ANAM: Adam McMillan and Laurence Matheson

ANAM
South Melbourne Town Hall

Monday 1 November 2015

RAVEL, Gaspard de la nuit

Adam McMillan

“A great musician is a great gastronome”, some bloke may have said about Rossini. The evidence included Rossini’s great corporation. There are exceptions. Adam McMcMillan, evidently, is an exceptional musician.

Ravel wrote some incredibly difficult music. Whether or not a pianist gets it technically is pretty obvious.

Adam did.

Much more subtly, whether or not a pianist gets it musically is a matter of emotional judgement.

Adam did.

Gaspard de la nuit of 1908 is instantly recognisable as Ravel and the first of the three poèmes, Ondine is set in constantly rippling water, writing that suggests Ravel understood chaos theory.

To play Gaspard – particularly to an educated, experienced audience (about 100 retirees and fellow students) – suggests supreme confidence, high-order foolishness or technical and musical competence of an extraordinary order. At about the one-minute mark, I’d opted for the technical bit. At about the three-minute mark I’d firmly decided on the musical bit too because Adam had answered my fundamental question about this piece, Was he finding the images and painting them for me?

Like the ripples in Ondine’s water that are nothing but the location of water molecules in three dimensions, Ravel’s – and Adam’s – music are nothing more than soundwaves in time. Neither the ripples nor the music exist until I stand back and see (or hear) it in perspective. The magic of Adam’s performance was that underneath the chaos of the ripples he found the melodic line (Ondine?). Fiendish stuff to play. Even more difficult to make work.

Gaspard de la Nuit, Ondine last page. Note the ppp

  

But as is the way of consummate musicians, apart from the cascades of notes that encompassed the entire range of the Steinway, Adam never let it sound like hard work.

The B-flat octave ostinato tolls aggravatingly throughout Le Gibet – admittedly much more aggravatingly to the poor blighter swaying in the breeze from the gallows. The rich backdrop of Ravel’s minor chords, often exhilarating in his work, only make the tolling worse. More technical brilliance; more superb musicianship.

Gaspard de la Nuit, Le Gibet

The dwarf, Scarbo, emerged, laughed, taunted, threatened. On a wickedness scale of one to ten, he represented a score of 13. Adam found his malevolence in bucket loads in Ravel’s wonderful highly chromatic score.

Gaspard de la Nuit, Scarbo

Has an ANAM end-of-year recital ever generated a standing ovation? This got pretty damn close.

RACHMANINOV, Suite no. 2 for two pianos in C minor op. 17

Adam McMillan

Laurence Matheson

If Ravel is an impressionist – even though he rejected the description – this piece is pure Rachmaninov-romanticism. There are hints of the two great piano concertos – Two and Three – every few minutes. It has “soaring melodies building to a dramatic climax” (Adam) that brand this music as gut-grabbing Rachmaninov. And the notes, the number of notes. The two pianists had 20 cm fingers and six or seven on each hand.

But it wasn’t difficult; It wasn’t hard work – or it didn’t seem so. It was cascades of gorgeous music that left a gent in front of me grinning with delight as he applauded.

Critical to the success of this performance – apart from the technical wizardry – was the synergy of two pianists controlling the rubatos (rubati?) by gut; clearly they couldn’t see each other’s hands.

Two superb pianists, one superlative composition; one splendid recital. Bravo, gentlemen!

Victorian Opera: Simon and The Suit

The Grumpiest Boy in the World

Victorian Opera

Coopers Malthouse

3 October 2015

Jacob Lawrence was on stage for the entire time today. Most of that was shared with a dog. When it wasn’t with a dog it was with a lion. When it wasn’t a dog or a lion it was with children – even if the oldest of them was 25.

Given the adage about stages, children and animals, poor Jacob/Zachary Riddling (by no  means middling) shouldn’t have stood a chance. But he did.

Two weeks ago I sat in on the first voice run-through of The Grumpiest Boy in the World. Jacob was on top of his part then. Four days ago I sat in on the sitzprobe. Then, the score lay open at his feet – just a security thing.

Today he gave a sizzling performance; note perfect, witty and beautifully articulated . He was on top of the dog too – literally in one scene where the hapless dog, having been dispatched to the back yard, doubled as a horse.

Jacob Lawrence, dog and fantasy chorus incl. a squirrel monkey on a scooter (as you'd expect)
Source: https://www.facebook.com/victorianopera/photos/a.417759429218.192233.127956549218/10153378160534219/?type=3&theater

It was the chorus, though, that gave Jacob/Zachary a run for his money in sharing the lime-light. They were superb.

