BY MARK BOSCH, LEAD CRITIC
Radio Signals
BackStage Music
The Newsagency, 17 October
BackStage Music has, at last, returned for 2019, with the first of three rapid-fire concerts across the Thursdays of October at Annandale’s cozy Newsagency.
Emerging (Lewis Mosley, Sam Weller, Charlie Sundborn) and established (Cathy Milliken, Jane Sheldon, Lamorna Nightingale, Fiona Hill) artists played an exceptionally curated program of five works involving electronics to a sell-out crowd.
With three of the five works written in the past 10 years, BackStage clearly continues to live up to its MO of providing “living space for living music”.
Guitarist and composer Lewis Mosley’s Speaking Alone (2019) for two saxophones and amp feedback was a panoramic exploration of what can be achieved with a simple conceit. Saxophonists Weller and Sundborn ventured gentle, to nervous, to plain screaming and exorcistic textures, showing the versatility of their instrument.
Although the piece was not necessarily “durational”, Mosley gave just enough time for ideas in the work’s five-or-so sections to develop and, eventually, bubble up to breaking point.
Mosley’s work was perhaps the most outwardly structured on the program, with Stockhausen/Milliken’s Spiral Remix (1968) and Berio’s Altra Voce (1999) amorphously stop-starting and ebbing and flowing respectively in the trademark ways of their composers. I was not entirely sure how Milliken was operating a shortwave radio in the former work, but the radio transmissions mingling with her mercurial oboe and vocal thrusts made for stimulating listening.
Soprano Sheldon and flautist (and one of BackStage’s animateurs) Nightingale delivered Berio’s rather more restrained and mysterious Altra Voce with aplomb — call this a fact because I was peeking at the score! Fiona Hill was sat just in front of me watching the score to deliver live electronics. On top of the musicians’ great sensitivity, I enjoyed this extra element.
With Sheldon’s full vocal range engaged in Milliken’s emotionally charged Urge Me Not (2013), Nightingale returned to the stage, and the two (again, plus Hill on electronics) finished the evening with Hill’s Imago (2018), reflecting on the history of forced adoption in Australia.
It was a vivid work, which included the words of survivors, as well as — though questionably — those of, if I’m not mistaken, Julia Gillard on the occasion of the 2013 National Apology. Gillard probably wasn’t the right choice, giving the work a slightly self-congratulatory tinge and leaving me ambivalent to the solidarity Hill was attempting to affirm for victims of the government’s (still continuing) practices of forced adoption. Nonetheless, Imago was a deeply felt, good-faith dive into one of Australia’s egregious histories.
All in all, this was a crisp program of energising and intriguing works, and a great kick-off to a busy month for BackStage.
Image supplied.
