Young and Jackson

Charlie Cousins, Sam Duncan, Jacob Machin, Gabrielle Scawthorn

45 Downstairs

21 March 2015

At first it was difficult to know who was the more attractive woman: Gabrielle Scawthorn (as Lorna or “Lorn” a nickname that inspired awful puns about grass) in black market nylons and scent or Charlie Cousins sporting magnificent boobs. After a few seconds Gabrielle’s magnificent red hair won hands down and not just because it took that time to realise that five o’clock shadow was just visible under Cousins’ make-up.

But Y & J was not about cross-dressing, although that fleshed out an interesting character. It was about the pointlessness, gut-wrenching horror of war and its universal ability to destroy men’s minds as well as their bodies.

It's late 1945. Two sailors who are about to get their orders are on weekend leave from Flinders Naval Base. The rules that specify they are too junior to take a room at Y & Js are a challenge to be taken on and so are the Yanks that steal their women – in this play, both successfully.

The boys – they are about 17 –  avoid any consideration of the war against the Japs still raging up north with classic Aussie wit. Don Reid built the rapid fire dialogue into rehearsals for concert party skits (‘men only’) that rationalised the camp sexual innuendo and awful puns. It’s difficult stuff to write credibly but Reid did it superbly. Its delivery depended on split-second timing but Cousins (as Keith) and Machin (as the dim-witted Jimmy) made it seem effortless and therefore unrehearsed.

The script was inspired by real men and real locations and events that could easily have been. It’s a sort of historical fiction – or is it fictional history? Les (Sam Duncan) is best in hospital getting treatment for “shell shock” – now PSTD – where the byplay with a pineapple (you don’t take flowers to a bloke) is beautifully written and precisely acted. But Aussie blokes don’t talk about themselves and certainly they don’t do meaningful confessions about how they feel when they have failed to cope (as their mates in battle appear to have) and appear weak (and therefore unmanly). That awkward scene might have been better built on laconic insults where Keith effectively, but not directly, tells his best mate Les that he understands what’s going on in Les’s head. Later, the erotic content (Keith knows ménage à trois) works well by reminiscence and allusion. Les’s PTSD might have been better handled the same way.

Chloe’s costume by Michael Hili, design & artwork by Miranda Costa.

image from http://www.fortyfivedownstairs.com/events/

Setting the audience in Young and Jacksons’ main bar worked superbly. Setting Room 24 – with its two iron beds – on one side and the hospital room on the other and the bar with Chloe (left tit damaged by a brutish Yank and patched by a sensitive barman) at one end was entirely credible. So were the minimal sets – one wonky backdrop and a few well-chosen props.

Y & J is an important story. It records Australian history. It records Australian culture. It records what war did and is still doing to young Australian men except that in 2015, the Australian army does not treat many of them. It just chucks them out.

ANAM: Symphonic Requiem for the child victims of war

Shane Chen violin

Stanley Dodds conductor

ANAM Orchestra

South Melbourne Town Hall

Saturday 28 February 2015

‘Wilfred Lehmann's Symphonic Requiem for the child victims of war,’ says Paul Dean, Director of the Australian National Academy of Music, ‘is one of the most extraordinary pieces of Australian music you will ever hear, and yet it has been played only once since it was written in 1994.’

The piece is described (accurately, I think) as “a devastating work for violin and orchestra voicing his (Wilfred Lehmann’s) outrage at the obscenities suffered by children at the hands of warring adults.’*

Did the ANAM orchestra with Stanley Dodds find that outrage? 

Most certainly – with the intensity that we’ve come to expect from an ANAM band.

Did Shane Chen find it? 

Absolutely – with the intelligence and musical sensibility that is becoming his trade-mark.

Shane’s problem was how to find that devastation out front on his violin because it was certainly written into Wilfred Lehmann’s score and played out behind him.

‘Important for me, as I prepared the piece,' he said, 'was the innocence of the childish character in the second movement (played on the mandolin). That’s more important than the anger. The anger is due to man-made circumstances but the beauty throughout the whole piece, that continued to the very end, was that Mr Lehmann shows the children having the final say. I firmly believe that the spirit of the piece is that they are going to a better place.’

The piece started with the drums of war – the snare drum – and that was picked up by the solo violin almost immediately in the opening bars.

Shane agreed, ’It’s the panicking in the chaos. It is portrayed in the opening.  It’s the middle of the night. You can hear a noise  – a possum? – then all of a sudden the drum beat, the terror during the night-time.’

