BY CUTCOMMON
We’re in the depths of winter, and you know what that means — it’s time for staying at home live music. The Primrose Potter Salon will be filled with people so you can bring a friend (just like pianist Kristian Chong is planning to do), get comfortable, and enjoy some concerts that’ll warm you up from the inside.
We asked Melbourne Recital Centre to tell us what’s happening this July, and here’s what they said. Expect singers who will wear their hearts on their sleeves, Bach turned jazz, and brothers who commissioned a piece of music to make fun of their sibling rivalry.
Michelle Nicolle Quartet — Bach Project
Could there be a greater combo than baroque and jazz? Michelle Nicolle is an award-winning Australian jazz singer who takes the music of Bach, rolls with it, improvises with it, and turns it into something you’ve never heard. Even then, it’s still fairly true to the original form (Bach himself was an improviser, way back in his day). In a recent chat, Michelle told us the foundations of jazz and baroque are “pretty much built on the same rules”.
“Playing the music of Bach is no different to playing any other jazz piece, or any song really. As individual musicians, we each have a vocabulary and language developed from years of listening and analysing in the same way that J.S. Bach built his improvisations from his knowledge of composers such as Vivaldi.”
You probably won’t be able to imagine what it’ll sound like — but you’ll hear it in the Primrose Potter Salon: Bach’s Little Fugue in G minor with Round Midnight, Sarabande from Partita No.1 with Lonely Woman, and a heap more.
(You can learn more about this gig in our latest interview with Michelle right here.)
Kristian Chong & Friends — Mozart and Faure Quartets
Who doesn’t like music with friends? When you bring your mates to a concert, you have a great time. When you’re on stage performing with them, the same goes — and pianist Kristian Chong will play with some of his most talented music connections. Kristian is a soloist who has performed with pretty much every major orchestra in Australia; his career in chamber music is equally impressive and in the Primrose Potter Salon you’ll hear him weave his way through chamber music from Fauré and Mozart.
Wenhong Luo is a violist who studied at the Royal Academy of Music and New England Conservatory of Music; in 2020 she joined the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music as an educator. She has an international performance career, but we’re also interested in the way she uses music to empower communities — she’s been involved in the Music for Food and Music Sharing programs across the continents.
Kristian’s other friend Ike See is a violinist from the Australian Chamber Orchestra, though audiences in Asia would have heard him perform as soloist with the Singapore Symphony; in Europe they’d have heard him compete in the Sion-Valais International Violin Competition; in America they’d have heard him serving as a principal player in the Curtis Symphony Orchestra.
And cellist Richard Narroway recorded Bach’s Six Cello Suites for his debut album, which received rave reviews and a million streams. He also toured Australia with this music — and made a special recording of some pieces from Bach’s Cello Suite No.3, which were used in the Dance for PD project designed to help bring joy and wellbeing benefits to people living with Parkinson’s Disease. He studied at Juilliard School (among others) and has taught at Melbourne Conservatorium of Music (among others). Oh, and he’s a marathon runner, too.
Not bad friends to have!
Invenio Singers — Hands for Clay
You don’t need to be an artist to feel a creative impulse — that drive to express yourself; the vulnerability that arrives when you think about what to express. But Gian Slater is an artist (and an award-winning one at that). And she has worked with Invenio Singers to craft an eight-movement work sharing the intimate story the creative process.
Hands for Clay features 10 a cappella voices, and although it was first performed in 2018 for Melbourne Music Week, composer Gian “maximises the acoustics” of the Primrose Potter Salon so you’ll get surround-sound vibes when you hear it performed in Melbourne Recital Centre.
Invenio Singers has a history of approaching music in new and unusual ways; in Spiral Now the ensemble performed music alongside recordings of interviews that explored themes of nostalgia and memory. In previous projects, they’ve collaborated with talent such as visual artist Robert Jarvis and singer-songwriter Lior.
Watch the video below to get a taste of Invenio Singers’ work before the event.
Songmakers Australia — The Beautiful Miller’s Daughter
When choosing which pieces to perform, the artists of Songmakers Australia seek out the “pinnacles of all chamber music“. It’s a description that matches the work Die schöne Müllerin, which they’ll perform in light of its 200-year anniversary.
The title translates to The Fair Maid of the Mill, and it was composed by Schubert who at this point — and brace yourself for this one — said he felt like “the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world”. The work is a song cycle: 20 pieces of music based on 20 poems from Wilhelm Müller (who also wrote Winterreise, another Schubert song cycle).
Wilhelm wrote the poems out of love for Luise Hensel (the Mendelssohns’ sister-in-law). They’re not romantic in the happily-ever-after sense of the word: they tell of a man who falls in (unrequited) love with a miller’s daughter, and then dies. To hear about the hope and tragedy that unravels along the way, you’ll need to listen to pianist Andrea Katz with tenor Brenton Spiteri in the Primrose Potter Salon.
Ziggy & Miles — Sidekick
Ziggy and Miles Johnston are brothers. In Sidekick, they open up about their life off the stage — and what it’s like to shar their career in the Australian music industry. (You might’ve been part of that career already, if you saw their previous performances in the Melbourne Recital Centre. A few years ago, they performed in the Local Heroes series; “our strengths cover each other’s weaknesses,” they told CutCommon. They had also just been accepted into the Juilliard School of Music, so it’s safe to say there are more strengths than weaknesses between these two.)
The classical guitarists will come together for Katie Jenkins’ Sidekick — a piece written specifically for them, which “intentionally inflates and satirises their relationship with musical bickering and sparring virtuosity“.
The other works on the program reflect their progression from youth to adulthood — from Paulo Bellitani’s Jongo, which inspired them in their earlier years, through to their own arrangement of Suite Bergamasque by Debussy. You’ll also hear Trin Warren Tam-boore from composer Ken Murray, himself a guitarist who has worked with fellow Australian composers.
Get warmed up with their video of Tonadilla by Joaquin Rodrigo below.
Check out full details to these events and more from the July calendar on the Melbourne Recital Centre website.
Kristian Chong credit John Tsiavis; Invenio by Madeleine Bishop; Ziggy and Miles by Jiyang Chen.
