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'.

Seraphim Trio: Beethoven goes Pop-up

A year or so back I sat behind a family who got stuck into their tucker at a Montreal Symphony concert. The row beside me were scandalised. The family had been to an outdoor picnic concert a few weeks before – a concert designed to encourage newbies to sign up for more. Clearly it had worked. But the ignorants hadn’t twigged that the rules in Montreal’s Maison symphonique were different – and formal.

Horror!

Concert performances of classical music has, for centuries, required players to dress formally. But, until recently, listening had quite different rules. Arriving late, chatting, being there to be seen, throwing food and applauding at the end of movements (much like jazz is appreciated today) was normal and expected. But then the maestros – the masters – started to crack down. They insisted on the respect they, if not the music, thought they deserved.

In the early 1930s Stokowski’s campaign for reverential silence right through the piece he was conducting prompted one dissenter to suggest that, at the end of a movement, Mr Stokowski ‘press a button …(for) … a noiseless illuminated sign: You may now cross the other leg.’

http://www.therestisnoise.com/2005/02/applause_a_rest.html

I should think so!

Seraphim Trio – and other groups such as Flinders Quartet and Victorian Opera – have begun de-reverence-ifying (I made it up) some of their repertoire, taking it to the people rather than compelling the people to come to a formal concert hall.

Late last year Flinders set up in a city shop. And already this year Seraphim have given recitals (have played?) in Melbourne’s Parliament Station. They've also collaborated with the street artist Peter Drew in a pop-up recital in Campbell Arcade.  Peter and Anna Goldsworthy, the pianist arm of Seraphim, had met at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas in 2013. 

Perversely, at their 2015 season launch, Seraphim even reversed even that. Instead of taking Beethoven trios to the people they brought the people into the Beethoven Trios – right into them. On each of three chairs huddled in a central triangle a volunteer sat facing out towards a player. Each audience-person had been dropped right in it – in the centre of the action. And they reported that they loved it. Certainly there was no shortage of new volunteers at the movement change-over. Each of them got a very personal aural view of a bit of one of two ‘early’ Beethoven piano trios (for piano, violin and cello) of his Opus 1 collection of three.

But there was more. Seraphim Trio is investigating “virtual reality”.

Jumpgate VR is a South Australian production company that creates virtual reality content for live events. Anton Andreacchio is the brains behind the company and, when Anna met him, she decided to investigate the  idea of virtual immersion of a Beethoven trio performance. At Jumpgate, Anton demonstrated a scuba diving clip (truly immersion!) that excited Anna enough to set up a recording that was trialled with a few concert-goers in late 2014.

A digital recording of a Beethoven trio performance is played through traditional headphones. A non-traditional viewer-headset shows the performance image consistent with the orientation of the audience-person head. That is, the image moves to follow the head as it ‘looks’ around a concert hall. Anna said that Jumpgate seemed a natural collaborator in a project that emphasised Beethoven; he was one of the most democratic of composers. ‘Choose Your Own Beethoven, she said, ‘is being developed as an opportunity for the audience to take a larger (curatorial) role in their concert experience. In the example I tested I ‘stood’ in the Salon of Melbourne Recital Centre for a Beethoven trio Seraphim had recorded a month before.

But all of this is not the stuff of gimmicks – desperate measures of an emerging group. The Trio has been together for two decades and they have big fans internationally. When I met them in late 2014 they had just returned from Europe. They’d been invited – for the second time – to study with one of the world’s great chamber musicians. They had spent 11 days working five hours a day in intensive workshops in Vienna with the violist, Hatto Beyerle, co-founder of the Alban Berg Quartet.

The Vienna connection continues – even if tenuously.

Beethoven wrote his first set of three piano trios in 1795 when he was 25 – about 15 years younger than the Seraphim players are now. He premiered them at a concert in Vienna. Papa Haydn was in the audience. Haydn advised Beethoven not to publish the third in its present form. It’s been suggested he thought it was “too creative”. That could be code for, “People won’t understand it”. It could also be code for “It’s too good; it threatens me”. Haydn is recorded as saying, ‘You give me the impression of a man with more than one head, more than one heart and more than one soul!" (A Alsvang, Beethoven, 1961).

By this time – 1795 – Bach’s Coffee Cantata was about 60 years old. Coffee with Beethoven-in-performance could have been old hat even if Parliament Station was a few centuries off. There’s no reason why caffeine shouldn’t be taken with Beethoven and every reason why it should. The only problem is getting the Steinway down the escalator.

In 2015 Seraphim are playing all the Beethoven trios in five Australian states above and below ground, in ones and twos at traditional recitals and in festivals, such ‘Weekend Feasts’ in Pontville, Tasmania and in the State Library of South Australia* in the beautiful Mortlock Wing.

Mortlock wing-State-Library-of-South-Australia

True, they sometimes still perform recital-style in black – or black and white. But Tim Cellist was seen inside a pair of lairy socks a year or so back.

*SA State Library Beethoven Festival

 

Saturday 22 August

11.00am - 1.30pm Concert 1 (includes lunch) - $45

Opus 1 No. 1 in E-flat major

Opus 70 No. 2 in E-flat major

 

2.00 - 3.00pm, Panel discussion

Simon Healy, Anna Goldsworthy and artist Peter Drew discuss Beethoven's contemporary relevance.

4.30 - 6.30pm Concert 2 (includes afternoon tea) - $45

Opus 11 Piano Trio No. 4 in B-flat major ("Gassenhauer")

Opus 1 No. 2 in G major

Opus 97 in B-flat major ("Archduke")

7.00pm 3-course dinner package - $135

3 course meal with Seraphim Trio in the Mortlock Chamber.

Sunday 23 August

10.00am - 12.30pm Concert 3 (includes morning tea) - $45

Opus 1 No. 3 in C minor
Opus 70 No. 1 in D major ("Ghost")

Other ticketing options

3-concert ticket - $120
All inclusive festival ticket - $250

Contact: Michelle Harniman; P: (08) 8207 7258 E: harniman.michelle@slsa.sa.gov.au

 http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au/site/page.cfm?u=828&c=44089