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David John Lang

Musica Viva: Van Diemen's Band

29/4/2022

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REVIEW

PROGRAM

Dietrich Becker - Sonata No.5 in F major (1674)
Borderlands Suite (assembled by Julia Fredersdorff)
  • Samuel Schedit - Galliard Battaglia (1621)
  • Dietrich Becker - Paduan
  • Jean de Sainte-Colombe - Les Pleurs
  • Samuel Scheidt - Courant
  • Philipp Heinrich Erlebach - Chaconne from Ouverture No.2 (1693)
Tomaso Albinoni - Sonata II in C major, op.2, no.3, from Sinfonia à 5 (1700)

INTERVAL

Georg Muffat - Sonata No.1 in D major, from Armonico Tributo (1682)
María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir - Clockworking (2013)
Anonymous (attributed to Biber or Schmelzer) - Sonata Jucunda
Donald Nicolson - Spirals (2022)
Thursday 28 April 2022, 7:30pm
Adelaide Town Hall

Van Diemen's Band
Julia Fredersdorff, artistic director & violin
Simone Slattery, violin & recorder
Katie Yap, viola
Laura Vaughan, bass viol
Anton Baba, bass viol & cello
Donald Nicolson, harpsichord

I like the idea of a Baroque ensemble being called a band. Just a group of enthusiasts hanging out, having a jam session, enjoying each other's company and the sound they can create together. That's what the Van Diemen's Band were like; and when their director, Julia Fredersdorff, spoke from the stage between pieces, it was warmly and concisely, and with a little humour, as though we were an assortment of friends they had invited along to hear their latest Baroque discoveries.

Van Diemen's Band play like a band; they come from diverse corners of the country (I wonder what qualifies them as a Tasmanian group?), but they blend well in sound and phrasing, and also in physical gesture and visual expression. Fredersdorff reminded us that Baroque music is all about the extremes of emotion, and this came through strongly in their playing: there were no 'neutral' passages, everything was played with expressive intent. Yet it never sounded forced or heavy or tiring. There was a lightness even to the bleakest emotions – which got me thinking, because this kind of lightness seems to be missing in most contemporary art of every genre, perhaps for fear that it belittles those negative emotions which are 'all the rage'. But what's the point of art if it doesn't do something with an emotion, put it in a context, a story?

The music (as always) being incapable of selling itself, we were offered a context for it in the form of the concert's title: 'Borderlands'. It's a nice little spark of an idea to set the brain whirring, and to fill program notes and reviews with many fuzzy statements about what borders are and how music (of course) transcends them. And it encourages us to make connections between the music and certain current world events involving borders, which all involved in presenting this program were at pains to point out. But the truth is that such a nebulous term was only ever going to be peripheral to my enjoyment of the concert; it feels weird to even bring it up, except that everything in the program booklet told me it was important. It's funny how complicated it can be to enjoy music. As one given to over-thinking, I know all about this; what I particularly enjoyed about this music was the way it quietened, rather than engaged, that part of me. At least until I sat down to write just now.

There were six musicians in Van Diemen's Band, and most played in all the pieces. Simone Slattery, second violin, also whipped out a recorder for a few of them. Several of the works made full use of the available five-part counterpoint (most notably Tomaso Albinoni's C major Sonata, dominated by its two wonderful fugues), but at times I wished more could have been done to aid the spatial-acoustic separation of parts. The ensemble stayed in an identical formation throughout, with the two violins side by side (their sounds virtually on top of each other), and the viola and first bass viol separated by the continuo (harpsichord and cello/second bass viol). This was all quite understandable, given the need for optimal projection in a space like this, and the presence of ABC's microphones, but it obscured the counterpoint in the fugues a little, and made the duelling 'trumpets' (violins) in Samuel Scheidt's Galliard Battaglia sound more like they were echoing rather than fighting.

The centre of the first half was a Borderlands Suite assembled by Fredersdorff, made up of five short movements from a diverse selection of composers, structured into a effective 'war and its aftermath' narrative. We were assured that this kind of Baroque mix-tape approach was common practice back in the 1600s, and I thought it worked beautifully. The standouts for me were Les Pleurs ('The Tears') by Jean de Sainte-Colombe, for its evocation of tortured despair; and a Courant by Samuel Scheidt which Fredersdorff told us would express 'resentment' – and somehow it did exactly this, its dark, compelling energy reminding me how easily resentment can turn to hatred. And yet, in music, still be beautiful.

