortest track in a playful Mai Yao Ch’en frippery, An excuse for not returning the visit of a friend. The reason for this social embarrassment is that the poet’s children are clinging to him – apparently not in fear but from that perverse affection which insists that a parent keep his focus where it belongs. Brown gives Vorster a lightly tripping accompaniment while Roubos vaults through her apology which at the end sounds ever so slightly manic.

Another Tu Fu meditation follows, this time Snow Storm which is unrelievedly negative, a series of observations of the natural world’s harshness and the futility of human contact. Brown’s piano accompaniment presents as a chain of ascending and sometimes descending arpeggio-type figures while Green’s tenor sets out a pretty dreary monologue with an odd attempt at word-painting on the word ‘coiling’. Its unfinished conclusion is echoed in the following The Spring will never reach me (Ou Yang Hsiu again) where Vorster’s piano ends the song with a kind of half-close. Here, Vi’s violin sounds as though it is being played at some distance from the central participants, oscillating between offering a linear support to piano,. then singer, then back again, etc. The harmonic vocabulary is bare but liable to resolve into concordances across this lyric of regretful nostalgia and longing for home in a bleak, unfriendly environment.

That delight in postludes becomes even more clear in Brown’s setting of another Tu Fu poem, By the winding river in which the instrumental post-lied commentary takes up almost half the track. Yet again, you are conscious of the composer’s preference for delivering whole lines on a single note; indeed, there are few requirements of Green to leap about his compass – just a spaced-out common chord or the shift of a 2nd but nothing to disturb the temperate self-questioning of the text which contrasts the universal quest for happiness with the writer’s own sacrifices for the sake of a career. As for the vocabulary, you can detect traces of Delius and Faure but the harmonic structures are simple when set alongside the chromatic slurries of these two formidable masters.

Nothing new arises with the setting of Su Tung P’O’s A walk in the Country. The piano provides a quaver support that stays in the same major key for much of the song while Green follows a (by now) predictable path with plenty of repeated notes and small excursions like the last two lines that involve two notes. The song moves pretty rapidly through the set lines and sets no problems for either executant. Much the same can be noted about the penultimate track, The House by the River (Tu Fu), in which the main interest comes from the initial rising tetrachord figure in Vorster’s part, across which Green sets out another quasi-recitative with few moments of linear curvature; see the last two lines (again) which phase out in a near-monotone before a postlude with one (possibly two) moments of harmonic interest, the merest frissons of change from the predictable.

Finally, Tu Fu’s South Wind involves both singers. Green sings the 8-line text, then Roubos joins him for a repeat, omitting one line for reasons that I can’t quite fathom. Suddenly we are translated to an atmosphere that is packed with Mendelssohnian sweetness, including some melting linear vocal 6ths and a fluent barcarolle-like accompaniment to this rather saccharine Spring scene complete with blossoms and coupling birdlife. It’s an amiable enough song and comes to me straight from the 1840s, making an odd conclusion to this collection that has veered most of the time to modal and pentatonic frugality.

What does all this amount to, once the 13 songs are over? Brown lives up to his claim of writing music in Romantic and Impressionist styles, and his take on Chinese poetry fits in with his chosen vocabularies. But the music is not original, despite some attempts to summon up your Oriental taste-buds. He is content to follow his masters – Mahler, Debussy, Delius – but he isn’t offering much else beyond imitation and faint reflection. As with the two preceding CDs recently issued of Brown’s music, you’ll find nothing to offend and not much to excite – just pleasant music performed with sympathy by under-stretched interpreters.

CHAMBER WORKS

Lachlan Brown

Move Records MCD 651

Here is another in the series of three CDs put out by Move, all dedicated to the works of Australian composer Lachlan Brown. These chamber scores are a bit of a mixed bag as far as format is concerned. You have four piano solos – three performed by Len Vorster, one by the composer. Brown’s String Quartet No. 1 is preceded by a brief piece for the same format (different performers) and a similar short work for guitar quartet. Two duets appear, one for harp and cello, the other for violin and piano. As well, two other solo tracks are included – one for organ, one for harp.

