CONCERT PROGRAM 2 – 4 MAY
Education Partner
METROPOLIS NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL EVENTS SCHEDULE THURSDAY 2 MAY 6pm
7pm
A VIOLIN & A BALL OF WOOL Primrose Potter Salon
FREE PERFORMANCE Ground Floor Foyer
Anna McMichael violin
PLEXUS & Friends
Damian Barbeler electronics/visuals Tim Jetis visual design
7.30pm METROPOLIS NIGHT ONE Elisabeth Murdoch Hall Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Clark Rundell conductor Ralph van Raat piano
FRIDAY 3 MAY 12pm
6pm
FREE MUSIC Primrose Potter Salon
10 FROM 10 MELBOURNE EDITION Primrose Potter Salon
PLEXUS
Decibel New Music Ensemble
7.30pm
8pm
FREE PERFORMANCE Ground Floor Foyer
RALPH VAN RAAT IN RECITAL Elisabeth Murdoch Hall
PLEXUS & Friends
SATURDAY 4 MAY 3pm
4.45pm
GENERATIONS Primrose Potter Salon
FREE PERFORMANCE Ground Floor Foyer
Six Degrees Ensemble
PLEXUS & Friends
6pm
7pm
WORKERS UNION Primrose Potter Salon
FREE PERFORMANCE Ground Floor Foyer
Lisa Moore piano/director/narrator
PLEXUS & Friends
ANAM musicians
7.30pm
9.30pm
METROPOLIS NIGHT TWO Elisabeth Murdoch Hall
ANDRIESSEN’S HOKETUS Primrose Potter Salon
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
MCM New Music Ensemble
Clark Rundell conductor Lior Attar vocalist
The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Land on which we perform and would like to pay our respects to their Elders and Community both past and present.
Louis Andriessen: A Profile great organist, who had assimilated the lessons both of Stravinskyan neoclassicism and the twelve-note serial method of Schoenberg.
In 1990 Reinbert de Leeuw and the Schoenberg Ensemble recorded Louis Andriessen’s De Staat. Composed between 1973 and 1976 for four singers and a large band of winds, violas, harps and electric guitars and bass, De Staat was the work in which Andriessen turned away from the now-orthodox avant-garde to create a distinctive kind of minimalism. ‘A contribution to the discussion about the place of music in politics’, it sets sections of Plato’s Republic that deal with music. During the recording sessions, Andriessen had a conversation with producer Ruth Dreier about the roots of the work’s style. ‘Early bebop and cool jazz’ he explained, have influenced me very strongly, much more than Mozart, Bach and Brahms. When I was a teenager, I improvised a lot on the piano, playing with friends. I found great freedom in jazz, even anarchy, in the music of CP [Charlie Parker], DG [Dizzy Gillespie] and Miles Davis…Playing bebop on string instruments is of course impossible, it’s unidiomatic, but it could be interesting… Another major influence was that of American minimalism, specifically Terry Riley’s In C, which American composer Frederic Rzewski had played to Andriessen in 1970. Andriessen was born into a storied family of Dutch musicians, his father Henrik being an admired composer of opera, symphonic and liturgical music and a 4
Andriessen was exposed to that rich tradition as a young composer, and was influenced by the works of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The works of the 1970s after De Staat, like Hoketus or Symphony for Open Strings, are perhaps Andriessen at his most radically ‘minimal’ (though he eschews the term) but even in rejecting the mid-century avant-garde, Andriessen’s music avoids the frictionless prettiness into which American minimalism sometimes falls. Andriessen’s music encompasses numerous small-scale works for soloists or small ensembles, but he followed De Staat with other large-scale works such as De tijd (‘Time’, based on St Augustine’s notions of eternity) in 1980-81, and continued adding to a body of musictheatre works with De materie (‘Matter’) in 1989. This led in the 1990s to two major operas, Rosa: A Horse Drama and Writing to Vermeer, both collaborations with filmmaker Peter Greenaway, with whom he had worked on a film project for the Mozart anniversary in 1991. It is tempting to regard Andriessen’s career as a process of radical pruning and then a gradual burgeoning. The scores of works like Writing to Vermeer or 2013’s Mysteriën – his first purely orchestral work in decades – show a composer blithely unaware of aesthetic categories. The latter work, a meditation on the writings of 15th-century theologian Thomas à Kempis, ranges from dense, dissonant chords, through passages shot through with obsessive ostinatos and hints of jazz, to moments of bleak emptiness and utterly radiant transparency. Gordon Kerry © 2019
Artists and Commissioned Composers
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Clark Rundell
Established in 1906, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) is an arts leader and Australia’s oldest professional orchestra. Chief Conductor Sir Andrew Davis has been at the helm of MSO since 2013. Engaging more than 3 million people each year, the MSO reaches a variety of audiences through live performances, recordings, TV and radio broadcasts and live streaming. As a truly global orchestra, the MSO collaborates with guest artists and arts organisations from across the world. Its international audiences include China, where MSO has performed in 2012, 2016 and again in 2018, Europe (2014) and Indonesia, where in 2017 it performed at the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Prambanan Temple.
