Soundstream New Music. Elder Hall. 14 Oct 2023
Considering Matthew Shepard is billed as a “…modern day Passion for choir and ensemble reaching beyond tragedy to find peace, understanding and life-affirming joy.”
Does that pique your curiosity, especially the use of the the capitalised ‘P’? For a particular music demographic, the answer is ‘yes’. For many, I suspect the answer is ‘no’, and if that assessment is correct, then it’s a great shame, because Grammy-nominated Considering Matthew Shepard is one of the most achingly beautiful modern choral works ever created. It needs to be re-billed!
Conductor Jesse Budel’s program notes state that the work draws on diverse “…musical styles, including hymns, country, rock, jazz, plainchant, gospel and ballads”, almost in equal measure. As such, it is eminently easy to listen to, and should have wide appeal. The billing perhaps should seize on this because it deserves huge audiences despite its disturbing content. Considering Matthew Shepard is no stuffy ‘highbrow’ event. Rather, it is broadly accessible, affecting, deeply satisfying, and both provocative and disquieting at the same time. The music is highly enjoyable, and varied, and the songs are transparent in their meaning. It is theatrical in its staging, and co-producers Jesse Budel and Riana Chakravarti clearly understand that what is seen on stage (and throughout the auditorium) is just as important as what is heard.
So, who is Matthew Shepard, and why should we ‘consider’ him?
Matthew Shepard was – no longer ‘is’ – an American twenty-one-year-old University of Wyoming student who was beaten by Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson who pistol whipped him with a gun, robbed him, tied him to a fence in a lonely country field in freezing conditions, and then set fire to him before leaving him to die. He was found eighteen hours later, and died five days later in hospital without having gained consciousness. (I mention the names of Matthew’s assailants because they should be reviled forever.)
Matthew was gay, and the ensuing court case that sentenced McKinney and Henderson each to two consecutive life sentences in prison, did not hear the case as a hate crime as that didn’t exist as an indictable crime under the State of Wyoming’s criminal law at the time. The case did however prompt national action against homophobia and hate laws were passed during the Obama administration. Good things sometime emerge from evil, and Mathew’s murder has resulted in a number of positive developments from the queer community, and even foregrounded in art such as the stage play The Laramie Project (Matthew was murdered in the town Laramie), and composer Craig Hella Johnson’s oratorio Considering Matthew Shepard.
In 2013 award winning investigative journalist Stephen Jimenez published a book that suggested Matthew’s murder was not a hate crime but was more likely related to the drug trade. Needless to say, his thesis caused controversy with suggestions it diminished the vileness of the crime.
Regardless of what the full story is about Matthew’s cruel death, nothing can derogate from the evil that was perpetrated. The oratorio stands: it is about an “ordinary boy” who loved and was loved, who celebrated the majesty and mystery of the wide outdoors, who loved theatre and music and food and “feeling good”, who loved surprising and delighting friends and neighbours, who loved meeting new people, and who loved politics and learning languages. But he was an “ordinary boy”, as one of the songs in the oratorio explores, and he died an anything but ordinary death, and who is now immortalised in many ways, and is no longer ordinary.
Craig Hella Johnson’s oratorio brings all this to a conscious level, and it is celebratory, sad, shocking, disturbing, and positive, and optimistic, and beautiful.
Conductor and musical director Jesse Budel has assembled a superb choir and excellent musical ensemble, which are joined by soloists Mark Oates and Jennifer Trijo. Musically, the result is first rate. At times the acoustic of the Elder Hall blurred the choir and crisp consonant sounds were being lost, but Budel set and maintained an appropriate pace that by and large ameliorated the issue. The staging of the performance was sublime. Lighting was carefully designed and executed to be sympathetic to the content being sung, and two large projection screens to the sides of the stage displayed images that were whimsical, funny, sad, and evocative. Modest amounts of haze made us feel we were at the site of Matthew’s savage and inhumane bashing. For some songs, some of the singers left the stage and located themselves around the auditorium with devastating emotional impact, and Budel controlled it all authoritatively. Bravo Budel and Chakravarti. Bravo.
Oates sang exceptionally well, and he bent the Elder acoustic to his wont. He hasn’t sung better. His In Need of Breath and Deer Song were almost breathtaking. Trijo was also at the top of her game, with crystal clear articulation and a mesmerising blend of gentle vibratory and straight tones.
Members of the choir also sang solo parts, and smaller groups. The lady’s quartet that sang Keep it Away from Me was a highlight. The affecting I am like you was sung a cappella and was very fine indeed.
