Adelaide Festival. Thebartone Theatre. 6 Mar 2016
Vampilla, support act to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, were getting in the mood as three members traipsed about the foyer of Thebarton Theatre in white modernist clothes embossed in black calligraphy, sporting a black flag with white calligraphy. An outrageously brilliant, overly long, horizontal black Elvis wig on one member was a costume highlight.
Japan’s self styled avant garde ‘brutal orchestra’ were ready to rip on their second visit to the Adelaide Festival of Arts.
Rip, roar, and tear the heart out of classical music with cartoon savvy punk style abandon they most certainly did and the audience lapped it up. Machine gun bursts of heady metal style rock, interspersed with gentle phrases of violin and piano and lung bursting hearty vocals roared through the venue.
If that wasn’t enough, playing the audience with music-box like phrases and encouraging hands in the air swaying, proved hugely successful as just one of many musical and theatrical antics employed by Vampilla to mash up the romantic bombast of opera with an anarchic spirit of rebellion.
For Vampilla, the classic, operatic style is anything they want it to be and no one’s allowed to argue the point, just get into the theatricality of it and enjoy.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor had a solid crowd eagerly awaiting them. The band hadn’t played live anywhere in the world since 2003, until they began doing so again in 2010.
The near two hour set, with accompanying split screen video projection, challenged the audience to allow the wave of sound to crash over and about them, yet pay close attention to the structure of linked visual and musical narrative. To elicit key moments, sound and vision coalesced in flashes of epiphany, encompassing a meditation of the battle to sustain nature and humanity.
Three grand phrases comprised the evening’s experience, each quite clearly and explicitly demarked.
Beginning with a soft rolling violin zither, and flickering out-of-focus projection which slowly became clearer and clearer sprang a paean of ‘hope’. Filled with soaring violin, sounding as if seeking places to rest, hurried on by growling undercurrents of percussive bass to vision of deserted towns, fields and graves. This descended into quiet, broken by solo guitar notes pulled in such a manner they sounded like heady drops of water, and indeed water was the visual theme to accompany the barrelling, grumbling roll of percussion and base guitar rising and falling in sharp cracking cantos of despair, with the equally sparse vision of rising birds amidst grey skies as flashes of buckshot flare.
This emotively discordant growl faded down, replaced by a series of sharp, deep, hard base drum beats leading into the darkest and lightest moments of the evening.
The base drum lead the phase for the early part, with rattling lead guitar and violin rustling swiftly beneath as the visual projection looked on nature in a darker, more deathly context.
Each beat, suggested death of black and white infrared deer. Each growl of ‘death’ gripping the audience until, in a subtle shift, came light leading into a thrilling pianissimo crisscrossing of violin and piano rising ever higher and higher. The sound peaking in a momentous, excited burst of light filled freedom and comprehension which placidly played on through, back to the violin zither which began the evening.
David O’Brien
When: 6 March
Where: Thebarton Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Presented by Adelaide Wind Orchestra. Concordia College Chapel, Highgate. 5 Mar 2016
A fragment from the iconic Star Wars theme is being tenderly picked out on a xylophone as Symphonic Suite by John Williams from the film Star Wars: The Force Awakens gently fades away to bring the concert to a close. But every composition before it was swashbuckling, heroic, adventurous, and … from a galaxy far, far away. The program is an action packed veritable cornucopia of some of the finest and most memorable film music since 1978 and is warmly received by a large audience that ranged in ages from seven to seventy!
The Adelaide Wind Orchestra kicks off its 2016 season with a highly entertaining program dedicated to some of the the giants of modern film music composition: Bruce Broughton (Silverado), Michael Giacchino (The Incredibles, Star Trek), Jerry Goldsmith (The Mummy, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Star Trek: Insurrection), Alan Silvestri (The Mummy Returns), and James Horner (Apollo 13, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan).
