BY LEWIS INGHAM
Australian Composers’ Concert
Works by Kitty Xiao, Natasha Lin, Julian Yu, Robert Dora, and curators Carol Dixon and Benjamin Bates
Melbourne Composers’ Chamber Orchestra featuring Geoff Urquhart and Emma Knight, Melbourne Composers’ Orchestra, Nimbus Trio, Natasha Lin
St Stephen’s Anglican Church, Richmond, 8 April
What’d you miss?
- A whole bunch of new music including four world premieres
- Artists performing their own works
- Delightful chaos and moments of reflection
Curated by composers Benjamin Bates and Carol Dixon, the second-ever Australian Composers’ Concert offers eight works, half of them world premieres, to an enthusiastic crowd inside St Stephen’s Anglican Church in Richmond.
Proactive string runs and explosive moments of tension characterise the opening movement of Carol Dixon’s Concerto No. 1 for Harpsichord and String Orchestra (2018). Performed by the Melbourne Composers’ Chamber Orchestra with Robert Dora on the conductor’s podium and Geoff Urquhart at the harpsichord, the spirited opening develops into a more harmonically driven second movement. The spacing of the harmony within the string orchestra offering poised moments of reflection. Beautiful overlapping ascending lines allow the intent of the strings and harpsichord to be clearly heard in this second movement.
As the ensemble moves into the third and final moment, I can’t help but feel that the harpsichord has been under-utilised as a solo instrument. Although there is considerable interplay between the string orchestra and the harpsichord, the harpsichord’s solo passages are often short-lived.
Composed in a neo-baroque style, Benjamin Bates’ Suite in A Minor (2017) adds flautist Emma Knight to this harpsichord and chamber orchestra combination. Within the six movements of this cohesively crafted suite, the third movement, Courante, stands out the most. With a clear nod to 18th Century baroque style, this movement allows the ensemble members to share a beautiful culmination of phrases, like an ongoing refrain. The Gigue finale gives Knight’s flute a chance to soar, propelled by the violins; a wonderful duet resounding from Urquhart’s harpsichord and the double bass, played by the composer himself, pumps the final movement along.
The blatant exploration of 18th Century style is justly juxtaposed by the swapping of the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra for another local ensemble, Nimbus Trio. Ultramarine to Indigo (2018), composed by the trio’s founding member and pianist Kitty Xiao, takes its title from a Margaret Atwood poem and utilises amplified alto flute (Jessica Laird) and violin (Chloe Sanger) with piano and electronics.
The composition allows a dense electronic soundscape to dominate before instrumental layers from the trio begin to drift in and out of the electronic’s shadow; a stunning effect which renders the trio eerily distant in the sonic landscape.
I learn from Kitty during the interval that the majority of the electronics track is made up of recorded samples of bowed fishing line, a sound which provides a surprisingly wonderful low-frequency texture. Whilst the electronics component of the composition doesn’t veer too far from its initial sonic palette, it does take on a more percussive nature later in the work, which is mirrored in stabbed phrases occurring in the alto flute and violin parts. As the electronics dissolve into silence, I am left with only my captivation.
Pianist Natasha Lin performs two of her own solo piano compositions before the interval. The first work Voyage, taken from her Antarctic Suite (2018), takes off with delicate floating and flowing lines before the utilisation of the piano’s lower register creates a sense of adventure.
Influenced by the writings of Admiral Byrd, who wrote about a magical world existing through a portal in the Antarctic, Voyage evokes visions of ice, snow, and adventure; the end of the composition leaving the audience with a floating motif that suggests this idea of a magical world was all just a dream. Lin follows this with Ghost (2015), a piece only about a minute long that combines more delicate melodies with static pulsing intervals in the piano’s lower register.
Returning from the interval, I find the Melbourne Composers’ Orchestra dominating the interior of St Stephen’s. Conductor Robert Dora leads the ensemble through his own composition Lex Overture (2016), a work which pairs 19th Century grandeur with light whimsical phrases to detail the life of a stereotypical court lawyer.
Dora’s exploitation of the individual sections of the orchestra allows his bouncing motifs to fall through the ensemble in a delightfully chaotic manner; the conductor clearly showing great enjoyment in navigating the orchestra through his own piece, a sentiment the audience certainly shares as well.
The orchestration benchmark of this concert is clearly set by Julian Yu in Slavic Dance (2017), a work which allows six Slavic melodies to be flawlessly carried around the orchestra in clear and distinguishable instrumental layers. The most striking moment of this work comes when frenetic bobbing melodies suddenly give way to a passage of sustained string writing, in which the gradual incorporation of other orchestral colours and timbres greatly enhance the rich harmonic texture. This respite from the jumping melodies is only short-lived, with the work suddenly tumbling into an energetic conclusion.
Benjamin Bates’ Symphony No. 1 (1993) rounds out the program; the only composition not be written in the past three years. The driving force within this symphony is the 13/8 time signature that dominates the first and fourth movements. Dora and the members of the Melbourne Composers’ Orchestra and deserve credit for absolutely nailing these jagged rhythms. From a compositional standpoint, however, these 13/8 phrases often hinder the development of any thematic material, with the percussion part in particular overshadowing various melodic lines appearing elsewhere in the orchestra during the fourth movement.
The second movement’s noticeably menacing personality is considerably enhanced by the six double basses spread across the back row of the orchestra – I hope to see this many basses in the next Australian Composers’ Concert – before the third movement showcases Bates’ natural ability to start ideas small and grow them into rising and collapsing orchestral textures.
It’s important that the intent of these concerts featuring new Australian compositions doesn’t go unnoticed. As a music community, we need to be able to premiere new and recent compositions by our own living composers, and what a treat it is to share the room with them as we experience their artistic output.
Carol and Benjamin deserve our congratulations and admiration for their contribution as composers and concert curators, and I hope to see their Australian Composers’ Concerts thrive in the future.
Did you read our interview with Carol Saffer and each of the composers featuring in this concert? Check it out!
Image supplied. Julian Yu congratulates Benjamin Bates after the performance of his Symphony No. 1 by the Melbourne Composers‘ Orchestra.