Considering Matthew Shepard is a major work, and is approximately 100 minutes non-stop in length, even with two songs omitted for this performance. (Budel later informed me that one song was optional and the other is often cut to make the ending more straightforward.) Towards the end, the high emotion of the piece and being confined to one’s seat for the entire performance, it almost … almost … starts to drag, but no sooner does that thought start to creep into one’s mind when the tempo of the music surges and the singing and lyricism become an explosion of joy in the penultimate movement, All of Us!
And there it is. Ultimately joyous. A composition and a performance that anyone could enjoy. Anyone. Yes, it needs to be billed that way, and even though this is the second time that Budel has presented this work, it deserves to be staged heard again. Soundstream New Music and Budel are to be applauded for taking the risk a second time.
Kym Clayton
When: 12 to 14 Oct
Where: Elder Hall
Bookings: Closed
Musica Viva. Adelaide Town Hall. 12 Oct 2023
On occasion you know that what you are hearing in the concert hall is rare and extraordinary. Tonight’s concert given by the Vision String Quartet is one of those moments. In a fleeting seventy minutes, our understanding of what constitutes ‘significance’ in string quartet playing was challenged, and new benchmarks were created.
The Vision String Quartet is indeed a revelation.
This is high praise indeed, but this reviewer has never before experienced a string quartet that is able to present challenging repertoire with such transparency that it feels like a familiar ‘old friend’. Ernest Bloch’s Prelude for String Quartet, B.63, and especially Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No.4 in C minor, Sz.91 are not walks in the park by any stretch of the imagination, and in lesser hands they can sound inaccessible. However, the members of the Vision String Quartet fully appreciate what makes these compositions come to life and stay alive, and their playing tapped into this life blood and was a revelation. There’s that word again.
So, what makes this particular ensemble special? Like many other ensembles, their technical skill and musicality is of the highest order. Like some other ensembles, they stand rather than sit while performing (with the exception of the cellist). Like very few (any?) other highest calibre ensembles, they play a full program totally from memory – there’s not a music stand nor a sheet of music nor an iPad in sight. The excellent Musica Viva program notes accompanying the concert provide us with the reasons why the Vision String Quartet choose to play without music, which do not need to be replicated here, but suffice to say that it is a significant choice. Arguably, memorising a piece of music gives a musician a more profound understanding of the score, and playing it from memory may liberate them to give a more heartfelt performance. But then again, there are many elite musicians who almost always have the music in front of them and still give bravura performances.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter, but with the Vision String Quartet it does seem to have an impact. It is fascinating to watch them perform as they intensely concentrate on each other and watch (as well as hear) precisely what each other is doing. Every muscle twitch, every sideways glance or fleeting smile is sharply observed. The progression of the music calls for allegiances between the players shift and change. Leonard Disselhorst on cello and Sander Stuart on viola concentrate intensely on each other in the opening bars of the Bloch. When it’s time for the violins to enter, Daniel Stoll and Florian Willeitner on violins hold each other’s gaze and Disselhorst and Stuart check on them. Disselhorst encouragingly leans towards the violins and checks that his dialogue with them is what they are calling for. They constantly adjust and trade-off, but faithfully stick at Bloch’s intentions. What they are doing is incredibly believable. They are not reading the music; they are feeling it.
The Bartók is performed with crystal clarity, and the mathematical symmetry of the piece is laid bare. The prestissimo second movement ends with a final up-bow, which is almost nonchalant, and fleeting knowing smiles all round. The bows are all placed on Disselhorst’s lap for the allegretto pizzicato fourth movement, and with the final plucked note there’s that nonchalance again, but it’s not really that. It’s more an expression of calmness that comes with being supremely comfortable with the task at hand. The Bartók ends with an almost standard reading of the allegro molto final movement: it’s lively, well-articulated and the technical difficulty is made to look easy.
Antonín Dvořák’s String Quartet No.13 in G major, Op.106 rounded out the concert. Unlike the previous pieces by Bloch and Bartók, it is suffused with rich lyrical melodies that more easily appeal to a Western ear, but that does not diminish the exceptional clarity with which the earlier pieces were played. Indeed, the clarity exposed the melodic material more convincingly: the forest did not obscure the trees, as it were. As beautiful as the Dvořák was, for this reviewer the magic of the concert was in the revealing and astonishing performances of the Bloch and the Bartók, and in the encore, which was a Latin-infused dance piece from their recent album Spectrum. As in the pizzicato movement of the Bartók, they dispensed with their bows and played the instruments as if they were guitars (except the cello!). It seemed very much like a jam session. They played to and for each other; they competed; they strutted their stuff; they had fun. And the audience just loved it.
Again, the Vision String Quartet is a revelation.
