AUSTRALIA LIVE
drinking elegance and enlightened conversation in Lhe
intervals.
If Lhe analogy wiLh Lhe kind of spring typified by coiled
metal is accepted, Lhe necessary tension involved is reaclily
provided by a conflict between Lhe desire of Lhe festival's
planner to construct interesting and unpredictable programs
- famous old avant-garde war-horses of Lhe 1960s side by
side wiLh new or new-ish pieces and works by 1991 's
major anniversary composers (Mozart and Prokofiev) -
a11d Lhe evident conviction of some young Australian
composers Lhat the festival's program ought to be given
over entirely to them and their contemporaries. I think
I actually heard someone using that bad old Boulezian
phrase 'culinary programming.' Woodward and company
understandably want the festival to continue and prosper
and become financially strong and - even more important
- to draw on an auclience of more than one type of music-
lover, avoicling putting new music in its usual gheLlo.
Much as I sympathise with Lhis point of view and much
as I hope that this aim can be realized I have a fairly strong
conviction that the Sydey Spring will become exclusively
a festival of new or at least twentieth century music, if
only because the alternative may lead to a dilution of its
character through comer-shop blandness of choice. The
other serious drawback to ranging through the classical
a.'1d romantic repenory in order to provide interesting
juxtapositions of music is that performances of Mozart
and company demand excellence within the current
standards of concert-giving. This can be both expensive
and excessively time-consuming. The laudable wish of
Woodward - and his great-heartedness and vision are
attributes for which he receives insufficient recognition -
is that the players of his Alpha Centauri ensemble should
show themselves as much in command of the traditional
repertory as of new music. But the truth is that, through
the Alpha Centauri players are collectively capable of
outstanding performances of difficult contemporary scores
(as is more than adequately shown by their recorcling of
Xenakis' Kraanerg for the Etcetera label), not all of them
make an equally convincing showing in exposed quasi-
soloistic textures of the traclitional chamber music repertory.
The clarinettist Roslyn Dunlop, one of the most completely
equipped members of Alpha Centauri, might agree, I think,
that her festival performance in Mozart'S clarinet quintet
was not impeccable, thoroughly creditable though it was
for much of the piece; yet her performance must be allowed
unqualified brilliance in comparison wiLh the contributions
of her string-playing colleagues. On the whole, the festival's
Saturday night program of Mozart and Prokofiev made it
clear that more than the director's faith (and his touching
readiness to regard his colleagues as capable of rising to
his own remarkable versatility) was required to help this
recital reach true festival standards.
Army commanders are said to be notorious for their
assumption that anyone can do anything if so instructed.
May I be crassly obvious in pointing out that the successful
presentation of a music-theatre piece implies that the
performers possess distinct theatrical as well as musical
abilities? The trombonist Trevor Jones suffered from a
mismatch between his well-developed musical proficiency
and an underdeveloped sense of theatre in his difficult
assignment of carrying a significant part of the festival's
opening recital with Kagel's weakly designed Atem. The
trumpeter-trombonist James Morrison, in contrast, martaged
to be theatrical as well as musical wthout benefit of props
PAGE 56
or scenario. Yet Lhe admirable idea of bringing Morrison
into an improvisation (on Lhe Ken Done painting referred
to above) in company with Woodward, Jones, and Lhe
percussionist Darryl Pratt did not work quite as well as
it might have done (apart from a particularly well-managed
encling) because of a fundamental divergence of purpose:
Woodward was looking for a radically poetic adventure.
Morrison for adventure placed within a palpable musical
shapeliness. Morrison, I suspect, would have been happier
if Woodward had proposed a chord or two for expartSion
and dismemberment instead of a single pitch class without
a defined context.