Last but by no means least the program features the music of the 86 years young John Williams, who really needs no introduction. The ultimate distinction in any form of human endeavor is to become ‘part of the furniture’ and John Williams is that: surely there is no-one alive who has not heard at least one of his compositions! The AWO plays instantly recognisable pieces from Hook, Superman, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
In typical Fringe Festival fashion, the concert has a laid back feel to it. Director and conductor Dave Polain host the evening and begin dressed in pirate attire replete with eye patch and hook hand. Several members of the ensemble also occasionally wear hats or other items of clothing that are the sartorial analogues of musical leitmotifs; Polain wears Spock ears and flashes a Superman undergarment at the appropriate times. Despite the fun, and despite Polain’s reserved and unembellished conducting style, the AWO is tight and up to its accustomed exacting standard. Musically, they are top notch. That said some of the early arrangements (such as the Superman March) need something else in the quieter sections, which the clarinets and flutes do not seem to supply, to compensate for the absence of a string section; which a wind orchestra of course lacks.
The French horns are in fine form, with impressive glissandi in Silverado. Double bass player Lucy Hatcher – the only string player in the orchestra – also displays her ample skills on bass guitar during the very catchy arrangement of the Incredibles Suite. Tom von Einem’s precise but empathetic percussion on bongo drums works beautifully with the fine work from the flute section and keyboard to give an exotic dance like feel to the Symphonic Suite based on music from The Mummy and The Mummy Returns. Timothy Frahn’s solo on C trumpet in the Main Title from Apollo 13 superbly captures the loneliness and foreboding the crew of the badly damaged spacecraft must have felt as they limped back to Earth. David Lang is also conspicuous by his fine trumpet work throughout the evening.
The audience base of the Adelaide Wind Orchestra is slowly growing as the word gets out that we have a world class ensemble in our midst. I was accompanied by someone who was quite ‘unsure’ whether they would enjoy the performance or not, but left impressed. The AWO’s next performance (which are always one-offs) will be in the Flinders Street Baptist Church on 9 April and will showcase Mozart’s gorgeous Gran Partita.
AWO Plays John Williams is a sparkling start to the year.
Kym Clayton
When: 5 Mar
Where: Concordia College Chapel, Highgate
Bookings: Closed
Thebarton Theatre. Adelaide Festival. 29 Feb 2016
Last time we saw Sufjan Stevens it was his 2011 Age of Adz tour. Inspired by the paintings of the schizophrenic visionary Royal Robertson, the concert featured massive back projections of Robertson’s ecstatic, vibrantly coloured imaginings while Stevens and a ten piece band produced a symphonic event, festooned with samples, loops and intrepid orchestrations.
For his 2016 tour Sufjan Stevens is in lyric mode. With just four band members this time, he is showcasing last year’s album, Carrie and Lowell, his most personal album to date and, in the minds of many, his best. Stevens is a mercurial talent and like say, Prince or Beck, he can, chameleon-like, effortlessly inhabit a variety of contemporary forms from pop to prog to acoustic ballad, psychedelia and post-folk. The constants in Stevens’ music are his sweet keening vocal, his open-tuned guitar and banjo, and his incorporation of synths, piano, horns and angelic harmonies.
On stage at the Thebarton Theatre, Stevens and his associates open with Redford, an instrumental composition from Michigan. The band creates a weave of sounds – guitar, piano, trombone, percussion. It is a soothing, but inviting overture, setting the mood for what is to follow.
And what follows are the first trickling guitar notes of Death With Dignity, opening track to Carrie and Lowell. “Spirit of my silence I can hear you / But I’m afraid to be near you” Stevens sings in his soft, burred, mesmerising way- “And I don’t know where to begin.”
But begin he does, embarking on a set of songs, written after the death of his mother, Carrie in 2012. They are self-explorations, sometimes excoriating, sometimes plain bereft. These expressions of loss, anger, and bewilderment reflect the fact that he is trying to retrieve a mother he hardly knew, who left him when he was one year old.
Raised by his father and stepmother in an interfaith counterculture community in Michigan, Stevens rarely saw his mother who, living in Oregon with Lowell Brams, her second husband, suffered bipolar illness and bouts of drug dependence. When she was diagnosed with stomach cancer he visited her in hospital until her death. The songs describe his attempts to recover memories and unravel feelings, both repressed and lost to time.