The highlight of the concert's second half, for me, was the anonymous Sonata Jucunda. This came across as more of a riddle than a joke, its bizarre excessive repetitions, crazy harpsichord cadenzas, moments of whole ensemble unison, emphatic semitone clashes, and overall restless structure appearing to be laced with some inscrutable meaning. If it was a joke, it was like one of those elaborate narrative jokes in which it suddenly dawns on you that there is no punchline to make sense of it all, just a weird and wonderful array of bizarre images.

The were also two contemporary pieces on the program. Clockworking was written for Baroque string trio and backing track by María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir, an Icelandic composer who also plays in an indie band, amiina. While very beautiful, this work confused me a bit: the backing track consisted of acoustic sounds (more strings playing glassy ostinatos, along with some kalimba or bell-like sounds moving in slow, regular patterns), which drew attention to its 'not live' quality, because it's always impossible to perfectly balance such things. Here, the pre-recorded accompaniment was slightly too loud, and definitely too 'bassy' compared with the thin sound of gut strings coming from the live instruments. The music itself stood out from the rest of the program because of its simplicity, being essentially a single extended gesture. A cloud of ostinatos created a neutral-sounding chord below which a bass line was slowly repeated and developed. It was like someone sitting at a piano and looking for a tune to go with a single chord, very gradually getting more harmonically adventurous (yes, I've been there).

The concert concluded with its newest piece, Spirals, commissioned from the Van Diemen Band's harpsichordist, Donald Nicolson. It was a carefully crafted passacaglia for the whole ensemble, using a very Baroque harmonic progression. It slowly dissolved into a Slavonic Orthodox lament, led by Slattery on the recorder and shadowed closely and thinly by the treble of the harpsichord. This special ending was apparently added to the piece as an afterthought, in February, from a desire to include something in the program that acknowledged the unfolding events in Ukraine. While I am a big fan of drawing connections between music and the world around us, this did feel a little forced to me. It's hard to fault the motivation, but motivation isn't everything.

I sat down to write about this music, because I really liked it and wanted to re-enjoy it, and now I've found that it's disappeared like dust. If I started writing about borders and Ukraine and bandwagons, maybe what I would have to say would seem more relevant, but simultaneously the music would be further away. So I will stop now.

4.5 stars

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Adelaide Festival 2022: Prayer for the Living

23/3/2022

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REVIEW

PROGRAM

Pēteris Vasks – Lūgšana mātei (Prayer for a Mother)
Lili Boulanger – Psalm 129
Maurice Ravel – 'Kaddisch' from Deux mélodies hébraïques
Lili Boulanger – Vieille prière bouddhique (Old Buddhist Prayer)
Pēteris Vasks – Dona nobis pacem

INTERVAL

Francis Poulenc – Gloria

Sunday 20 March 2022, 4pm
Adelaide Festival Theatre

Benjamin Northey, conductor
Carl Crossin & Karl Geiger, choral directors
Stacey Alleaume, soprano
Nicholas Jones, tenor
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra

This one-off performance in Adelaide's Festival Theatre was one of the closing events of the 2022 Adelaide Festival, held on the final Sunday afternoon. By this stage in March, a sleepy, after-dinner feeling is kicking in around the city. Having loaded their plates with Fringe and Festival offerings (not to mention WOMADelaide), most Adelaideans are feeling more than sated when it comes to the arts, and just want something light to "fill up the corners". Prayer for the Living wasn't that exactly, yet the simplicity and clarity of its presentation (not to mention the fact that we've all been starved of massed choral singing) made it a joyful event, despite the gravity of its subject matter.

A large, socially-distanced choir (mostly constituting the Elder Conservatorium Chorale and the Graduate Singers) took up the entire stage, spread across the tiers in Carl Crossin's much-loved 'random' formation – that is, with all voice types mingled together. I wondered later if this was wise, given that the choir sounded rather soft and tentative in the first half, as though the singers could barely hear one other. A smattering of masks lingered on a few of the choristers' faces,  a reminder to be thankful that such an event is even possible. The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, meanwhile, was crammed below in the pit.