First of the piano solos is Vorster’s reading of Little Emily in the Garden which has a series of stepwise descending 7th chords as its main motif and stands as a sanitised piece of post-Impressionist composition, not exploring new ground but happy in its quiet sprightliness. Pushing the painting nomenclature even more closely is Monet’s Garden which is very close to a Debussy prelude/esquisse with carefully pointed arpeggios along harp lines and suggestions of foliage and water droplets to animate the original paintings – those that have a definite scene rather than the water-only mammoths I think saw decades ago in the Jeu de Paume (or perhaps it was l’Orangerie).

Third in the piano solos is A New Day, played by the composer. This is a restrained ramble tending to wander around a falling Major 2nd motif, generally confined to the middle and lower reaches of the instrument. What you hear sounds quite conventional, not virtuosic but a gentle lyric with limited ambition in a regular diatonic framework. Finally, Vorster returns for the most substantial of these products: A Passing Cloud – near 6 minutes of placid slow-waltzing that gets an idea, toys with it for a fair while, then moves to something else. It’s all rather like a Satie composition without the quirkiness of melody.

Beginning the album are harp Megan Reeve and cello Zoe Knighton with Early Spring. You might expect something bucolic, possibly suggestive of those gentle miniatures written by British composers to celebrate their own soporific countryside. Which is what you get, beginning with a gently arpeggiated supporting line from Reeve and a winding, mild melodic cello melody that could go on for miles. Knighton generates a finely shaped senior voice while Reeve enjoys two short breaks/cadenzas and has the final delicately flourished word.

George Vi and the composer present the Romance for violin and piano with earnest emotional commitment although the string line is liable to clumsy production; not in its tuning so much but in the conviction of its bowing. Mind you, the line moves into the instrument’s highest reaches pretty soon after the opening and rarely moves into the territory of the lowest, or even the D, string. Here is another, if more focused, meander for the melody line while the keyboard confines itself pretty much to background chords – like the harp in Early Spring, but more so. The final impression is of a genteel charm without much harmonic levity.

On the Promenade, the first and briefest of the quartets, employs the talents of Vi as first violin, Marianne Rothschild on second, Karen Columbine‘s viola and cello Michelle John. A neat little study in 3rds for the violins while the viola provides a rather aimless secondary melody line and the cello gives a pizzicato bass, this is – again – restrained and Anglophile in its language, leaving no lasting impression. Pavane is played by the Melbourne Guitar Quartet: Dan McKay, Jeremy Tottenham, Ben Dix, and Michael McManus. A gentle, stepping motion from all participants sets a suitably grave, processional framework, and the opening melody has what can only be called an antique charm. Not much happens as the dance works through its patterns and repetitions with some chromatic slips occurring in two spots and passages with quiet triplets emerge from the consistent 4/4 rhythm. I can’t see that any players were over-stretched by this placid sequence.

Brown’s first essay in the formal string quartet four-movement lay-out is here played by violins Kathryn Taylor and Nick Waters, viola Helen Ireland, and cello Knighton. Here is a full-blooded composition, still written in a language that was extant a century ago but the first movement, for instance, has an unexpected intensity and spatial balance that shows a solidly informed mind engaged with his work. You can hear traces of Delius in the linear spaciousness of individual lines, but then Brown has cited the English writer as an influence. Mind you, the score starts off with some chord clusters that aggregate promisingly, but the whole breadth of these pages sticks to an orthodox tonality.

After the initial ‘Moderately’, the second movement is headed ‘With gravity and intensity’ and reminds you of the ardent chorale-like steps in the late Beethovens. Brown is keen on resolving his chord progressions quickly so that nothing hints at dissonance, apart from a slight subordinate semiquaver rustling right at the end – as though the devil is not quite muffled in this peaceful, hymn-suggestive atmosphere. For all that, the lower voices enjoy little prominence and the real action comes from the top violin.

For his next stage, ‘With movement, like a changeable wind’, the composer has invested a good deal of his effort; in fact, this segment alone is equivalent in time to the other three combined, being close to 12 minutes long. To my ears, it appears to fall into four chapters, the last echoing the first, with a concord-establishing coda. Along the way, we encounter passages in rich thirds for the upper lines, later lowered; another of Brown’s floating melodies that seems to operate around the most nebulous of axes; some thick contrapuntal pages that could have been attributable to an entrant in the Cobbett Prize; and whole sentences that promise stringency but eventually come down on the side of righteous resolution.

