Laudable Events Both, But, Oh, The Tedium
The Age
Thursday February 19, 2004
CLASSICAL
MATS LIDSTROM, Australian National Academy of Music, February 12
NEW MUSIC WORKS, World Wide Warehouse, Collingwood, February 13
Swedish cellist Mats Lidstrom called his opening recital Cello and Piano: The Never-Ending Story, the occasion living up to its name when I left the South Melbourne Town Hall last Thursday. By half-time, Lidstrom had played filleted movements from sonatas by Saint-Saens and Godard, the Austrian Robert Fuchs and two Swedish minor figures - Jakob Hagg and Ludvig Norman - using four accompanists.
Lidstrom has a shapely and well-projected sound, effective even in this acoustically challenging hall, and he made persuasive cases for the music of his countrymen, pieces that are unlikely to be heard again without such sponsorship.
As well, the occasion gave a splendid showcase for the talents of some of the Academy's younger aspirants - Amir Farid and Benjamin Kopp - as well as the body's performance fellow Leigh Harrold and the Academy Pianist, the ever-reliable Timothy Young.
It was not solely the prospect of eight more fragments and a complete sonata by one of England's more idiosyncratic voices (Alan Rawsthorne) that drained one's enthusiasm, but the cellist's insistence on introducing every piece with rambling, often inaudible comments.
PROBLEMS of a different sort featured at the Dead Horse Productions' recital of new works by Australian, Dutch and Belgian composers held at the World Wide Warehouse in Easey Street, linked not only with the famous murders, but also with the waste of effort that was the Absolute Ensemble's appearance for Musica Viva a few years ago.
Not that Friday night's program was as narcissistic as the exhibition from the Kristjan Jarvi-led group, featuring at this year's Adelaide Festival, but it certainly revolved around a lack of inventiveness.
Mayke Nas's I Asked For It started 20 minutes before schedule and occupied the first 15 minutes of the first half: four people replicating texts on blackboards wired for sound. This harks back to the music-theatre pieces of the 1960s that Keith Humble brought from Paris, part of a long tradition from the Dadaists and Jarry, here revisited with determination but lacking the daring of those earlier essays in the form.
Kate Neal's music for Mendel Hardeman's video Holy Vessels came across as piercingly resonant; a pre-recorded tape of flutes, recorders and saxophone sounds that capably mirrored the intentional rough naivete of the visual images. Neal's work impressed as decorative, illustrative music with its own brand of fluent power and engaging quirkiness.
David Young's Roccia brought back happy memories of graphic music, scores that eschewed ledger lines and notes, instead taking on the character of drawings as in the extraordinary, flamboyant constructs of Sylvano Busotti or the mathematics-indebted shapes of Earle Brown and the New York School.
In this case, Young took images from rock carvings in the Camonica Valley of Italy and asked his quartet of musicians, led by pianist Michael Kieran Harvey, to respond to their visual stimulus. All well and good, although there is a danger in showing the audience what is being attempted, particularly when the performers miss out on fitting their improvisations into the time-span of the various score-page slides.
Nas then played her own DiGiT #2 with Will Poskitt. This work for two players at one piano begins with well-spaced communal block chords, gradually accelerates, introduces clapping and thigh-slapping until the instrument proves irrelevant as the two players become involved in a rhythmically catchy game of pat-a-cake.
Such a reduction of formal musical engagement has its entertaining side, but the point wore pretty thin before the work ended.
I left before the last three works, chiefly to avoid further physical discomfort, but also because one of this final group - Thierry de Mey's Table Music - hardly qualifies as new, having been written in 1987.
What also worked against involvement with much of this music was the ambience. The large space was unpleasantly hot, unventilated, dark, with activities taking place in three discrete areas, of which the most sociable and enjoyable seemed to be the bar.
As a platform for young composers, the event had a laudable aspect. That what they had to say was lightweight, and calculated for a limited attention-span, made the exercise strangely unchallenging: gesturing towards the past without building on it.
© 2004 The Age