'Bliss' to go ahead

Brett Dean's forthcoming opera, 'Bliss', which it seemed Opera Australia was going to wimp out of staging, will definately be performed in the organisation's 2008 season. This follows the awarding of a prize to the company to assist with the costs of commissioning the work.

Good news!!

'Heavy-handed'

The wonderful Clive O'Connell! It's good to see that he continues to live up to my low expectations of him. Tim Young and I performed the Boulez Sonatine for flute and piano in the Edge of Sunset Series at the Melbourne Festival last Wednesday night, and for a sort of 'provisional' performance it went pretty spectacularly well: we were together almost all the way through, and felt like we had gone all out for the extremes demanded in the score. So it was a shock to read Clive's review in Friday's Age newspaper - here is the section dealing with my performance:

The difficult Sonatine of 1946 by Boulez ended the night, performed by the National Academy's Timothy Munro on flute with Timothy Young negotiating the piano part. This turned into a heavy-handed affair, with plenty of pedal washes from the keyboard, a reticent wind line and little of the anticipated exhilaration and glittering brilliance. Those pages where the instruments play as partners moved close to being bland, jog-trotting carefully when the music requires abrupt disjunctions and dynamic surprises.

I am determined to use some quotes from this for a future concert poster, for example

'heavy-handed ... reticent ... little of the anticipated exhilaration ... bland, jog-trotting' Clive O'Connell, The Age

As soon as Melbournites see Clive's name attached, they will automatically believe the opposite of what is written....

On the edge of sunset

I played two concerts in a chamber series at the Melbourne Festival this week: on Monday, Brett Dean's new 'Demons' and two little ensemble pieces by young Aussie composer Katy Abbott; last night, Boulez's fiendish 'Sonatine' (twice as hard for piano as for flute). Both were broadcast on ABC Classic FM - all around a bloody good experience. I have a review from the bizarre and apalling Clive O'Connell in The Age for Monday night's concert - and last night's concert should get a review tomorrow. Since I'm self-obsessed, I'll quote the bits involving me...:

'No sooner had Katy Abbott's three contributions started than they seemed to be over, in particular her delicately etched Sunburnt Aftertones III, in which the instrumental sextet worked through her clean score with professional and rapid address, notably the duo passages for Timothy Munro's flute and Richard Haynes' clarinet ... By contrast, Munro's pair of solos - Brett Dean's Demons and Berio's Sequenza I - sounded unusually aggressive with their demands for multiphonics and heavily-impacted modes of articulation.'

Ummmm. Well, for starters, Sunburnt Aftertones III had NO real duo passages - although there are some in Abbott's Making Angels (dubbed by our trio 'Making Babies', for no real reason...). The hopeless Clive then suggests that I played a 'pair of solos' - actually I only played one, Demons; the Berio was played by the fabulous Sarah Beggs. 'Unusually aggressive'? Dunno quite how to take that. Nice to get in the paper though....

Anyway, at least I'm going to have some time to blog now for a while - so prepare yourself for a deluge of idiotic opinions on a range of topics!

'Atomic Minimalism'

It's been a while since my last post. I've been preparing for two rather intense performances at next week's Melbourne Festival Contemporary Music Series: Brett Dean's fabulous new solo flute piece 'Demons' (which is reasonably demonic in its demands) and Pierre Boulez's famous and equally demonic Sonatine for flute and piano. The Boulez has been giving Tim Young and I the fright of our lives, as we try to piece together fragments in slow motion, speed them up, then try to make it 'work' dramatically. Now that it is all starting to come together, I can say that it is a glorious piece to perform - by turns lyrical, savage, skittish and even melancholy. I'm going to have a LOT of fun next Wednesday night. My Dean performance will be the second it will have had in ONE DAY, as it recieves a performance from the fabulous Mardi McSullea at a lunchtime concert at Melbourne Uni on Monday arvo, and I play it at 6pm that night. Both my Dean and Boulez performances will be broadcast on ABC Classic FM soon after - I'll post the info when I get it.

So all of the reviews are in for Dr Atomic, and they are, well.....a mixed bag, really. Not surprising if you consider that in the 18th and 19th Centuries, when the difference in composers' styles were not anywhere nearly as great as today (Hummel and Beethoven vs Brian Ferneyhough and Philip Glass), reviewers had often violent divergences of opinion. Nowadays, when reviewers have even more radically different expectations, it seems logical that every new work should come in for plaudits and a bagging. Lisa Hirsch at Iron Tongue has a compilation of review links - so you can make up your own mind! I'm desperate to hear the bloody thing!