Clark Rundell’s repertoire ranges from 18th century music to the present day. He conducted last year’s Metropolis series featuring the music of Unsuk Chin. Since then he has conducted the Orquestra Simfònica di Barcelona i Nacional di Catalunya, Kammerphilharmonie Graubünden, Ensemble 10/10 (Liverpool), BBC Concert Orchestra, Britten Sinfonia, Orchestre National d’Île de France, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. Recent appearances have included Florida’s Sarasota Symphony.
The MSO performs a variety of concerts ranging from core classical performances at its home, Hamer Hall at Arts Centre Melbourne, to its annual free concerts at Melbourne’s largest outdoor venue, the Sidney Myer Music Bowl. The MSO also delivers innovative and engaging programs and digital tools to audiences of all ages through its Education and Outreach initiatives.
conductor
He has premiered operas by James MacMillan and Orlando Gough. In 2017, he conducted the European premiere of Daniel Snyder’s Yardbird, about Charlie Parker. Other operas he has conducted include Albert Herring, Carmen, and The Cunning Little Vixen. He has recorded works by composers such as Peter Dickinson, arranged suites from Louis Andriessen’s operas, and presented cross-genre collaborations with Elvis Costello and the Wayne Shorter Quartet, among others. Raised in Minnesota, he now lives in Manchester where he heads Conducting at the Royal Northern College of Music.
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Ralph van Raat
Lior Attar
Although Ralph van Raat’s repertoire is broad, his primary focus has been to convince audiences of the immense beauty and diversity of music from Debussy, Bartók and Ives to the present day, through solo recitals, lecture-recitals, concerto performances, CDs and special projects.
Lior is one of Australia’s most successful singer-songwriters, arriving on the Australian music scene in 2005 with his debut album Autumn Flow. Lior has toured extensively in Australia and internationally, and has been a regular performer at festivals around the world. Lior has toured with artists such as Melbourne vocal group ‘Invenio’ as well as visual artists, string quartets and orchestras.
piano
Ralph van Raat studied piano with Ton Hartsuiker and Willem Brons at the Conservatory of Amsterdam and Musicology at the University of Amsterdam. Awards include First Prize at the International Gaudeamus Interpreters Competition in 1999. He regularly appears as a recitalist and has performed as soloist with orchestras including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, London Sinfonietta, and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Ralph van Raat’s many recordings include the complete piano works of John Adams, and Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated. He has worked closely with composers including Gavin Bryars, David Lang and Tan Dun, who have dedicated compositions to him. Ralph van Raat is a Steinway Artist.
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vocalist
In 2013, Lior collaborated with composer Nigel Westlake to write Compassion, a song cycle for voice and orchestra consisting of original melodies set to ancient Hebrew and Arabic texts. Commissioned by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the work premiered at the Sydney Opera House in 2013, and a recording of Compassion won the ARIA for “Best Classical Album” in 2014. Lior released his fifth studio album, Between You and Me, in 2018. In June 2019, Lior performs with Paul Grabowsky as part of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, and throughout August will be a featured vocalist with the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
Barry Conyngham AM
Mark Holdsworth
After studies with Peter Sculthorpe (1965 –69) in Australia and with Toru Takemitsu (1970) in Japan, Barry Conyngham has established himself as one of Australia’s international composers. Notable premieres including orchestral works Cala Tuent (2008), double bass concerto Kangaroo Island (2009), Gardener of Time (2009–11), Symphony (2012), Anzac (2014), and Diasporas (2016), have taken place in Palma, Hong Kong, Boston, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Tokyo, Vienna, and St Petersburg.
MSO 2019 CYBEC YOUNG COMPOSER IN RESIDENCE
composer
Barry Conyngham has received many awards, including Churchill, Harkness, Australia Council and Fulbright Fellowships, an Aria and two Sounds Australia Awards. He is a Member of the Order of Australia. Over his career he has published almost 100 works and over 40 recordings. Barry Conyngham was the first musician to hold the Harvard Chair of Australian Studies (2000–2001). In 2016 he was appointed Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of Melbourne, where he has been Dean of Fine Arts and Music since 2011.