At the back of the stage was a square screen (its top frustratingly cut off for those of us in the cheap seats) which was used throughout to display a combination of  live close-up video footage of the performers and (in the first half) photos from the Red Cross archives. Occasionally we also got some of the text that was being sung, although far less than I would have liked. There seemed to be a desire to present the music as abstractly as possible, probably to broaden its appeal and message.

Yet I was impressed at how clear and coherent the message of the concert came across. The first half of the concert was presented as a prayer for world peace – 'prayer' here covering a spectrum from vague ideal to intense longing to hopeful actual request. All five pieces before interval were performed back-to-back without applause, giving it more the feeling of a ritual than a performance, especially since the works matched and complemented each other so well. I was not in possession of a program booklet, but apparently Alan John was the curator (if so, he deserved more credit). The projected photos from famines, wars and refugee camps invited us to draw connections between what we were hearing and what we knew about the outside world. The prayer was thus at least partially directed to the audience, almost as a challenge: "You also value peace, yes? Well, look around, the world is crying out for it. What are you going to do?"

Pēteris Vasks' Prayer for Mother began the ritual quietly, a clarinet solo gradually opening up over a haze of strings before Stacey Alleaume's warm soprano entered. The tenderness of motherhood was presented here (images complementing the music) as something extremely valuable but under threat: the first entry of the choir was pointedly on a tritone. The eerie end of the work, with the clarinet solo returning over a warm aleatoric choral 'cooing' from the choir, didn't quite live up to its potential magic in the unforgiving Festival Theatre acoustics. No thanks either to the usher whose radio kept crackling away in the near silence.

Lili Boulanger's dramatic setting of Psalm 129 for choir and large orchestra came next. A passionate cry against affliction and oppression, led by unison male voices, this is music of intense pain and anger, written during the First World War. Some indication of the text would have helped here, but the images and music nevertheless plunged us into the thick of a violent, unforgiving world.

Maurice Ravel's 'Kaddisch', his setting of a traditional Hebrew mourning song, was the expressive, personal heart of the set, its intricate melodic line sung with assurance by tenor Nicholas Jones. The projected images here spoke of death, the unanswered question.

Lili Boulanger's Old Buddhist Prayer is not the ethereal, meditative oasis one might expect. Its persistently repeated musical refrain suggests more the longing of its petition rather than the detached "let it be" philosophy it is asking for. This time the text was deemed worthy of translation, although it wasn't always easy to read over the changing images.

Vasks' Dona nobis pacem then took Boulanger's prayer even further, the repetitiveness of its phrases now suggesting desperation and perhaps even bitter resignation as the prayer seemed to go on and on, unanswered. And yet, there is a note – or rather, a modulation – of renewed hope towards the end, from somewhere... somewhere...

After the interval the mood shifted abruptly. Francis Poulenc's Gloria for soprano, choir and orchestra is a delightful musical patchwork of bright, bold colours in clear and distinctive patterns. It is also, of course, a hymn of praise to God, although once again the text was deemed redundant to enjoyment of the music (except for those of us already familiar with it). The orchestra was in great form here, and the choir sang much more confidently and with the necessary exuberance – you could tell they were enjoying it. Occasionally, however, the inadequacy of the stage setup was apparent – the choir never sounded quite together in their consonants, and got a step or two out of time with the distant orchestra in the jaunty 'Laudamus te'. Stacey Alleaume's voice was perfect for the soaring yet prayerful soprano solos, making the high notes sound easy, floating up to the tops of phrases ("Domine Deus") like incense.

Was it appropriate to be singing such joyful music after the serious prayers in the first half of the concert? Only if God is actually good, and does actually hear our prayers. Poulenc's "refreshingly human take on the Latin mass", as the Festival guide described it (as opposed to all those, you know, inhuman masses we know and hate) is either worshipping a worthy Creator and Saviour, who truly "takes away the sins of the world", or it's just a playful game. Or... could it be both?


4 stars
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Et misericordia

15/1/2020

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I've been reading through the book of Job this month. This brought to mind a piece of music which I haven't heard since May 2013: Et misericordia, by Clare Maclean.