He had other problems sitting in his head as well as the intellectual-musical. He had his fellow students of three years ago behind him, he had Paul Dean, Head of ANAM and clarinettist in QSO for the concerto’s first and only performance in 1994 in front of him and he had Lehmann himself in the fifth row. Pressure!

Chen had thought hard about accepting the gig. He thought the piece was ‘epic, huge and technically very difficult. It’s very difficult’, he said, ‘like Ysaÿe (the Ysaÿe sonata for solo violin, his 2011 end-of-year recital). The Symphonic Requiem is very difficult, but playable. It’s written by a great violinist, Wilfred Lehmann and he knows what works, what doesn’t work. The process of learning it s difficult but once you get it under your finger it’s very comfortable and very expressive.

 *https://lifeatanam.wordpress.com/2015/02/16/wilfred-lehmann/

Ensemble Offspring and Ironwood: Broken Consorts

Ensemble Offspring and Ironwood

45 Downstairs

23 February 2015

How does a classical music writer deal with performance they don’t understand and music they don’t really like? That was my only (personal, I admit) problem with this recital. It was one of programming.

45 Downstairs was an ideal venue for these instruments. The bricks and glass windows behind and the ancient timber floor beneath liked the strings and were bright enough not to lose the woods and percussion.

Which brings me to this: as percussionist and joint music director for the series, Claire Edwardes confirmed her position as top-notch percussion – and indeed musician - in Australia.

A consort, the program told me (I didn’t know that!) is a collection of similar instruments, eg viols. A mix of consorts equals a broken consort. Musically, there was nothing broken about this lot. They had thought carefully about this concert - even their ‘broken’ dress: black, white, and black and white.

Their real genius was their treatment of the music: 17^th century pieces seen from a 21^st century perspective. Matthew Locke, student of Edward Gibbons, (student of Orlando) wrote music that is firmly English Baroque – very contrapuntal and no tremolo – on gut strings, in this case obviously written for dancing not for singing. Consort of Flower Parts was played straight – simply gorgeous. Later, his Suite from The Tempest became a tantalising walk through some history of music. It was C17 played with prepared piano, bass clarinet, glass bells and bowed, prepared vibraphone. And it worked. That is, it grabbed me – even the impromptu sing around the piano (Google, “Tie up the wind”.)

William Lawes Consorts in Six Parts was fugal, deliciously complex and richly played on contemporary instruments. It drew me to Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites except that Bach* did it all with one string line.

The Broken Consorts idea was clear in Felicity Wilcox’s Uncovered Ground. It was an intriguing dialogue between early and new music where she had written glimpses of the (musical) ground like a ‘chipped paint wall’ before the ground is revealed. The bowed vibraphone was eerie, the bass clarinet didgeridoo-like and it took me to the Australian bush. Was it intended to? It doesn’t matter. The piece was commissioned by Ensemble Offspring. I’m glad they did.

I came unstuck with Damien Ricketson’s Trace Elements (badly) and less so with Mary Finister’sSilva with its dripping rainforest references.

This program and these instrumentations could easily have been simply ‘clever’. The program was cleverly intelligent. The performance was great. I loved it.

I went to this recital with a freebie I 'won' from a link to Flinders Quartet newsletter.

*

WL 1602 - 1645 Musician to Charles 1; killed fighting for the Royalists at the siege of Chester.

ML 1621 - 1677 Composer in Ordinary to Charles 11; succeeded by Purcell.

JSB 1685 - 1750

The Flying Dutchman

Victorian Opera

Palais Theatre,

15 February 2015

Four or five bars were enough and I grinned to myself. We had an orchestra that knew what it was doing. So they were Young People. So? So the youngest was 15. So? To quote Jason*, ‘Your point being?’.

Orchestrally speaking it’s what comes out of the pit that matters. Not that it was, strictly speaking, a pit - more like a small depression in the stalls’ floor with excited fans held at bay by a small post-and-rail fence. (How Aussie!)

It’s always a risk with a pit orchestra. If the strings are not exactly in tune the high notes, where the strings are most exposed, sound unhappy. They didn’t. If the bangers and thumpers up the back are not exactly on their game the bang stands out like the proverbial dog’s. Not this lot. If they’re in a hole in the ground the sound is dead. They weren’t; it wasn’t.

But at about bar four I relaxed. It’s a point I’ve made before about AYO: with them we get enthusiasm and energy. It’s something missing from some of our orchestras and I know that, of itself, it’s far from being enough to guarantee a great performance.