This year's festival may have suffered from not including
a major recital appearance by Woodward himself earlier
in its schedule (though his anxiety to give as much of his
attention as possible to organisation raLher than to his own
appearances as pianist is more than understandable). It
benefited from some wisely planned recitals during its
first two or three days. Lisa Moore's program of twentieLh
century piano music was outstandingly good; and the Art
Gallery's over-reverberant acoustics interestingly brought
out the palpitating romanticism in Webern's Opus 27
Variations and converted the avowedly "brutal" altack of
Michael Sametanin's Stroke into a present-day equivalent
of turbulent quasi-Lisztian grandiloquence. Julia Ryder's
sympathy for the spirit of Rolf Gehlhaar's cello-and-tape
delay piece Solipse came across as absolute and her
collaboration wiLh David Pereira (cello) and Daryl Pratt
(percussion) was exciting in Kagel's famous Match. The
collection of electronic and computer-driven pieces gathered
together on the first Sunday was just Lhe kind of attraction
a festival should include, partly because of (certainly not
despite) its element of oddity. The festival's announced
move to the Eugene Goossens Hall in Lhe ABC's Ultimo
Centre in 1992 (when a 70-year-old Xenakis is expected
to be guest of honour) will tend, I, believe, to make it a
more specialised event; but I hope Lhat some easily accessible
place will be found where electronic installation pieces
and similar kinds of devices can be heard on a day-to-day
basis.
SYDNEY
Sydney Spring Festival: Second Week
- Peter McCallum
I gather (from what journalists call "usually reliable
sources") that one State Minister, when approached to
support Roger Woodward's Sydney Spring Festival, replied
to the effect that Sydney already had too many Festivals.
This is cenainly a novel way of encouraging the ans (issuing
perhaps from the same think-tank which plans the culling
of kangaroos and the cutting down of State Forests).
But it is also surprising in that, from the point of view
of serious music, I was unaware that Sydney had any other
regular festivals at all. Surely the minister was not referring
to the
Festival of Sydney, whose musical component in recent
years has been of negligible artistic significance.
The political pressures on publicly funded festivals,
such as the Festival of Sydney, to be even-handed,
comprehensive, and popularist rarely results in interesting
listening. A strong, even idiosyncratic artistic leadership,
such as Woodward provides, is bound to outperform them.
SOUNDS AUSTRALIAN, SUMMER 1991-92
AUSTRALIA LIVE
One of Lhe great strenLhs of Woodward's Sydney Spring,
it seems to me, is that it can afford to follow individual
enulUsiasms, personal musical tastes, private passions and
prcjudices.
Laura ChisleLl's solo flute recital which kicked off the
second week of Lhis year's Sydney Spring was a case in
point. In the language of recent discussion of Australian
music, the program, which ended with a dazzling
performance of Ferneyhough's Unity Capsule, would
probably be seen as demonstrating a taste (a somewhat
masochistic taste for a solo performer) for Complexity.
The word "complexity", of course is problematic here.
Often the superficial elements of that style, rapidity of
figuration, irrational (non-binary) rhyLhms, and general
resistance to detailed mental "chunking", can be used to
convey musical ideas which are, in fact, fairly
straightforward and uncomplicated (as, for example, in
Gerard Brophy's effectively cheeky new piccolo piece
Tweak in this recital). By contrast Lhe post-Minimalist
gestures of Michael Smetanin's striking new work for bass
flute, Nontiscordardime, have a complexity of association
and ambivalence of gesture even though the harmonic
language is, on the surface, apparently simple. The Lhird
piece in what was a bracket of first performances was by
a relative newcomer, Paul Brovm. His Pentimento is,
according to his own program note, Lhe result of much
reworking and refinement so that Lhe original lines of
material are barely evident. And indeed the piece came
across as a highly polished artefact, almost perhaps self-
consciously so (but no less interesting for that - indeed,
this was some of its charm). One hopes the success of
Pen tim en to will encourage further works from his pen.
The first half was framed by two complementary works
by Chris Dench, D~/ploy~ for piccolo and Shin for bass
flute (the laner receiving a first performance). Of all these
composers perhaps Dench's music sits most happily with
Lhe adjective "complex" at whatever level one wants to
take the word. Through involved cross-rhythmic layers
Shin creates an impression of alluring depLh, of someLhing
mysterious and, at a certain level, slightly impenetrable.
Deiploye, by contrast, is brilliant, almost brittle, and bounced
off the walls of the gallery with colourful iridescence.