composer
Mark Holdsworth is an Australian composer currently based in Perth. Holdsworth’s music is characterised by a keen sense of drama and narrative. His compositions include a substantial catalogue of orchestral works as well as numerous works for chamber ensemble and solo instrument. He has been commissioned and performed by Australia’s most feted ensembles including: the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, West Australian Symphony Orchestra, Australian Youth Orchestra, Australian String Quartet and Arcadia Winds. In 2018, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra premiered Holdsworth’s L’appel du vide as part of the Cybec 21st Century Australian Composers’ Program. Following this, Holdsworth has been appointed the MSO 2019 Cybec Young Composer in Residence, comprising 3 new commissions across their 2019 and 2020 seasons. His residency commenced with the premiere of A Hero’s Journey at the Sydney Myer Music Bowl in February, and now continues with the premiere of Cri de coeur at the Metropolis New Music Festival. 7
Ade Vincent composer
Ade Vincent is a prolific composer with a diverse body of work. His music has been heard on television, radio, digital media and film, as well as performed in a range of venues: from intimate bars to major music festivals and concert halls. His compositional style draws on classical, pop and electronic music, with a focus on blended genres, intricate production and the use of technology as part of the compositional process. In 2018 he became the MSO’s inaugural Young Composer in Residence. Forever Singing Winter into Spring is the third of three new works for the Orchestra as part of the position. A singer, multiinstrumentalist and songwriter, Vincent leads indie-pop quartet The Tiger & Me who have toured Australia extensively and are signed to the ABC record label Four|Four. In 2015 he co-founded Kaleidoscope Audio, an audio company specialising in music and sound for videogames. He is currently completing a PhD in Composition at The University of Melbourne where he also teaches.
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Melbourne Recital Centre Presents
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Metropolis Night One Thursday 2 May | 7.30pm Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Clark Rundell conductor Ralph van Raat piano BARRY CONYNGHAM One Small Step…
[7']
WORLD PREMIERE OF AN MSO COMMISSION
MISSY MAZZOLI Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) [12'] GRAEME KOEHNE Capriccio [20'] JULIA WOLFE The Vermeer Room [11'] LOUIS ANDRIESSEN (ARR. VAN PROOIJEN) … miserere … [16']
Post-concert conversation: Join Melbourne Recital Centre’s Marshall McGuire, conductor Clark Rundell, and this evening’s composers for a post-concert conversation in the Ground Floor Foyer from 9pm. Running time: approximately 80 minutes with no interval. Timings listed are approximate.
Program Notes BARRY CONYNGHAM
22:06 Houston: And we’re getting a picture on the TV.
One Small Step…
22:48 Houston: Okay. Neil, we can see you (on the TV) coming down the ladder now. (Pause)
(born 1944)
Imagine you are Neil Armstrong 10 minutes before you step out of your lunar module onto the moon’s surface. What do you see? That do you feel? What happens next…? That’s what I did. And wrote this piece.
22:59 Armstrong: Okay. I just checked getting back up to that first step, Buzz. It’s... The strut isn’t collapsed too far, but it’s adequate to get back up.
Here are extracts from the audio between Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong starting at 109 hours, 15 minutes and 45 seconds into the mission.
23:11 Armstrong: Takes a pretty good little jump (to get back up to the first rung). (Pause)
15:45 Aldrin: Okay. About ready to go down and get some Moon rock?
24:23 Armstrong: That’s one small step for (a) man; one giant leap for mankind. (Long Pause)
15:55 Armstrong: Now we’re ready to hook up… 16:49 Aldrin: Okay. All right… Forward and up; now you are clear. Little bit toward me. (Pause) Straight down. To your left a little bit. Plenty of room. (Pause) Okay, you’re lined up nicely. Toward me a little bit, down. Okay. Now you’re clear. You’re catching the first hinge… 17:29 Aldrin: All right. Move... To your... Roll to the left. Okay. Now you're clear. You’re lined up on the platform. Put your left foot to the right a little bit. Okay. That’s good. Roll left. Good. (Pause) 17:54 Armstrong: Okay. Now I’m going to check ingress here. 18:28 Armstrong: How am I doing? 18:29 Aldrin: You’re doing fine. (Long Pause) 20:58 Armstrong: Okay. Can you pull the door open a little more?
24:48 Armstrong: Yes, the surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles. 25:46 Armstrong: Ah ... There seems to be no difficulty in moving around – as we suspected. It's even perhaps easier than the simulations of one-sixth g that we performed in the various simulations on the ground. It’s absolutely no trouble to walk around. (Pause) 27:13 Armstrong: Okay. It’s quite dark here in the shadow and a little hard for me to see that I have good footing. I’ll work my way over into the sunlight here…. © Barry Conyngham This is the world premiere of this work.