This opera is a Victorian Opera commission. It had a young cast, some drawn from Victorian Youth Opera Chorus Ensemble (VOYCE). And it was the first totally solo, it’s-all-down-to-me opera conducting-in-a-suit job of Simon Bruckard.

The chorus was a dream group. They’d rolled up to the first singing run-through two weeks ago with most of them having learned their part. On stage today in the second performance they were energetic, perfectly drilled and chorally thrilling. The little buggers (some of whom were really big buggers) could sing! – superbly.

My opinion of Grumpy today is really not relevant, though. The big test was the response of the target audience: the kids. My test subjects, a dozen or so boys and girls aged 6 to 10 in my field of view (a 4 metre radius) were totally absorbed for the entire time. A 10 year old right index finger didn’t leave it’s default position – in the right nostril – for the full 50 minutes.

The kids were there for Zachary and the terrific fantasy scenes they created. I was there for Simon Bruckard, the conductor.

I had first interviewed him in late July for Behind the Curtain, Victorian Opera’s blog. We spoke again in mid September when he had only just seen the full score of Grumpy.Over the past couple of months BtC published three of my pieces following Simon working on the score. 

http://www.victorianopera.com.au/news/blog/

Now, I wanted so see how he managed that score with a real, live cast – and pit ensemble – in front of him and a real live audience including those most uncompromising of critics – children –  behind him.

 In a word, like a pro (that’s three words). The confidence I’d seen at the sitzprobe was there again today. The absolute control of the young chorus and note by note support of the principals was there as well. The only crack in his control was him not being terribly sure what to do with the applause that was justly his. And that was nice. The quiet, unassuming but clearly competent young musician who had talked to me about his life and music during the year was there again today.

Opinion in our house is that Grumpy, the canine lion (or leonine canid) and Simon B should be reprised.

To them let us garlands bring

Nathan Lay and friends

Lieder Society of Victoria

30 September 2015

Richmond Uniting Church

It had to be a winner, did this recital.

Four musicians hand-picked from a pool of 70 contenders for the Victorian Opera-Melbourne Con. Master of Music degree and an expertly ‘curated’ (sorry, but that’s what it really was) program of English, Italian and German songs. Add to that mix two years of hard yakka: coaching and teaching, language and stagecraft and we had a concert where everyone knew their stuff and got on with it.

It was a relaxed and joyous affair, crowned – wait for it – by a standing ovation. The audience was a hard one: lieder groupies, people who knew the text by heart, who had firmly-held opinions on interpretation and dynamics. And into this den strode the four friends.

Nathan Lay and Simon Bruckard began with that luscious cycle of Gerald Finzi. Very English, with text from Shakespeare plays. Everyone in the church had the Bryn recording of course, but after a few seconds he’d been replaced by Nathan and Simon. That in itself is an indication of the musicianship of the two young men.

Nathan now has a rich baritone voice now expertly placed in his head to produce a sound that gently but firmly filled the space without any stress. It was a hard space to sing in and his opera-house power could easily have bullied us. He found the gentle soliloquies in Finzi’s songs and Simon walked beside him all the way. This was not opera. This was art song – crisp and clean and totally beautiful.

Michael ‘The Rabbit’ Petruccelli drew a complete change of pace: the randy Italian under the window with his guitar (I’ve never heard it called that before) but with Papa’s blunderbuss not far away.

He’d chosen songs that sat right in the middle of his range and he didn’t even think about his Italian-tenor-wobble-and-sob software. His pianissimo was beautifully controlled. His Torna a Surriento was an example masterful resistance – musicianship over histrionics. This was not just voice. It was brain and voice. And again, Simon provided the bedrock that the singer built on.

Was Matthew nervous? Recovering from a cold? There was no doubting his control of the difficult Strauss songs. I assume his German was faultless; Simon would have seen to that. But his voice didn’t have the richness I’d heard from him only a few weeks before.

Matthew has a voice that’s developed superbly in the two years of Vic Opera’s MoM program. He can handle Rossini on one hand and Strauss on the other. In spite of his voice difficulty, though ,we got the magic of these beautiful songs.

Everyone in the church had, no doubt, one song that grabbed them; that took them back to a wonderful place.

Once, when I knew nothing about RVW’s songs, I accompanied Lois for her A Mus A exam. Silent Noon was on her list. In spite of my ignorance loved it then. I do now and more so. Would Nathan find the summer heat, the dragon-fly hanging like a blue thread … from the sky?

Yes.

But he didn’t have the quandary I had. Lois was prepared to marry me ‘if I would have her’.

Accompany? yes. Marry? no! So … moving right along …

The best was last.