Kym Clayton
When: 12 Oct
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Adelaide Town Hall. 22 Sep 2023
What’s in a title? The ASO’s seventh Symphony Series concert in the current season is entitled Dreams, and it’s almost a perfect description. The title refers to the outcomes of dreaming at a subconscious level rather than consciously wishing for particular things to eventuate. With that understanding in mind, it was interesting to observe so many members in the audience taking opportunities at various times to close their eyes and let the music transport them to all manner of places.
In what has now become the ASO’s traditional musical Acknowledgment of Country, Pudnanthi Padninthi transports one to distant places in this vast country known best to our indigenous brothers and sisters. As we listen, we are briefly introduced to the mystery of the connection to country, and ….. the ‘dreams’ begin.
In a première by any Australian orchestra, American composer Grace-Evangeline Mason’s The Imagined Forest is an orchestral tone poem that is very pleasing to the ear, and uncomplicated to listen to. It comprises a dizzying fusion of melodies and rhythms that wash through and around you. No sooner does one instrument introduce melodic material, which is quickly seized upon by the wider orchestra, than it dissolves away and is replaced by something else. The auditory experience is ephemeral, as are dreams. It is fascinating to hear so many instruments foregrounded that often are not, such as xylophone, other percussion, and piccolo.
Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No.1 in D, Op.19, begins eccentrically. The solo violin enters almost immediately and announces a languid, pensive, and preoccupied theme. Indeed, the score is notated ‘sognando’ which translates as ‘dreamily’. Atypically, the usual fast-slow-fast movement structure of a concerto is switched around and replaced with slow-fast-slow, and it finishes as abruptly and unexpectedly as it begins. Virtuoso Ilya Gringolts plays with clarity and coaxes the most transcendent tones from his Stradivari violin as he expertly navigates the technical difficulties of the composition and makes it look easy. It is fascinating to watch concertmaster Kate Suthers while Gringolts plays: she clearly loves and understands the concerto and knows precisely how to lead her fellow violins, and the appreciative glance Gringolts gives her at the end of the scherzo movement speaks volumes. At the conclusion of the concerto, both Gringolts and guest conductor Mark Wigglesworth both acknowledge Suthers. It is a sign of mutual respect rather than duty.
After the interval, the temperate dreaming of the first half is put to the sword and replaced by feverish and tormented fantasising in a no-holds-barred reading of Sibelius’ Symphony No.1 in E minor, Op.39. Like the tone poem luxuriously performed earlier in the program, the Sibelius is redolent with lyricism. It begins with heroic yet plaintive tones from Dean Newcomb’s sublimely played clarinet which is soon engulfed by the full might of the orchestra. Wigglesworth is unafraid to let the orchestra erupt and inundate the audience with heartfelt and enthusiastic acknowledgment of the melodic material, and it is awe inspiring to see timpanist Andrew Penrose in full flight. Harpist Kate Moloney is inspiring in the opening of the second movement, and Wigglesworth is able to extract almost vocal tones from the violins in the finale, almost as if the symphony is a choral symphony.
At the end, the feverish dreaming is well and truly over as the highly appreciative audience gave generous and deserved applause.
Kym Clayton
When: 22 Sep
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Elder Hall, The University of Adelaide. 9 Sep 2023
Violinist Emily Sun is the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s current “Artist in Association”. It’s a quaint designation, and regardless of the benefits that the ASO and Emily Sun might derive from the arrangement, the concert-going audience of Adelaide is the clear winner.
Emily Sun is a superb musician, and her artistry is exquisite. For this concert, she paired with pianist Andrea Lam who also has an international reputation for excellence as a soloist in her own right. They have collaborated to prepare a program that is, in their own words, “inspired by nature and their love of it”. Such words uttered about supposed rationales behind programming decisions can often be dismissed as mere verbiage, but in this case, they would seem to have been said with sincerity. The program is entitled “Storm and sunlight”, and everything they play comes fully alive when listened to through that ‘lens’.
The entire concert has an impressionistic and distinctly modern feel about it and begins gently with an arrangement credited to Sun herself and to the great Russian-American violinist Jascha Heifetz. The arrangement allows Sun to demonstrate her creativity and Lam to reveal her superb collaborative skills. As sublime as the composition is, the arrangement doesn’t quite evoke the same dreamy contemplation as does Debussy’s original orchestral tone poem.
This is followed by an Australian première of Turkish composer Fazil Say’s remarkable composition Violin Sonata No.2 , Op.82, which he names Kaz Dağı (Mount Ida). It is Say’s musical response to a modern day man-made ecological disaster that is happening at the site through mining operations. The sonata starts with Lam reaching into the case of the Steinway to prevent the natural workings of the instrument as she violently stabs a repeated note in the bass register. The result is a sickening semi-resonant sound that mimics machinery savaging the earth. Sun joins in and together there is a fusion of haunting western and eastern harmonies across the three movements. The result is ominous, and is both aurally and visually arresting. There seem to be musical equivalents of cries for help from the natural world, and there is also hope and optimism in the seemingly French-infused exquisite extended piano part in the closing section. This piece deserves to be heard again and again, and Sun and Lam’s affecting performance was a ride on a knife-edge.