21:39 Armstrong: Houston, this is Neil. Radio check. 11
MISSY MAZZOLI
GRAEME KOEHNE
(born 1980)
(born 1956)
Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres)
Capriccio
Missy Mazzoli’s music reflects a trend among composers of her generation who combine styles, writing music for the omnivorous audiences of the 21st century. She inhabits a sound world that melds indie-rock sensibilities with formal training from Louis Andriessen, David Lang, Aaron Jay Kernis and others. Her music has been played by leading ensembles and artists all over the world, and featured at numerous festivals including the BBC Proms and Bang on a Can Marathon. Her first opera, Breaking the Waves (2016), received the inaugural award for Best New Opera by the Music Critics Association of North America. She is currently Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra who gave the premiere under John Adams on 8 April 2014. The composer writes: Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) is music in the shape of a solar system, a collection of rococo loops that twist around each other within a larger orbit. The word ‘sinfonia’ refers to Baroque works for chamber orchestra but also to the old Italian term for a hurdy-gurdy, a medieval stringed instrument with constant, wheezing drones that are cranked out under melodies played on an attached keyboard. It’s a piece that churns and roils, that inches close to the listener only to leap away at breakneck speed, in the process transforming the ensemble into a makeshift hurdy-gurdy, flung recklessly into space. © Missy Mazzoli This is the first performance of this work by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
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Caprice Rounds Scherzo Ralph van Raat piano Graeme Koehne studied with Richard Meale in Adelaide at a time when the older composer was re-evaluating his own commitment to the virtues of musical modernism. So, despite dutifully absorbing the lessons of post-Webernian music, in 1981 Koehne produced the orchestral work Rain forest, which staked an unequivocal claim to the territory that he would subsequently explore. That work, which won the Australian Composers Award at the 1982 Adelaide Festival, was, like Meale’s Viridian of 1979, unapologetically post-impressionist in a way reminiscent of Takemitsu. Over the subsequent 30 years Koehne has remained faithful to a vision of ‘classical’ music enlivened by the idioms of film and popular music, and which has a grateful relationship to the music of the past. Writing about a more recent work, Koehne has noted: ‘Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.’ With these words, spoken by Amanda in his play Private Lives, Noel Coward elegantly sums up an argument that has been and continues to be a central issue for music’s future. We in the world of ‘classical music’ constantly strive to set ourselves apart from the ‘common’ taste, seeking instead to invest our music with a stature of superiority which we imagine makes us morally unassailable. We take every opportunity to put down music which speaks in a language that can be widely understood and enjoyed, refusing to allow
the artificial barriers between popular taste and ‘high art’ to tumble down. Capriccio, premiered in 1987 but recently revised, was one of the early crop of works in which Koehne staked that claim to a broad-based, popular classicism. Unsurprisingly, the music often behaves and sounds like that of composers who espoused a similar aesthetic. The opening Caprice, for instance, begins with that taut bustling that we hear from time to time in Shostakovich, Prokofiev or Britten: highly profiled metrical units, scored and harmonised lightly, create a sense of headlong motion, with the occasional metrical irregularity – a single bar in a different time signature, for instance – to banish any sense of routine. This clarity, dominating the strings’ opening ritornello, is carried over into the piano part, which is characterised, frequently, by glittering fast passagework. Koehne offers contrast in sections where gruff ostinato figures offset pounding motifs in the piano’s bass. The spirits of Grainger and Copland hover over Rounds, where a gradual overlay of simple modal ideas in the strings becomes immensely rich and lyrical, before the piano enters with a line that glints in the upper register. Such writing contrasts with string music of great warmth and expression. In the Scherzo the piano upstages the orchestra’s opening gambit with a short bravura cadenza, but the orchestra reasserts itself with tarantella rhythms that are passed to and fro between strings and soloist. A central section in contrasting metre, with a busy string line that recalls some of Britten’s writing in the Frank Bridge Variations, offers the piano more space to shine, while the movement’s concluding section brings together the driving triplets of the tarantella rhythm with insistent duple-time material. Gordon Kerry © 2019 This is the first performance of this work by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
JULIA WOLFE
(born 1958)