‘Litanei’, Schubert. A rich, powerful, emotional song where baritone and piano need to be welded, totally integrated; smooth vocal lines on equal footing with carefully controlled pedalling. It was there. It was all there. Real grab-you-in-the-gut stuff.

I loved it.

Who is going to fund these blokes to do a Salon recital?

Seraphim Trio: Wind Farm Music Dedicated to Tony Abbott – a quodlibet for piano trio by Lyle Chan

Seraphim Trio
19 August 2015
45 Downstairs

Politically motivated music has been around forever - almost. Haydn’s Symphony # 45 (The Farewell, subtitled, ‘last one please blow out the candle’) is an early example; Patrick Ascione’s Guernica (1978) is much later. Some of it is seriously political, some of it is acerbic, some is comical and witty such as Haydn’s Symphony # 47 (The Palindrome). It’s just that the black-tie, po-faced milieu that is the norm for classical music today has, with one or two exceptions, killed the possibility of hearing ‘classical’ music with non-serious intent. Sometimes, though, a piece comes along that defies the respectful-attention expectation. Wind Farm Music Dedicated to Tony Abbott is a very contemporary example.

It was commissioned by Julian Burnside from Lyle Chan only a few months ago. Lyle’s piece is both political and witty. Its subtitle ‘a quodlibet for piano trio’ – from the Latin, ‘what pleases’ – describes the piece as a pastiche of quotes stitched together and sometimes in counterpoint (which makes those bits simultaneous quodlibets). It’s the quotes that give WFMDtTA its edge.

The piece is analogous to a political cartoon: brief, pithy, witty and multilayered. And like the best political cartoons it’s funny – laugh-out-loud funny.(Lyle told me it was ok to laugh.) As well, it has something serious to say. Picture a wheat famer ploughing. Snatches of ABCFM escape the cab of his tractor and head at the speed of sound (340.29m/s) into the atmosphere. Bits of music hit the blades of a wind turbine. They’re reflected in all directions from the blades. (It’s quite safe. It’s well above the frequency of infrasound.) It is these reflected quotes – there are 17 – that form Lyle’s quodlibet.

Seraphim found all of that: the quotes, the wit, the edge. We’ve come to expect all of that from a sharpish lot who are not afraid of something that’s new or breaks tradition.

Like artworks built from found objects, most musical pastiches don’t work. You can see the lines of Tarzan’s Grip, yellowing with age. This piece is a major exception. It’s seamless.

Something fishy about this quote

I have a theory – triggered by a Burnside comment about Beethoven IX at the first performance – that Lyle’s piece is subtly about freedom. The text in the choral movement is freude – joy. It can, Burnside suggested, be reasonably be rendered freiheit – freedom. Likewise, some of the other quotes from William Tell, The Marriage of Figaro, The Trout … And like all good conspiracy theories this one depends on selected evidence and is completely untestable.

Seraphim Trio seems to be doing more than any other Melbourne chamber group to get ‘classical’ (whatever that may be) music to a broad audience. That day (19 August 2015) the Trio staged three pop-up concerts/performances/recitals/events/launches (delete several at will) in a little theatre, a Melbourne library and a city museum then took off for Adelaide to stage a Beethoven Festival in the SA State Library.

This launch was at 45 (halfway) Downstairs. The little gallery – the performance space – had pieces of framed art on the wall. All were handwritten musings about climate change. Wind farms; climate change; now ex-PM Abbott; political music; perhaps there is hope for humans yet.

Later in the day Seraphim played Lyle's quodlibet at the State Library of Victoria but this time with a real - as opposed to a plastic - piano.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky-w9qrCO-E&feature=youtu.be

and here's Lyle's program note about the piece:

http://www.lylechan.com/compositions/wind-farm-music-dedicated-to-tony-abbott/

The ABC might record it - as a piece of Australian political history ... perhaps ... one day.

Fairfax certainly has it on record:

 http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/music/julian-burnside-commissions-classical-ode-to-wind-farms-as-rebuke-to-tony-abbott-20150819-gj2kf0.html

*****

And it worked.
Lyle 'received numerous gleeful messages' to that effect on execution day. It was, it is, a piece for it's time.

Hiroshima and The American Bomb

In time of war Japan, like many other nations, has pressed its children into service of some kind. And they were put to work in Hiroshima in 1945 too.

Hiroshima was where I stood in the bright Spring sunshine beside the river – part of the rich delta on which the city of Hiroshima has stood for centuries. It is the capital of the Prefecture now and had been the seat of government from time to time as the power shifted across the past seven hundred years or so: feudal lords, shoguns and their samurai, and emperors.