The book of Job made a deep impression on me when I first read it in 2011. I happened to be going through a pretty dark patch of my life at the time, so I felt some kind of solidarity with Job as he called upon God for answers. It's a pretty standard complaint: If God is good and omnipotent, why is there suffering and injustice in the world? I loved that the Bible wasn't shying away from those questions, and I looked forward to getting some answers...

When I got to the last few chapters, in which God responds to Job ("out of the whirlwind"), I was stunned. Instead of providing answers, God bombards Job with a long chain of his own questions:


Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Declare, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements, or who stretched the line upon it?
On what do its foundations rest, or who laid its corner stone,
When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
These are the words Clare Maclean starts with (from chapter 38 of Job). The music actually sounds confronting. The opening chords get more and more insistent as the thick, full-voiced harmonies pile up. God declares himself as the unfathomable, unreachable Creator through the awesome scope of the created universe, and we hear it all in the music. Earth, stars, light, darkness, wind and water – all are portrayed with a music that emphasises their mystery and complexity. (Maclean writes for 12-part chorus, often very contrapuntally, so it's not an easy piece.)

The word painting is exquisite. I love the scintillating depiction of “light diffused” and the thick, cloudy, misaligned chords of the sea “shut in with doors”. I'm struck by something new each time I listen. You can hear the composer's wonder at the created natural world in the sheer inventiveness of the music – just like with Haydn's brilliant Creation oratorio, which I listened to last week.

But how does all this awe and wonder answer the question of human suffering?


There is something more. Twice we hear words in Latin, taken from the Magnificat: Et misericordia eius a progenie in progenies timentibus eum (“And his mercy extends from generation to generation for those who fear him”). This is a signpost, pointing to the very heart of the work. And here, the overwhelming extravagance of creation is momentarily stilled – “the surface of the deep is frozen,” sings the choir, as the harmony falls in to a single note. And then, just for a moment, the misty counterpoint is cleared away, the foreign harmonies become familiar, and the divine becomes human. The gulf of the ‘unknown’ is bridged: “For I know that my Redeemer lives.”
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This text comes from earlier in Job (19:25), a fragment of light and hope in the middle of one of his many impassioned speeches. By placing it here, in the middle of God's speech of chapter 38, and signposted with a quote from the Magnificat, Clare Maclean points to Jesus Christ as Job's longed-for Redeemer.

I love how Clare Maclean has chosen and structured these texts, and then how she's set them to music. The main body of the piece, with text from Job 38, shows God's glory in all its vastness and grandeur, and it's frankly terrifying – he really has made everything. The title and the quote from the Magnificat (Luke 1:50) points us to God's mercy, and our humility before him ("His mercy is for those who fear him"). And at the heart of the work is God's love, in the promise of the Redeemer.

There's way too much depth here for a single blog post. But hopefully I've shown something about how I think this work glorifies God.

Unfortunately for my readers, there doesn't seem to be a readily available recording online. But if you're really inspired to seek it out, you can buy an MP3 recording from the Sydney Chamber Choir here, or find it on one of the Adelaide Chamber Singers' CDs here.

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Glide Path

12/7/2017

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Sam Young is another composer I met in Alaska last year. He was back doing Composing in the Wilderness for a second time, because he had loved it so much in 2015. He lives in Los Angeles, and is a percussionist as well as a composer.

I've been preparing to conduct Sam's piece Glide Path with the Adelaide Wind Orchestra. It's an 8-minute work that Sam composed after his first trip to Alaska. There's no specific narrative to the piece, but Sam tells me that he had many different images of flying running through his head as he wrote it.

In looking back at my own memories of Alaska, flying features a lot. We took a bush plane from Fairbanks to Coal Creek and back, and before the workshop started I went on one of the popular sightseeing flights around Denali (which included landing on a glacier!). And even on the ground, the 24-hour daylight and all the pointy spruce trees had me constantly looking up at the sky in wonder. Perhaps most memorable of all was the golden eagle we all saw up close as we sat collecting inspiration on a hilltop in Denali National Park.

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I love flying. And I love Sam's piece.

You know that sleep-deprived restless energy you get on a long flight to a new place? That's what Glide Path reminds me of. It sounds so bright, so free. It begins with loose fragments of music tossed playfully around the orchestra, and although there's a cool 5-beat groove that gets going a little later on, the music never feels like it completely settles down – which I love! It's just constantly overflowing with nervous energy and excitement!