I can think of few songwriters who cut as close to the emotional bone as Sufjan Stevens does in the Carrie and Lowell suite. Many singers draw on personal material – Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor in the 60s and 70s delved their own experiences, but the results were, more often than not, encrypted and at arm’s length. Blood on the Tracks is the closest Dylan example, Joni Mitchell’s Blue is her most directly revelatory work and Taylor said it all in one song – Fire and Rain. John Lennon’s Plastic Ono solo album is a primal cry from the heart, Loudon Wainwright is sardonically, almost compulsively, frank - and now, younger singers like Will Oldham and William Fitzsimmons are also Stevens’ fellow travellers.
The real comparisons with Sufjan’s Carrie and Lowell, though, are American confessional poets like Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, writing about family, anguish and self-harm. Lowell called his ground-breaking volume, Life Studies – vignettes of his parents, his marriage, his dreads and anxieties described in plain candour ; stark, courageous, sometimes wry - and, like all genuine confrontations with the troubled self : healing and celebratory in their rediscovery of purpose.
Death with Dignity is a remarkable song in that it describes grief as a child might experience it – paradoxically, as a mystery, an impossible finality. It is not self pitying, sentimental or mawkish: “I forgive you mother, I can hear you/And I long to be near you/ But every road leads to an end…Your apparition passes through me in the willows: Five red hens - you’ll never see us again.”
As the musicians conjure a modal web of guitar, piano and pedal steel, digital projections – a flickering slideshow of old family photos, glimpses of the baby Sufjan and his parents - appear in what seem like a series of cathedral windows or a huge illuminated picket fence. Light floods in to the hall, identifying us to the performers as well. This could have been portentous and self-regarding but Stevens judges it perfectly. He is a quiet mystic, modest in manner and able to heft emotional weight. These experiences are about him, but they are also about us, and he astutely reminds us so.
A cluster of songs follow- the regretful Should Have Known Better –“My black shroud… I should’ve wrote a letter/Explaining what I feel” – the vocals are on echo, processed, otherworldly, while Casey Foubert’s electric guitar churns in rhyme with Stephen Moore’s harmonium keyboard chords.
And there is Sufjan, in his signature wacky green trucker hat and a black t-shirt emblazoned with almost luminous silver cross-hatchings. The hall lights are up again. It is like a revival show but it’s not selling any afterlife except the rest of the one we already have.
All of Me Wants All of You – with its memories of Oregon landscapes: “Saw myself on Spencer’s Butte /landscape changed my point of view” - has the band really opening up with a more enveloping sound than the album version. Foubert unleashes a wash of pedal effects , James Mcalister’s percussion grows louder, along with piano and synths, and an extended, trippy, psychedelic jam unfolds, complete with purple haze lighting and the forlorn repetition of “All of me wants all of you”.
The exact sequence from the album is broken with a switch to The Only Thing, the most openly fraught song, it reveals Stevens’ crisis of faith and dread at what he has to contemplate. It is histrionic to say “Should I tear my eyes out now ?” but maybe it is the understatement of the vocal delivery which offsets a sense of excess.
In an age of bombastic self-regard and religious simple-mindedness, for any artist, describing the dark night of the soul is perilous, both personally and aesthetically. Sufjan Stevens, perhaps because he determinedly shies away from talking directly about questions of faith, is better able than most to explore the elusive subject of transcendence.
In this carefully managed set list the inclusion of The Owl and Tanager from All Delighted People is a switch but not a departure from the emotional narrative. The playful refrain between the two birds (a tanager is a generic for a songbird) and the shreds of childhood recollection in the song are beautifully managed with multiple harmonies from Stevens, Dawn Landes and Foubert with the band opening out in a swoon of synthesisers.
Four more key songs follow- Eugene, another mix of Oregon memory and deathbed reality –“What’s the point of singing songs/If they’ll never even hear you” And, the highpoint of the set, Fourth of July, with its plaintive opening piano notes (echoes of Elbow’s Puncture Repair and Fitzsimmons’ The Sparrow and the Crow) its irresistible melody and lambent lyrics – “It was night when you died, my firefly/What could I have said to raise you from the dead ?”
It is a tender song of comfort and harsh truth from mother to son – My little hawk, why do you cry? We’re all gonna die. “The final refrain repeated in ever widening circles as the sweet harmonies turn into a full crescendo with sprays of light and a gathering drumbeat. Again, a moment that could have toppled into bathos, becomes one of affirmation instead.