I stood in the Peace Memorial Park, the site of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. It is on a narrow strip of land between the Honkawa and Motoyasu Rivers which make up part of the delta of Hiroshima. The Aioi bridge spans the rivers where they join and from it I had seen the iconic anti-nuclear weapon monument, the skeletal A-bomb Dome.

The Peace Park had a beautifully simple memorial to the dead. It was in two sections. The dominant piece was a stone coffin-like chest that holds the names of those who died from the bomb. Mounted over it, forming a shelter was an inverted parabola. The shelter was a shape recognisable to Japanese as a 6th century house roof – a metaphor for protection of extended family. It was aligned so that, looking through it from one end, I could see the Dome. An inscription carried a message to the dead, 'Sleep peacefully here. We shall not repeat the evil'.

'Sleep peacefully here. We shall not repeat the evil'  

© DJackel 2015

This was where I stood. In the warm sun, just across the river in sight of the location of the school, in sight of the dead skeleton of the Dome. As a statement about war it was pure genius. It said nothing. It said exactly what I let it say. What is said to me was unbearable.

At 8 am on the 6th of August in 1945 the spot of my standing was mostly traditional Japanese wooden houses: wood frames, timber floors and mats, tiled rooves with chains of upside down bells to direct the rain water to the ground. The houses stood in neat rows, their low rooves visible from the air and recorded by the cameras of the US Air Force who took the images as part of its 'before and after' program to record the nature and extent of the damage caused by an atomic explosion. They had done so over Nagasaki as well. The photos are in the Museum.

Yoshito Matsushige; Minutes after the American bomb

An 'after' photo shows an unploughed field with the occasional stark black tree trunk standing more or less erect. Every hundred metres or so a single ferro-concrete building shell remained. The contents of all of them, human and non-human, had been blown out and pulverised, vaporised or instantly burned. A three-story school building stands in the photo, a damaged shell, starkly empty. Were there children in school at 8.15 that day? If they were, nothing remained of them, their teachers, their books and equipment, their lunch boxes, their school bags, their sports equipment, their chairs and desks, their bodies, their clothes. There air raid sirens had sounded intermittently all night so nobody had slept much. But by morning the all clear had sounded so the students would have been in school or on their way, but tired.

© DJackel 2015

In 1945 the population of Hiroshima was about 350,000 people, most of them women and children together with the men of the military bases around the town. Probably half the population died instantly; cremated where they stood, or blown apart or burned where they sat. Over the next few days people died of horrible burns or, the most unfortunate ones, of cancers of all sorts as the damage to the chromosomes in the cells of their body tissues took effect.

Yoshito Matsushige; as the bomb exploded

Yoshito Matsushige was a press photographer working in Hiroshima in 1945. He arrived at a spot about 2.3 km from ground zero at about 11 am, not quite 3 hours after the blast. It took him 30 minutes to make the decision to photograph the unimaginable, the incomprehensible. His first image taken that morning has been enlarged to giant size and mounted just inside the first exhibit hall of the Peace Museum. It is an arresting image. It records a group of junior high school children attempting to clear rubble to create fire lanes. They are blurred into the background. In the foreground a group of people – all shoeless – stand, looking dazed, in a rough line on one side of the street. One of them is a young woman carrying a baby in her arms, its mop of black hair visible in the crook of her arm. Matushige wrote that she kept on crying out, 'My baby, open your eyes. Open your eyes'. It never did.

Only the shadow remains ...

A display case held a single rusted child's tricycle. Shinichi Tetsutani was riding it in front of his house that morning. He was nearly four. He died that night from his burns. His father, knowing he had no money for a funeral was unable to have the body cremated. Such was the number of bodies rotting in the Spring warmth, that he decided to bury his son and the trike in the backyard. Years later the boy's skeleton was exhumed for burial in a family plot and the bike was donated to the Museum. And there it was, that little, rusted little boy’s toy: an intensely powerful, eloquent testimony.

I fought back tears with an effort. I could take no more.

I made for the sunlight again, as if needing reassurance that the world was still habitable. In a weird act of defiance I found the Museum coffee shop.

I ordered a soft-serve ice-cream: powdered green tea and vanilla. An elderly American woman sat at a table clutching a strawberry and vanilla swirled cone, Shinichi’s trike a very few metres from her from her back in the museum. She spoke to her daughter, 'get me a napkin'. Her daughter, standing beside me at the counter, checked then replied, 'they don't have any'. Mother (exasperated), 'you've got to be kidding'.

'Sleep peacefully here. We shall not repeat the evil'.