More Orchestra Crisis

No sooner had the dust had settled after the brouhaha surrounding the James Strong Orchestras Review than a new report has been commissioned by Rod Kemp to examine issues surrounding the two beleaguered Australian opera and ballet orchestras, Orchestra Victoria and the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra. AOBO will post a deficit for this financial year of more than one million dollars, and has been struggling ever since it gave its players a rather generous pay rise (intended to bring it nearer to the SSO, who's principal players earn more than $100 000 a year after they received a boost some five years ago). There is talk of creating one big super-ballet-orchestra - surely an idiotic idea given the exorbitant travelling and accomodation costs that would result.

Arts-o-tainment?

I was a huge fan over the past two years of the now defunct ABC arts panel show Critical Mass, which was a lively and intelligent review show hosted by the wonderful Jonathan Biggins.

Obviously the show didn't rate (which I always thought didn't really matter to the ABC if it was producing quality TV.... I digress...), and was shelved indefinately. Now a new arts panel discussion show, Vulture, has appeared. It tries to steal a style and format familiar from several popular ABC shows of the recent and not-so-recent past - including Good News Week, the Glass House and Spicks and Specks - an entertaining host gives hilarious intros and outros to discussions, and the show is peppered with little pre-taped comedy routines and even a comedy 'news bulletin'. I guess the point is to make 'difficult' arts-talk into a funny romp for the whole family! Guests included the wonderfully gruff old conservative arts critic, Peter Craven, and three young, hip post-modern arty types. Despite the 'fluffy' format, the discussion was surprisingly interesting, although it involved the usual arty hypocricy (after slamming Shakespeare as old-fashioned and unintelligible - 'never liked him anyway' - one of the panellists later in the show went on an unintelligible and traditionally pretentious rant about contemporary art). Well worth checking out next Tuesday at 10pm.

Aussie Adams-mania

It seems almost too much of a coincidence that in the week John Adams' new opera, Doctor Atomic, is being premiered in San Francisco, SBS TV here in Oz is showing Penny Woolcock's bloody (literally) fabulous filmed version of Adams' 1991 opera, The Death of Klinghoffer. It's on at 10pm next Tuesday night, and is a searingly dramatic realisation of what, on the stage (I'm told) and on CD, can seem an abstract and even slightly 'distancing' work. DON'T MISS IT!!!!

Also, on ABC 2 (Digital) this afternoon and Saturday afternoon at 12:30pm is a portrait of the great man. Adams mania!?

WMD John Adams style

There is a truly fascinating article written by John Adams on the NewMusicBox website about preparations for the premiere of his new opera, Doctor Atomic, in which the composer outlines his hopes, fears and excitement about the production. There are some fascinating articles about the opera, in the New York Times, in Physics Today Online (!), on the exploratorium website (which has a podcast from a panel discussion including the composer and director), and from the San Francisco Chronicle. So great to see such interest in the premiere of a new opera! It premieres this weekend - and I'll keep you up to date with reviews after the fact - and if and when the premiere will be streamed online.

Mavericks r us

Check out American Mavericks, a truly fabulous online resource - you can listen to about fifty complete works by US composers in mostly live performances mostly from the San Francisco Symphony. Even better are two radio stations: the Crunchy Channel (Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt and other 'modernist'-types) and the Smooth Channel (Reich, Feldman, Meredith Monk, La Monte Young, etc). Both make fascinating listening. And while I'm on about interesting online radio stations, check out ArtsJournal blogger Kyle Gann's 'Postclassical' station. I don't always see eye to eye with him on issues dealing with classical music, but he picks some fascinating music

'Dictatorial son of a bitch'

Kyle Gann over at ArtsJournal says he hears plenty of stories of Elliott Carter being a 'dictatorial son of a bitch'. But just look at the guy....he seems so warm and cuddly. I played in a small festival of Carter's music at Carnegie Hall in 2001, and the 94-year-old composer came in and talked to us in that smooth, calm old-world Charles-Ives-esque accent that he has. He seemed like a lovely bloke! But reading some interviews over the years, he does seem to have harsh words for anyone that thinks atonal music isn't the way, the truth and the light. 'Avant Garde' seems so retro to me now, and yet there are so many disciples out there, all over the world, still preaching that 'wacko' is some sort of evolutionary step forward.