I really admire how Sam has orchestrated it – there's often a lot going on, but the music always has this lightness to it, even when the full orchestra is playing. And that's how it flies.
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Halfway through Glide Path, the bouncy rhythms stop, and there's this sudden sense of stillness and solitude. Clarinets and bassoons begin to gently pulsate a 'floating' suspended chord, and fragments of the themes are interwoven in half-tempo.

Sam explains that this section was inspired by his overnight flight home from Fairbanks in 2015. I had a similar experience in 2016...

Many of the Fairbanks flights leave sometime after midnight, but because it's the middle of summer, the sky is still light. So after take-off, everyone closes their window shades to get some sleep. You try to sleep too, but your mind is still spinning with all your adventures. So a few hours later, as everyone around you drowses, you slide up your window shade... and you look out silently on majestic, snow-covered mountains, lit by the morning sun!

That quiet, dreamy sense of wonder is beautifully expressed by this section of the music. It builds up in a very gradual crescendo, which includes my favourite part of all – listen out for the horns and euphonium! :)

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That middle section melts away peacefully, and then the restless adventure music returns, bringing the piece to a quick and exciting  close – short enough to keep you wishing for more!

There's no publicly available recording of Glide Path yet, but you can check out some of Sam Young's other music on his website or his SoundCloud page (my personal favourites are Glimpses of Stars and Drifting out to Sea). Or better yet, come along to the Adelaide Wind Orchestra concert this Saturday night to hear the Australian premiere! Tickets are available here or at the door.
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Ostara's Equinox

11/7/2017

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While Composing in the Wilderness in Alaska in July 2016, I asked my fellow composers (a.k.a. the Nine Wolves) if they had written anything for wind orchestra.

We were sitting in a cabin at Coal Creek, deep in the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve and miles away from anything so much as a road. Rain and mosquitoes took turns at keeping us indoors.

Cassie To, the other Aussie in the group, got out her laptop, and I had a listen to Ostara's Equinox...

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What I love about this music is how it grows.

At the start, all is still and dark. Clarinets provide a kind of soil-bed for the piece, an empty garden plot of A-flat major. And into this the flutes plant a little seed of music - just three notes, close together and very quiet...
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At first, nothing seems to happen. The clarinets murmur quietly to themselves. The flutes throw in a few more of the same seeds. And then the music begins to grow.

It grows in strength, it grows in size, but most of all it grows in energy. More and more instruments come in, the tempo gradually increases, and that three-note flute motif begins to proliferate all around the orchestra. I love how easy that motif is to spot, and yet at the same time how thick and complex the music becomes. Soon it's like the dense foliage of a tree, where all the individual leaves are more or less the same, but together they create an elaborate pattern of beautifully messy greenness.

The spacious stillness of the opening is replaced by a forward-leaning rhythm as the music gradually accumulates an almost unstoppable momentum. By the end, the seed has grown into a huge tree. The last thing we hear is that opening flute motif, now full-grown on the trumpets...

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Cassie named this piece Ostara's Equinox in reference to the goddess of spring and fertility (traditionally celebrated during the vernal equinox). The 'equinox' of the title also suggests a perfect balance between darkness and light.

As I listened to this at Coal Creek, I thought about the abundance of life that was all around us. Like many people, I went to Alaska thinking of white, snowy landscapes with very little life. But that's only one side of the story – the winter side, when there is ice everywhere, and barely any sun. A completely different side of Alaska is seen during the summer – the Yukon flows swiftly, the sunlight is constant, and there is so much green, so much life, all around.

How does one become the other? Ostara's Equinox charts the journey beautifully, from darkness to light.

It was written well before either of us had been to Alaska, but in my memory it is now associated with that cabin at Coal Creek, and the feeling of life's massive, ongoing presence in the spruce forest just outside the door.


Cassie wrote this for a workshop with the Sydney Conservatorium Wind Symphony a few years ago, and the recording (above) was made in a 30-minute reading session. But this weekend I'm honoured to be conducting its world premiere – the Adelaide Wind Orchestra will be performing it as the opening piece of our concert 'Aurora Awakes', and we've had much more time to prepare! Further details and tickets are available here.

UPDATE:
The concert was a success, and now there is a performance recording available to listen to online!

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