The Vermeer Room A co-founder and artistic co-director of New York’s Bang on a Can, Julia Wolfe draws inspiration from folk, classical and rock genres, bringing a modern sensibility to each while simultaneously tearing down the walls between them. Her music is distinguished by an intense physicality and a relentless power that pushes performers to extremes and demands attention from the audience. Works in recent years include the Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio Anthracite Fields for chorus and instruments (2014), and the evening-length Steel Hammer (2009) for the Bang on a Can All-Stars and singers which subsequently toured in an expanded theatrical form. In January 2019, the New York Philharmonic premiered Fire in my mouth, Wolfe’s large-scale work for orchestra and women’s chorus, continuing her interest in American labour history with the subject of women in New York’s garment industry at the turn of the century. About the inspiration behind The Vermeer Room (1989), Wolfe has commented: The Vermeer Room was inspired by Vermeer’s painting A Girl Asleep. It’s a very beautiful painting of a young girl seated at a table. Her head rests against her hand and her eyes are closed. To her right is an illuminated doorway. An x-ray of the painting revealed that at one point there was a figure of a man in the doorway. This was very mysterious to me, that Vermeer chose to remove the image, to leave an empty space. I thought of the light in the doorway, about things hidden. I thought of the girl’s sleep. While the scene is very quiet sleep is often drenched in sound. © Julia Wolfe
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This is the first performance of this work by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
LOUIS ANDRIESSEN
(born 1939) arr. Marijn van Prooijen …miserere…
As anyone who has sung Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere knows, the fact that the young Mozart copied it out from memory, having heard it sung once in the Sistine Chapel, isn’t a hugely big deal. It is a setting of Psalm 50 in the Catholic Psalter (51 in the Protestant Bible), a plea for mercy despite our sinfulness, sung in the days leading up to Easter. Allegri’s setting consists of simple blocks of material, almost entirely homophonic, and interspersed with plainchant; the seraphic high C for which audiences wait in joyful hope is not in the original score, but would have been added in by the singer that Mozart heard. Louis Andriessen wrote his …miserere… for string quartet in 2006–7, dedicating it to Henk Guittart and the Schoenberg Quartet who premiered it; composer and bass-player Marijn van Prooijen made this version for string orchestra in 2015. As Andriessen has noted, ‘…miserere… is connected to the famous Miserere through its form: A B A C A B A B.’ But, despite his family’s long association with liturgical music, Andriessen’s impetus for the piece came not from the penitential rites of the church, but rather from the 1993 novel Melodien, by German author Helmut Krausser. As Andriessen notes, ‘In this book, set in Italy around 1400, the alchemist Castiglio starts a quest for the 26 magic melodies. These melodies have a strange power, for example the power to enamour and to heal.’ Needless to say, such a Faustian project does not end well. Andriessen and Allegri may share a formal design, but where Allegri’s
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constant repetition might serve as an image for the soul bound in sin, Andriessen’s piece is based on constant variation of its material, as befits a story of alchemy. Its thematic material derives in part from Andriessen’s earlier Remembering that Sarabande, a piece for four violas written for the 60th birthday of London music critic Annette Morreau. Andriessen’s theme, or ‘A section’, is a simple passage in two-voice counterpoint of minims in stepwise motion against sighing three-note quaver motifs. The ‘B’ material is first stated in 3/8, with again, long notes as a kind of cantus firmus sustaining shorter motifs. A tranquillo section, based on a metrical simple accretion of chords, follows, dissolving into a pointillist texture of isolated ‘long quavers’, that in turn leads to a passage of overlaid long notes, each accented slightly ‘like little bells’. As noted, each restatement of earlier material is varied – metrically and or texturally, so the work has a strong sense of dramatic development. A lilting melody, played flautato in the middle voices, lapses into quiet distant chords; another largely homophonic tranquillo section in 7/8 gathers gradual strength and urgency, erupting into a relentless, emphatic passage in hammered semiquavers, before a section dominated by sarabande rhythm lowers the temperature. Gordon Kerry © 2019 This is the first performance of this work by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
A Midsummer’s Night Dream T U E 30 J U LY
L’Italiana in Algeri M O N 2 6 AU G
Melbourne Recital Centre
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Ralph van Raat in Recital Friday 3 May | 8pm Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre LOUIS ANDRIESSEN Souvenirs d'Enfance: Rondo opus 1, Allegro Marcato, Nocturne Prospettive e Retropsettive Registers Trepidus The Memory of Roses: Wals, Lied, Chorale, Deuxième Chorale Image de Moreau Searching for Unison JOHN ADAMS Phrygian Gates
Post-concert conversation: Join Melbourne Recital Centre’s Marshall McGuire for a post-concert conversation onstage following the performance. Running time: approximately 90 minutes with no interval.
LOUIS ANDRIESSEN
with tiny, sharp figurative details such as faces and objects.
On selections from tonight’s recital, Ralph van Raat writes:
Adapted from program notes © Ralph van Raat
Souvenirs d’Enfance (1954-66) is a survey of the different styles of composing in the Netherlands at the time. Rondo opus 1 contains a plurality of influences, including Debussy and Stravinsky. In Allegro Marcato, Andriessen remarks in the score that this piece is an example of bad taste, and should therefore not be played. It is written in an octatonic style considered at that time as ‘tasteless’, which a group of young Dutch composers rebelled against. The beautiful Nocturne is inspired by Fauré, though remains audibly Andriessen, particularly through his beautiful colouring of minor seconds.