There was also to have been a new flute work by Ian
Shanal1an in this programme. Although it wasn't ready for
this concert, performances of two of his pieces in the
Saturday concert by Alpha Centauri Ensemble allowed a
certain perspective on a composer whose music has only
been known through a few scores. The two works, Echoes/
Fantasies for bass clarinet and vibraphone and Cycles of
Vega for E flat clarinet and percussion, are companion
works with an obvious sound affinity. In Echoes/Fantasies
(1984), played by clarinetist Ros Dunlop with percussion
players, Daryl Pratt and Tony Cowdroy, I found two points
of engagement, in particular, held my attention: the
imaginative sound-world and the contrast between "free"
and "strict" writing which becomes a kind of structural
parameter. Cycles of Vega (1990) (played by Peter Jenkin
with the same percussionists) is probably the more
in1mediately appealing of the two pieces, showing an even
greater variety of sound from the percussion as well as
Shanahan's remarkable command of wind multiphonics.
As with the Dench, I felt that a great deal of the attraction
and sense of awe in the work arose from its expanded
sense of time through elaborate rhyLhmic processes. Let
us hope we can hear Lhe flute piece next year.
SOUNDS AUSTRALIAN, SUMMER 1991-92
This concert contained a strikingly high level of
outstanding performances, pointing to a high level of
virtuosity in ensemble as a whole. Among the highpoints
were harpist Marshall McGuire in Barry Conyngham's
Awakening, Peter Jenkin in Larry Sitsky's Vartarun (nearly
bringing the house down) and Linda Walsh in Berio's
Sequenza VII. Jenkin's beautifully phrased treatment of
the second movement of Vartarun made me wonder
wheLher Sitsky, in this kind of meditative tonal mood, has
not often suffered from rather poor performances (to
paraphrase Schoenberg, his music is not PosLmodem, just
badly played).
Restricting myself here to Australian works, there were
two other performances in the second week which demand
comment. The first was Woodward's own playing of Anne
Boyd's Book of the Bells at the end of the Friday night
concert with Robyn Archer. It was wonderful to hear the
many layers of Lhis piece fuse into a static block of complex
sound and resonance in this way. The concert itself, with
readings from Andrey Tarkovsky and George Sand, explored
the theme of "exile" and this work presumably gained a
guernsey as a work written by an Australian composer
overseas. In all oLher aesthetic respects, coming as Lhe last
work on Lhe program, it seemed totally and refreshingly
outside the concert's sound world and aesthetic concerns.
The second was Lhe final improvisation of Lhe festival
which involved Lloyd Swanton, Roger Woodward, members
of Synergy and Michael Atherton in a meclitation on a
poem by Vincent Buckley, Sea-Mammal Songs from Last
Poems. This performance became almost a competition
between Michael ALherton's soft exoticism and Woodward's
dark intensity wiLh Lhe latter winning but finally being
tamed by the insistent quietness of Lloyd Swanton's
doublebass playing. Inexplicably, the fmal concert was
poorly attended - a pity since it involved plenty of crowd
pleasing music by Atherton's SouLhern Crossings, including
some effective African numbers, and by Synergy.
ADELAIDE
New Orchestral Music in Adelaide
- Malcolm Fox
From time to time people have questioned the relevance
of Lhe orchestra in Lhe twentieth century. With such a high
proportion of progra!nrning devoted all too often to the
standard repertoire, it is not surprising that the orchestra
has been regarded in some quarters as little short of a
museum piece; a cultural artachronism that, like the dinosaur,
may ultimately be doomed to fossilisation.
How refreshing Lherefore to see that the two leading
South Australian orchestras - the Adelaide Symphony
Orchestra and the Adelaide Chamber Orchestra - are placing
a high priority on contemporary music in their current and
future programming, with a particular emphasis on works
by South Australian composers.
The Adelaide Chamber Orchestra presented a special
New Perspectives concert this year, in addition to its 1991
Subscription Series, and plans to continue this innovative
concept in 1992. The 1991 New Perspectives concert
featured four premiere performances - Sevens by Tristram
Cary, Burn by John Polglase, Nonet by John Hines and
3 Poems of Byron by Graeme Koehne - plus Peter
SculLhorpe's Sonata No.2 for strings.
PAGE 57