As well, the musicianship and technical skill of the musos of the AYO was also obvious early on. But the overture was only a taster for the spin-tingling performance of Senta’s Act II aria, Traft ihr das Schiff. Lori Phillips, Richard Mills and the AYO came together in a tightly drawn, magnificently sung, brilliantly accompanied, emotionally charged performance.

Senta is obsessed with the portrait of the Dutchman that she’s clutching. She’s slowly going mad with love, singing to the image.

Have you seen the ship upon the ocean

with blood‑red sails and black masts?

On her bridge a pallid man,

the ship's master, watches incessantly …

Let me be the one whose loyalty shall save you!

May God's angel reveal me to you!

Through me shall you attain redemption!**

Mary (Liane Keegan) L; Senta (Lori Phillips) R from
 http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/live-reviews/review-flying-dutchman-victorian-opera

The orchestration provides the clues about Senta’s psychological degradation: bassoons and so on. And that’s not going to work if the orchestra and the conductor – together – don’t know exactly what they are doing. And they did. They did!

Dr Mills had worked hard with that orchestra: intensive rehearsals section by section, teaching them to listen to the mini-ensembles they were part of and to find the broad sweeping lines of intense emotion that are fundamental to this – and the other – Wagner master-operas.

So it all came down to the Artistic Director of VO. He took the risk – there never was one – of hiring the AYO and he worked them into the ground. He, Richard Choc-o-late Bonbon Mills*** even organised a special gig for the quintet of off-stage horns: a reprise in the dress-circle foyer before the opera - their mini 'on-stage' moment.

* my mate. Well, one of ‘em

**http://www.impresario.ch/libretto/libwagfli_e.htm

*** CJ Dennis in The Sentimental Bloke, about Ginger Mick, ‘A choc-o-late bonbon, tough on the outside, soft on the inside.’

Timothy Nankervis Recital

Recital for Solo Cello 

St Brigid’s Church,

Maldon

13 January 2015

Bach, Suite no. 1

Britten, Suite no. 1

Taverner, Thrinos

A standing ovation!

Rare enough in a city concert hall but rarer still in a 100 seat country church.

On several levels Tim had nowhere to hide.

He had, at most, a maximum of two strings to play at any one time. To build a harmonic such as a chord he had to rely on the residual memory of the preceding one or two notes. So harmonic depended on total accuracy, especially in the Bach Suite.

No violins, no viola were going to rescue him if he fell over; no multiple piano strings to hide amongst.

His musical isolation was most obvious  in the Bach Suite. There are no surviving dynamic markings for the suites for solo cello; no louds or softs, no fasts or slows, no pauses, no nothing. Any markings in modern scores are figments of some earlier performer’s mind. A musician of the calibre of Tim would be insane to even look at them.

All of this just made the performance interesting. It was made exciting by the cellist’s naked musicianship. The first cello suite is nice to listen to played by any half competent musician such as the teenager I heard busking in Paris. But to lose yourself in Bach’s head, to sit beside him late at night in the light of a couple of candles when all the kids are finally in bed, to understand what was coming out of his psyche as his musical soul took off, needs more than technical competence; that’s assumed. Tim needed the ability to lose himself in Bach’s mind and his musicianship so that what he found could be heard coming from the string or strings he had under his bow. And the sound from under Tim’s bow was superb.

 

Tim Nankervis, St Bridget's Maldon

Image © Denise Jackel

But there was more.

Britten’s suites are modelled the baroque dances that form the structure of Bach’s cello suites. But ‘there is no more forlorn opening to a work by Britten than the beginning of this (Number One) suite’. A ‘doleful Canto’ opens and intersperses the work where ‘Britten conjures a whole peasant band’. Tim’s ability was laid bare in his attack on the complexity of the suite: ‘a battlefield call … drums … dull tabors and droning brass … a gauche stumping tune … a lyrical piece brought to an end with a ghostly bugle call’*.

It is an exhausting work and the performance was electric.

(Not the Elizabethan) John Tavener’s Thrinos was never going to be an encore to ease us out into the heavy Summer rain. Tavener said the title 'has both liturgical and folk significance in Greece - the Thrinos of the Mother of God sung at the Epitaphios on Good Friday and the Thrinos of mourning which is chanted over the dead body on the house of a close friend’. If for no other piece that day it was this lament that got the audience on its feet.

A few days before the recital Tim told me has was having butterflies just thinking about (the recital) and he knew that a beer afterwards would be fabulous.

You earned it Tim!

Timothy Nankervis is member of the Seraphim Trio, The Sonus Piano Quartet and Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and an ANAM graduate.

*Kidea, P, 2013, Benjamin Britten A Life in the Twentieth Century, Allen Lane, London