No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross again questions the central tenets of resurrection and, at last, the title song - Carrie and Lowell, is again accompanied by flickering Super 8 footage of his two families, including his stepfather Lowell. Accompanied on guitar and ukulele , the harmonies between Stevens and Dawn Landes, like much of the album, echo the very best of early Simon and Garfunkel. It is hovering on the edge of icky pop , but always carefully judged, the melody and lyric are triumphantly sublime.
Stevens and his splendid band complete the set with Vesuvius, a free form drumming blast from The Age of Adz, Futile Devices and one last word from Carrie and Lowell, Blue Bucket of Gold - referring to an Oregon story of miners who found gold but didn’t recognise it at the time - and then couldn’t find the site again.
The tune builds from simple piano chords to a full scale repeating finale – “Raise your right hand /tell me you want me in your life “ - with a long (perhaps over long) double spray of white laser light into the auditorium, drawing us towards two portals like a near death experience. It verges on interminable but, of course, like much else in the show its theatrics are intriguing and strangely comforting.
For the encore section, covering another six songs, the mood changes almost completely. The five musicians gather around a single microphone like an old-timey country music show. All play acoustic instruments – and Sufjan gets out his familiar banjo.
The selections are from Michigan and Seven Swans - and they sing Heirloom from All Delighted People. They have Emily Dickinson length titles – All The Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands, For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti. Stevens adds The Dress looks Nice on You and perhaps as a kind of in-joke, Casimir Pulaski Day, referring to the local public holiday in Chicago commemorating a hero of the American Revolution. It falls on the first Monday in March which would have been the night of our concert – if it hadn’t been a Leap Year.
During the encores Stevens speaks to the audience for the first time, disarmingly telling self-deprecating anecdotes about his father’s belief in Edgar Cayce’s Past Lives and the reincarnation of family pets . He also says he’s been listening to Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life and muses ironically whether his show might be called songs in the key of death.
He needn’t have worried. This singular talent has, in a pop concert, tangled with large and elusive questions with intelligence, wit and an open heart. It is a risky venture and he succeeds. I call that a wonder. And these beautifully performed songs are Sufjan Stevens’ life studies.
Murray Bramwell
When: Closed
Where: Thebarton Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Presented by Australian String Quartet. Adelaide Town Hall. 29 Feb 2016.
Blue for new.
With matched Guadagnini instruments firmly in hand – part of the brand name of the Australian String Quartet – two gentlemen casually dressed in dark lounge suits and pale blue shirts and two ladies in bright blue dresses ascend the majestic icy-blue lit stage of the Adelaide Town Hall. The Australian String Quartet enters its fourth decade of music making and begins another incarnation with four new members.
To mark the occasion, the ASQ has chosen a program that includes a world première by Australian composer Matthew Hindson and a reimagined quartet by post-minimalist American composer John Adams. Both include and additional musician on percussion. These two contemporary pieces are bookended by more standard fare – a quartet by Beethoven, and one by (Robert) Schuman – but it’s a shame the Hindson was not programmed to bring the curtain down, because it was spectacularly inspirational and well worth the price of the admission ticket alone. As part of the Adelaide Festival of Arts, the packed audience witnessed the birth of what is destined to become a classic of the genre.
The bookends are both all about their fourth movements. Schumann’s Op.41 No.1 is a ‘safe’ composition and shows the composer plying his craft as he learns about what it means to compose for a string quartet. The first two movements lack dynamic color and texture, and the dialogue is sparse. The composer is feeling his way and finds safety in Haydn-esque classicism and restraint. The adagio third movement is more lyrical with the viola and cello building the momentum. It segues into the presto final movement which is brimming with spiky dynamics and diverse ethnically infused dance rhythms and melodies. The cello provides a drone like spine to the movement and has the final exhausted gasping word.
Beethoven’s string quartets are perhaps at the pinnacle of the genre and are always a great curtain raiser. A sure fired way for the ensemble to announce its credentials in case we were ever in doubt. Like the Schumann, the first movement of Beethoven’s Op.18 No.6 begins modestly, and the ASQ took the classy dotted rhythms in their stride. The luxurious slow adagio second movement strips away the density of the first and finishes gently with gentle pizzicato chords before giving way to the spirited scherzo third. But this all gives way to the no-holds barred of the adagio fourth movement, which the ASQ held in tight control and articulated beautifully (bravo Sharon Draper on cello). The audience loved it, and rightly so.