The second half of the program included three excerpts from Sibelius’s Six Pieces for Violin and Piano, Op.79, and Grieg’s Violin Sonata No. 3 in C minor, Op.45. Neither of these works are frequently heard on the concert platform, which is a pity for they are both quite delightful and brim with elegant and cheerful melodies. The Grieg demonstrates the composer’s obvious skill at producing memorable and enduring miniature compositions, but the sonata is a substantial work coming in at around twenty-five minutes. It appears to lack the complexity that can be found in others of the genre, such as the sonatas of Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, and Prokofiev, but it radiates charm and wit and allows both piano and violin to weave a wonderful partnership of equals.
The couple that sat next to me in the auditorium freely admitted they seldom go to art music concerts, but were now encouraged they should make a habit of it. Maybe the ASO is also a winner?
Bravo Emily Sun and Andrea Lam!
Kym Clayton
When: 9 Sep
Where: Elder Hall
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Elder Hall. 9 Aug 2023
This reviewer has previously remarked that the ASO’s matinée concerts are a classy musical oasis in a busy week. There is nothing taxing in the music presented. Just unfussed elegance – pure and simple. The third concert in the series is titled Carefree, and it’s a perfect description. It begins with Aaron Copland’s über tuneful Clarinet Concert performed by the ASO’s principal clarinet Darren Skelton, and is followed by Schubert’s Symphony No.3 in D, D.200, which was composed when he was only 18 years old.
The concert begins with what has become the ASO’s traditional musical Acknowledgment of Country – Pudnanthi Padninthi (The Coming and the Going) by Buckskin. Regular ASO concert goers will have heard it numerous times before, and this presents a wonderful listening opportunity. Although it is being performed by the ASO, it is frequently done so under the direction of a different conductor. On this occasion, Luke Dollman is on the podium and he ‘does it his way’. Yes, the notes on the paper are the same, but the result is subtly different. With a slightly smaller orchestra and in the acoustic of the Elder Hall, the piece becomes more enunciated and precise. For the first time ever, one saw and heard the heavy sighing that is written into piece, and the French horn was more pronounced. Small things, but it was like hearing Pudnanthi Padninthi as if for the first time. This is the joy of live music.
Dean Newcomb is a superb clarinettist, and from the very start of the concerto he made the performance his own. The iconic benny Goodman commissioned Copland to write the work, and so it is unsurprising that it is jazz inflected and provides numerous opportunities for the clarinet to take centre stage, especially in the exciting cadenza that links the two movements. From the very start the clarinet announces a melodic theme that is evocative of sweeping American vistas. It is almost filmic, and the absence of percussion, brass and woodwind in the scoring, and the inclusion of harp and piano (which take on distinctive tumbling arpeggiated phrases), allows the solo clarinet to have a field day! Newcombe relished the cadenza and briefly wandered the front of the stage (not too far!) and was ‘squarely in the moment’. But the demands of the spiky syncopated rhythms and the frequent and changing dialogues with the orchestra in the second movement re-established more obvious and discernible communication between orchestra, conductor and soloist.
The applause for Newcombe at the end was generous, sustained, and deserved.
Schubert’s Symphony No.3 in D is youthful and uncomplicated. Even though Schubert had already written a dizzying number of compositions by the time he wrote the symphony, it has all the hallmarks of a composer who is still experimenting with and developing a symphonic style of their own. It is melodic, as would be expected from someone like Schubert, but it is impatient and moves quickly from one musical idea to the next without in-depth exploration. Arguably Dollman tries to make too much of this symphony by pushing the dynamics in the strings a little too far in the first and third movements which blurs the lightness of the dance rhythms. Again, the clarinet (this time from Mitchell Berick and Darren Skelton) has a significant role in laying out various melodies, and it’s delightful. American short story writer, journalist, poet and American Civil War veteran, Ambrose Bierce, was surely being mischievous when he infamously opined “There are two instruments worse than a clarinet – two clarinets!”
The audience reaction from hearing the Shubert was one of unanimous delight. Many could be heard saying afterwards that this was the first occasion they had ever heard it, which is not a surprise considering the last time the ASO performed it was back in 1978 under Israeli born Elyakum Shapirra, who was the ASO’s chief conductor from 1975 to 1979.
Kym Clayton
When: 9 Aug
Where: Elder Hall
Bookings: Closed