(born 1947)
(born 1939)
Trepidus is often referred to in relation to the ‘physical’ element in Andriessen’s work – the piano is hammered – the style is raw. It is an extremely expressive work (the title is Latin for ‘fear’) whereby the loudness pertains not so much to the volume, but more to a specific timbre. The Memory of Roses is the title of a collection for widely varying instruments. In these short pieces, often written for particular occasions, Andriessen shows his mastery of the compositional craft. The piano works from the collection are often austere in their material and duration, but all the greater in their expressive strength. The Wals is nostalgic in character yet still harmonically surprising. The Chorale is an effective meditation in memory of John Cage, and in the Deuxième Chorale, originally written for music box, one hears the tender and melancholic side of Andriessen. In Image de Moreau, lyricism, timbre, and rhythm come together as one. Written as a toccata, and referring to Prokofiev and Ravel, the work can be seen as a translation to music of the painter Gustave Moreau, who combined large colour fields
JOHN ADAMS
Phrygian Gates The composer writes: Phrygian Gates shows a strong influence of Minimalist procedures, and was the first piece of mine to be based on the idea of repetitive cell structure. Phrygian Gates is a tour of half of the cycle of keys, modulating by the circle of fifths rather than stepwise à la WellTempered Clavier. The structure is in the form of a modulating square wave with one state in the Lydian mode and the other in the Phrygian mode. As the piece progresses the amount of time spent in the Lydian gradually shortens while that given over to the Phrygian lengthens. Hence the very first section, on A Lydian, is the longest in the piece and is followed by a very short passage on A Phrygian. In the next pair (E Lydian and Phrygian) the Lydian section is slightly shorter while its Phrygian mate is proportionally longer, and so on until the tables are turned. Then follows a coda in which the modes are rapidly mixed, one after the other. ‘Gates,’ a term borrowed from electronics, are the moments when the modes abruptly and without warning shift. There is ‘mode’ in this music, but there is no ‘modulation’. What makes Phrygian Gates still interesting for me is the topography of its form and the variety of keyboard ideas, many of which suggest the rippling of waveforms. Sometimes these waves are smooth and tranquil; sometimes their surging and stabbing figurations can be as violent as a white-water expedition. Adapted from a program note © John Adams
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Metropolis Night Two Saturday 4 May | 7.30pm Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Clark Rundell conductor Lior Attar vocalist MARK HOLDSWORTH* Cri de coeur
[11']
WORLD PREMIERE OF AN MSO COMMISSION
ADE VINCENT / LIOR ATTAR Forever Singing Winter into Spring [20'] WORLD PREMIERE OF AN MSO COMMISSION
LOUIS ANDRIESSEN (ARR. RUNDELL) Vermeer Pictures [30']
* MSO 2019 Cybec Young Composer in Residence Post-concert conversation: Join Melbourne Recital Centre’s Marshall McGuire, conductor Clark Rundell, and this evening’s composers for a post-concert conversation in the Ground Floor Foyer from 9pm. Running time: approximately 80 minutes with no interval. Timings listed are approximate.
Program Notes MARK HOLDSWORTH
ADE VINCENT / LIOR ATTAR
(born 1990)
(born 1982) / (born 1976)
Cri de coeur
Forever Singing Winter into Spring is a song-cycle in four movements for solo voice, orchestra and electronics. The piece explores the concept that all life is cyclical, with the seasons symbolic of its cardinal points: birth, growth, change and death. Through time we experience this ever-repeating cycle over shifting scales – a day, a year, a lifetime.
It is a deficiency of compassion, compounded by inaction and apathy that nourishes the evils of humankind. A disregard for solicitude, both individual and societal, allows prejudice to supplant understanding, and through this, acts of violence and terror to proliferate. This collective ineptitude renders society and its constituents unscrupulous, undignified and fractured. To restore our dignity, offer and accept forgiveness, and near ourselves as close as possible to peace, it is integral that we conscientiously approach all people, known and unfamiliar, friend and foe, with equal compassion. Cri de Coeur (cry from the heart) is a desperate plea for compassion and love in a time of prevalent discrimination, violence and loneliness. The piece commences with a solitary violin line that gradually calls forth instrumental sections like an orchestral resurrection. This rallying of voices allegorises the fortification of the plea. In this first section, hope is a delicate thing that is constantly struggling to assert itself; grand tutti gestures surge and then rescind, forsaking instrumental soli that apprehensively reach out for company. This is foiled by a cacophony of relentless violent gestures, frenetic chromaticism and primitivism that symbolises the carnal hatred that impedes our humanity, a sonic battleground which references sounds of war. This ultimately concedes to the opening theme. In this concluding section, the soloist returns to reaffirm their plea before hope is consolidated by the orchestra’s unified resolution.