It’s an intriguing set of pages, more so than much else on the CD, probably because of its breadth and emotional concentration; not to mention the clear commitment and intonational clarity of its interpreters, viola and cello being long-time collaborators in the Flinders Quartet. And finally, we arrive at the fourth movement, ‘With easy movement, like a pleasant dance’, which is rich in concordant 3rds and 6ths for the violins and smooth sustained-note duets for the lower voices. It is pleasant and free from stress with not much argument and a fairly intact repeat in this ternary-shaped movement (not uncommon across this writer’s output).

Finally, you have the two non-piano solos: Snowcaps from James Leitch playing an unspecified organ, and Gentle Rain which lasts no time at all on Reeve’s harp. The first of these is the second-longest track here and another surprise for its harmonic writing which is packed with 2nds and 7ths, along with parallel chords of some complexity that suggest Messiaen but without the hysteria – not too many traces of alleluias sereins – but you encounter a hard-minded embrace of the instrument’s potential for dissonance similar to passages you can find in Jolivet.

This organ construct takes up a wide, sonorous canvas and Leitch exploits his instrument’s registrational potential with high efficiency, so that he makes a fine case for the piece’s melodic construction and coherence. On a smaller scale, Reeve makes easy work of the harp solo which maintains a falling series of 4ths as an upper ostinato throughout; it’s occasionally mirrored in the lower strings but the impact of this carefully crafted bagatelle has an unmistakable reference to its title, each scintillation droppeth effectively.

On this CD, I found more originality than on Brown’s The Night Sky Glory collection of vocal works. Some of the tracks leave little impression, yet you can see indications that the composer’s vision is not as easily defined as you’d think. He may have confided to us his empathy with Delius, Mahler and Debussy – and you can find traces of others in his output – but works like his string quartet, Gentle Rain and Snowcaps demonstrate a clarity and individuality that rouse your interest and generate hopes for further essays with similar adventurousness.

THE NIGHT SKY GLORY

Lachlan Brown

Move Records MCD 650

The good people at Move have just published three CDs devoted to the work of Australian composer Lachlan Brown who – as far as the internet is concerned – remains an enigma. That is to say, I can’t find any information about him apart from what is on the Move website – and that’s very meagre. So you’d have to expect something out of the box from a writer who manages to get the country’s prime Australian composition promoter to publish a set of recordings – put out simultaneously, what’s more – that features a performing group involving some high-profile musicians.

This first offering features pianist Len Vorster, soprano Jenna Roubos, soprano/altos Holly Haines and Alison Rae-Jones and Elspeth Bawden, treble Jimmy Hilton, tenors Timothy Reynolds and Alastair Cooper-Golec and Lyndon Green, the composer himself doubling as tenor and bass, harp Megan Reeve, violins George Vi and Marianne Rothschild, viola Karen Columbine, cello Michelle John, and organ Lachlan Redd. As you can see, some of these participants have been (and continue to be) significant members of the country’s (mainly Melbourne’s) musical community.

But what of the music they reproduce? One of the few ‘facts’ we can learn about Brown is that he has been influenced by Mahler, Sibelius, Debussy, Delius and Faure: a worthy clutch of late Romantic and Impressionist writers – in fact, a few of them sit on the cusp between those schools/groups/ delineations. But I become instantly wary when such names are presented, chiefly because I suspect that what we are going to hear is derivative – not so much influences as imitations. Further, is any composer in current operation harking back this far? All pay homage to Bach, but is anyone writing continuously in his style? Or that of Beethoven? Or Wagner? Still, you could pursue this topic into odd corners where composers are happy to boast an affinity with Schoenberg or Stravinsky (but never Hindemith), while the fad for Cage, Stockhausen or Boulez is well and truly over. Now, the trend is towards Radiohead, Philip Glass or Lady Gaga.

Back to Brown and his first track. a Rilke setting: Fruhling ist wiedergekommen which is the 21st of the Sonnets to Orpheus, here carried out by Roubos and Vorster. Well, it’s sort of that particular sonnet with the first part revisited at the end for the sake of balance, I suppose, and a few lines and a stanza, at least omitted. The musical language is a cross between 19th century operatic cadenza and post-Schumann lied, both A parts of this ternary composition opening with a sort of vocalise. This is amiable, salonesque music which manages to sound open-hearted and optimistic, like the poem.