First violin Dale Barltrop introduced Hindson’s String Quartet No.4 (for string quartet and percussion) and made special note that it was composed especially for the new ASQ and was also a dedication to his beloved one year old daughter.
Born out of the promise of new beginnings, it is a liberating work and reminiscent of meditative Asian spirituality. It begins with crashing chords made all the more impressive by the inclusion of the vibraphone played passionately and expertly by guest percussionist Claire Edwardes (also dressed in blue… for new). The striking opening gives way to rising arpeggios and, as in the third movement of the Schumann, the cello and viola drive the piece forward. Astonishing ascending and falling repeating scale passages foreground the vibraphone and the occasional use of the mallet handles (rather than the heads) eventually quietened and put to bed the first movement. The second (and final) movement began with a languid melody that was passed gently between the instruments and evoked memories of the third movement of the Beethoven. Gradually there is a sense of awakening – perhaps a child stirring and beginnings its day under the loving and watchful eye of a parent. The scoring becomes inquisitive and the instruments enter into multiple dialogues searching out answers and ways to resolve the question they ask of each other, but not always successfully. Doubts linger but hope tentatively rises and eventually provides a calming influence and the piece gently closes.
Hindson’s composition is truly remarkable, but the same cannot be said for John Adams’ Alleged Dances. I should stress that Adams is one of my most admired composers but these short pieces just “don’t do it for me”, and didn’t for many of the audience. They were however entertaining and the inclusion of percussion on diverse household kitchen containers (everything but the kitchen sink!) again at the hands of Claire Edwardes provided an amusing accompaniment to the ASQ.
It was fitting that the Adams should be bookended and hence eclipsed by the Beethoven and Schumann, but it was a shame that its partner was the Hindson, which should have been the finale!
This was a fabulous start to the ASQ’s 2016 season. I can’t wait for the next instalment.
Kym Clayton
When: 1 March (Sydney), 2 March (Brisbane), 3 March (Melbourne), 6 March (Canberra), 14 March (Perth)
Where: Various venues
Bookings: asq.com.au
Presented by Ensemble Amplitude. BAPeA Gallery and Sculpture Garden. 28 Feb 2016.
Ensemble Amplitude is a relatively new outfit on the contemporary chamber classical music scene, comprising Dan Thorpe (Piano), Anna Coleman (Clarinet), Melanie Walters (Flutes) and Lester Wong (Violin).
This program very much focused on Thorpe. The first half was entirely solo piano, and all but one of the chamber pieces in the second half were dominated by piano. So, the pianist would want to be pretty good, and Thorpe was.
He sits easily at the piano and his concentration is manifestly intense. He clearly has a penchant for lightly textured compositions that are best served by finely balanced dynamics. He can also belt out a thumper as well, and his performance of Philip Glass’s iconic Mad Rush for solo piano, and his ensemble work in Srul Glick’s Klezmer’s Wedding were extremely well received by the audience; although he was probably a little too heavy on the sustain pedal throughout Mad Rush.
It was presumably no accident in programming that Thorpe concluded the first half of the concert with Mad Rush, for it comprises rapidly played and repeated rolling broken chords that were also a feature of his own compositions Considerate and Little Serenade that immediately preceded it.
The second half of the program kicked off with an interesting performance of the quirky Piece in the shape of a Square by Philip Glass. Originally scored for two flutes, Ensemble Amplitude presented it instead on flute and clarinet, which doesn’t seem to work as well. Using identical instruments allows the music to interact in a way that different instruments with different timbres cannot. The interest in the piece is how the instruments move in and out of phase with each other, and this is most evident and strangely beautiful with matching instruments.
The program also featured music of Missy Mazzoli, Anne Boyd, Jane Stanley, Houston Dunleavy and Nico Muhly. All composers featured in the program are living!
The concert was performed in the tranquility of the BAPëA gallery and Sculpture Garden in Brompton.
Kym Clayton
When: 28 Feb
Where: BAPeA Gallery and Sculpture Garden
Bookings: Closed