The work combines the emotional grandeur of live orchestra with the incisive innovation and driving rhythm of modern electronic music. Lior’s voice is showcased for its versatility, shifting from raw fragility to soaring falsetto – sometimes exposed and honest, sometimes digitally stretched, pulled, sped up and cut as he lyrically explores four stories of a single life reflected through the changing seasons. The score moves from the hope of spring and new life with lush ambient orchestral electronica through to the infectious electro pop of summer; from autumnal trip-hop to the hymnal introspection of winter. The piece is a collage of inspiration and influences. The genesis of the idea is an old book of haiku and the rich seasonal imagery within. The book prompted an email exchange with friend and creative sounding board Tobias Selkirk as I thought aloud about the topic, that led to his response: All organisms experience time at different rates (in as much as we can deduce the experience of an organism); a fly lives only a day, everything is sped up, a giant turtle over a hundred years, and some trees over thousands of years. But each life, and each day, has the same elements as the 4 seasons: birth (dawn – spring),
© Mark Holdsworth This is the world premiere of this work.
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peak activity (midday – summer), aging (sunset – autumn), death (night – winter). One circle for the fly, 3,000 for the turtle but still encapsulated in the one. Whether the circle is sped up or slowed down. This late-night email from a friend and the old book of haiku were influential during early planning stages for the work, and both are parents to the lyrics. The form and character of haiku appealed – Lior was particularly drawn to its ability to focus in on one moment in time and employ provocative, colourful imagery to provide a sudden moment of illumination. The piece is also indebted to contemporary Mexican artist Teresa Clark for her set of paintings Las Cuatro Estanciones. I discovered this fantastic series shortly after beginning writing and they provided a visual stimulus to much of the creative process. Forever Singing Winter into Spring is dedicated to the memory of Roger Riordan – a remarkably kind and generous man who is greatly missed. © Ade Vincent This is the first performance of this work by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
LOUIS ANDRIESSEN
(born 1939) arr. Clark Rundell Vermeer Pictures
…when you stare into the light Saskia’s scissors A quantity of natural ultramarine They have opened up the sluices For the Dutch, 1672 was known as the year of disasters, including war, civil strife and catastrophic flooding. Against this backdrop, painter Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) produced a small but amazing corpus of images of preternatural calm, usually in domestic settings. The subjects of his paintings are frequently women engaged in domestic pursuits, pouring milk, playing music, and often reading or writing letters. In 1999 Andriessen collaborated with film director Peter Greenaway on the opera Writing to Vermeer. The painter has gone from his home in Delft to The Hague for a fortnight, during which time the women of his household – his wife Catharina Bolnes, his mother-in-law, Maria Thins and the young model Saskia de Vries – each write six letters to him, describing daily life and urging him to return. (The letters are, of course, fictional, as is the figure of Saskia de Vries, her forename, not coincidentally, that of Rembrandt’s first wife and model.) The action of the opera, therefore, has some of the poised interiority of the paintings, though as the piece progresses, the outside world encroaches, represented in the opera by filmed inserts of violence and cataclysm, with electronic musical accompaniments by Michel van der Aa that contrast with Andriessen’s often lyrical score and his loving appropriations of music by Dutch composer Sweelinck. As Greenaway has written: While Vermeer is absent, the women defend their household against the
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potential erosion of five liquids: ink from an excess of writing, varnish that threatens the life of a child, milk that endlessly pours from the milkmaid’s jug, blood that demonstrates the violence of political assassination, and finally water that ultimately sweeps them, their household, their children and the stage away. Conductor Clark Rundell completed this suite of selections from the opera in 2005. The opening movement, …when you stare into the light, is derived at first from the opera’s prelude, where simple string figures over a low drone evoke the sounds of a consort of viols, before a passage of gently pulsing syncopation appears. On the importance of light in Vermeer, Greenaway has