Vorster and tenor Cooper-Golec then present a Victor Hugo setting: Hier soir, which is fully Romantic but lacking in subtlety. It’s as if Baudelaire had never been born. As for the setting, it treads a conservative line in chromatic sliding, except for some questionable moments at the end of the first stanza. Cooper-Golec’s tiumbre is a touch over-nasal for a piece that might have been better suited to a baritone; as it is, the song sounds like a kind of plaint rather than an assertion of devotion. The whole reminds me of Duparc but without much attraction in its melodic curve.

Brown then takes on a well-known set of verses in Heine’s Auf Flugeln des Gesanges, forever associated with Mendelssohn who set the poem in his Op. 34 Six Songs. This new version employs two tenors – Reynolds and Green – with the string quartet mentioned above, the lower strings pizzicato while Vi weaves a third line around the intertwining vocal chain of 3rds and 6ths. It’s very mellifluous and just as richly conservative as Mendelssohn’s work in its vocal demands and its harmonic vocabulary.

Next come a pair of actual vocalises. The first involves Roubos and harpist Reeve and is an amiable enough exercise with a fetching vocal line above instrumental arpeggios, mainly (always?) rising. Brown stays fixed in a completely predictable metre with a few gestures towards late French Romantic modernity. To their credit, both artists handle this slender piece with sympathy. The second uses the boy treble Hilton with Redd providing supporting chords on an unattributed organ while the singer follows a melodic path of no particular character, alternating a step-wise melodic motion and a widely-spaced arpeggio three-note pattern. Again, there’s nothing here that speaks to any of Brown’s influencers, except possibly some suggestions of Faure of the Requiem.

Rilke enjoys another outing through Schon horch, also from the Orphean sonnets – No. 25 in the cycle – and Cooper-Golec and Vorster return for this number. Here we might be stepping into the 20th century with some efficient Delian slides and a setting of some drama, particularly for the singer who is tested across a wide tessitura. If it suggests anything, it’s one of Berg’s early songs, chiefly for the solidity of its piano material. But I can’t find much of a link between the text and the music; my fault, of course, that I never embraced the German poet’s taxing imagery.

We now arrive at the CD’s title-work, which is another vocalise for what I assume are multi-track voices. Only two are cited. Haines and Brown. but both are credited with double vocal types: soprano/alto, and tenor/bass. What we hear is a series of four-part (or are there more?) chords, revolving around a mobile axis in yet another very circumscribed harmonic ramble. Again, you’re reminded of Delius in a vague sense, but I don’t know the English master’s choral scores well enough to play pinpoint the similarity.

The composer is still indulging in vocalise for the next three tracks: Meditations for choir III, IV and V. The pairs of singers (each contributing at least two vocal strands) have no words, just an open vowel sound as they slowly meander around a rather ordinary sequence of chords. Rae-Jones and Brown are the personnel for the first two of this clutch, the No IV having more interest for the momentary individuality of line at its centre. The last, involving Bawden and Brown, builds slowly to a fine climax, and impressed for its multi-choral effects, but by this point my attention was wandering in an aural landscape where the elements were proving interchangeable..

More harmonic originality appears in a brace of Forest Voices from multi-phonicised Haines and Brown, still textless. The writing is loaded with droning open 5ths and some biting 2nds and 7ths that speak a language that is more contemporary than anything we’ve come across this far. Further, these pieces have a definite atmosphere: the forest they depict is no sweetly-wooded series of groves but something more menacing and aggressive.

To end, we have Night Falls in the Forest which continues the atmospheric suggestions of the preceding two tracks but much less stridently. Bawden’s soprano and alto have the melodic running although Brown’s tenor and bass are not stuck in the subsidiary positions they held in the Voices tracks. But seven tracks in a row of harmonic shifts and vocalisations seems to me to be too much of a moderately good thing.

When facing modern composition, I’m still sympathetic to Stockhausen’s saying that he asks ‘two things of a composer: invention, and that he astonish me.’ That’s still a tall order which might be more useful if the combination was actually a pair of alternatives. Brown’s music is not impressive for its inventiveness but moves along well-trodden paths, compositional tropes that are very common territory. Much of it is pleasant and deft in its organization but it ignores most of what has happened in Western music over the last 120 years. As for the question of astonishment, it does not arise. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to experiencing further facets of the composer’s creativity in the other two Move CDs that were issued alongside this one.