noted that ‘Gadar, a very famous French film director, suggested Vermeer was the very first cinematographer because he dealt in a world totally controlled by light and split seconds of time’. Saskia’s scissors starts with a duet for piccolo and double bass, gradually filled in with hocket-like textures but becoming more frenetic. A quantity of natural ultramarine is characterised at first by spare textures with isolated glints of colour and light and a gradual filling-out of the canvas in rocking triplet figures from the strings and rippling passages for pianos and harps. They have opened up the sluices, which contains some of the opera’s most brutal sounds, refers to the deliberate flooding – to hamper the invading army – that inundates Vermeer’s home at the end. Gordon Kerry © 2019 This is the first performance of this work by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
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Your MSO Sir Andrew Davis Chief Conductor
Benjamin Northey Associate Conductor
Tianyi Lu
Cybec Assistant Conductor
Hiroyuki Iwaki
Conductor Laureate (1974–2006)
FIRST VIOLINS Dale Barltrop Concertmaster
Sophie Rowell Concertmaster
The Ullmer Family Foundation#
Peter Edwards
Assistant Principal
Kirsty Bremner Sarah Curro
Michael Aquilina#
Peter Fellin Deborah Goodall Lorraine Hook Anne-Marie Johnson Kirstin Kenny Ji Won Kim Eleanor Mancini Chisholm & Gamon#
Mark Mogilevski Michelle Ruffolo Kathryn Taylor Michael Aquilina#
SECOND VIOLINS Matthew Tomkins
Freya Franzen Cong Gu Andrew Hall Isy Wasserman Philippa West Patrick Wong Roger Young
DOUBLE BASSES Steve Reeves Principal
Andrew Moon
Associate Principal
Sylvia Hosking
Assistant Principal
Damien Eckersley Benjamin Hanlon Suzanne Lee Stephen Newton
VIOLAS Christopher Moore Principal Di Jameson#
Lauren Brigden Katharine Brockman Christopher Cartlidge Michael Aquilina#
Anthony Chataway
Dr Elizabeth E Lewis AM
#
Gabrielle Halloran Maria Solà
#
Trevor Jones Fiona Sargeant Cindy Watkin Elizabeth Woolnough CELLOS
Sophie Galaise and Clarence Fraser#
FLUTES Prudence Davis Principal Anonymous#
Wendy Clarke
Associate Principal
Sarah Beggs
Sophia Yong-Tang#
PICCOLO Andrew Macleod
Principal John McKay and Lois McKay#
OBOES
David Berlin
Principal MS Newman Family#
Jeffrey Crellin
Rachael Tobin
Thomas Hutchinson
Associate Principal
Nicholas Bochner Assistant Principal Anonymous*
Principal
Associate Principal
Ann Blackburn
The Rosemary Norman Foundation#
Principal The Gross Foundation#
Miranda Brockman
Geelong Friends of the MSO#
COR ANGLAIS
Robert Macindoe
Rohan de Korte
Michael Pisani
Monica Curro
Keith Johnson Sarah Morse Angela Sargeant
CLARINETS
Mary Allison Isin Cakmakcioglu Tiffany Cheng
Maria Solà
Philip Arkinstall
Associate Principal
Assistant Principal Danny Gorog and Lindy Susskind#
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Andrew Dudgeon#
#
Michelle Wood
Michael Aquilina Andrew and Theresa Dyer# #
Principal
David Thomas Principal
Associate Principal
Craig Hill
BASS CLARINET
TIMPANI**
Jon Craven
Christopher Lane Principal
Rachel Curkpatrick
BASSOONS
PERCUSSION
Jack Schiller
Robert Clarke
Lloyd Van't Hoff
Elise Millman
John Arcaro
Tim and Lyn Edward#
guest associate principal bassoon
Natasha Thomas
Robert Cossom
Tristan Rebien
HARP
Greg Sully
Principal
Principal
Associate Principal
CONTRABASSOON Brock Imison Principal
HORNS
Principal
Drs Clem Gruen and Rhyl Wade#
Yinuo Mu Principal
Nicolas Fleury Principal
METROPOLIS GUEST MUSICIANS
Saul Lewis
Harry Bennetts
Principal Third
guest assistant concertmaster
Abbey Edlin
Aaron Barnden
Nereda Hanlon and Michael Hanlon AM#
violin
Trinette McClimont Rachel Shaw
violin
TRUMPETS
Nicholas Waters
Amy Brookman Madeleine Jevons violin
Owen Morris
violin
Shane Hooton
viola
William Evans Rosie Turner
viola
Principal
Associate Principal
William Clark Ceridwen Davies Isabel Morse
John and Diana Frew#
viola
TROMBONES
cello
Brett Kelly Principal
Kalina Krusteva-Theaker Mee Na Lojewski Phoebe Russell^
Mike Szabo
Rohan Dasika
Principal Bass Trombone
TUBA Timothy Buzbee Principal
guest associate principal oboe oboe
contrabass clarinet
Lyndon Watts
guest associate principal trumpet guest associate principal percussion
Robert Allan percussion
Timothy Hook percussion
Conrad Nilsson percussion
Melina van Leeuwen harp
Leigh Harrold
piano/celeste/synthesizer
Donald Nicolson piano
Ade Vincent synthesizer
Doug de Vries guitar
Sophie Marcheff guitar
Tristan Courtney
electronics/bass guitar
Gareth Thomson drum kit
cello
Richard Shirley
Tim and Lyn Edward#
Rachel Bullen
guest principal double bass double bass
Vivian Qu Siyuan double bass
Taryn Clarke
guest associate principal flute
# Position supported by ** Timpani Chair position supported by Lady Potter AC CMRI ^ Appears courtesy of Queensland Symphony Orchestra 23
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