John Adams, my favourite man in the whole world at present. Listen to anything he has written, but especially the two operas Death of Klinghoffer and Nixon in China, both full of fabulous music and with fascinating librettos by the (now Reverend) Alice Goodman. My best bits at the moment: the opening choruses and (Palestinian) baritone aria with bassoon obligato from Death of Klinghoffer; and the opening 10 minutes, 'cheers!' chorus and Third Act opening of Nixon in China. Great stuff!

Don't be afraid - it's me! Until I can work out how to actually put a photo on the sidebar of this blog, I'm going to put photos of me every now and then - mostly because I have found out how to add images, and it's really easy!

Slave Labour

Many if not most classical music concerts in Australia run on free performer labour. This in itself is not particularly surprising or offensive given the large amount of amateur musical (particularly choral) activity around the country. However, much of this free or cheap-as-chips labour comes under the inappropriate title of 'professional' performances. As a young professional flute player I have experienced much of this first-hand.

In three weeks time I will perform two extremely challenging flute works and two contemporary chamber pieces as part of the Melbourne Festival, one of the largest and best-funded of the Australian arts festivals, and not be paid anything for my efforts. The justification is that the contemporary music component of the festival was a last minute addition, and was not funded properly; the composers are not being paid for their new works, either. But as part of a professional, well-funded festival?! A couple of months ago I performed in a handful of concerts as part of a regional festival, run by a professional chamber group, in NSW. For this I was paid the grand total of $400 - which works out at about $10 an hour, just for the rehearsals and performances. The festival runs on a small budget, but the main problem was that they literally employed far too many people, filling the stage with different instrumental combinations where a more conservative festival program would surely suffice. Players cannot say 'no', however, because the quality of the music-making at the festival is so high.

In Melbourne there is an outfit called Independent Classics that promotes 'professional' concert events, including operas as well as chamber, orchestral and choral concerts. For the orchestral concerts players get paid $35 per call, which works out at about $12 per hour, well below the Australian minimum wage.

Bad reviews!

I thought when I left sunny Queensland at the beginning of this year that I had forever escaped the appalling arts coverage of my beloved home state's idiotic newspaper, The Courier Mail. Classical music concerts in Brisbane are mostly reviewed by Patricia Kelly, who has the amazing ability to say absolutely nothing with as much as 500 words; armed with her thesaurus, she attaches scrumptionsly irrelevant and absurd adverbs and adjectives to already idiotic phrases. Little was I to know that Melbourne has Australia's worst classical music reviewer: Clive O'Connell. Music reviews that are unintelligible to the average music-lover are pointless, but there is something seriously wrong when professional musicians can't understand large sections of a review, as in the case of dotty old Clive's ridiculous rantings.

The Onion - which runs some great classical music stories - has a fabulous idea for orchestras to become a bit more relevant: open mic nights. A great idea that Aussie orchestras should definately get into - The Queensland Orchestra would draw a huge crowd of blokes to see their mates have a go at the solo parts in a Vivaldi or Mozart concerto...

Down with genius!

Last night Sandy Baillie played all five Beethoven Cello Sonatas at the National Academy of Music. What a phenomenal musician! He plays with incredibly expressive and emotional freedom, negotiating the dramatic extremes of the music with ease; rarely have I seen an instrumentalist so completely in accord with his instrument. The sonatas don't chart a consistent path through the composer's life - there are two Haydnesque sonatas at the beginning, two glowing and radiant sonatas at the end, and the glorious A major in the middle. Hearing them together brings home to me the path of Beethoven from craftsman to genius 'for all time'. Several people I talked to after the performance commented on the 'superiority' of the last sonatas. This sort of talk drives me nuts; when people say about the late works that the composer 'journeys into the soul' or 'takes us closer to heaven', the implication is that as a 'mere' craftsman, experimenting within the accepted style and forms of the time, Beethoven was an inferior composer compared with the more 'modern'-style genius of the later years. I remember Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe saying last year at a function I attended that he'd be happy if we just ditched all of his earlier music totally. I think that in some ways it is this 'enduring artworks for all time' attitude that has helped to freeze classical music in time, setting a 'canon of great works' in stone and keeping us locked in the 19th century...

Where have the orchestras gone?

Six months ago the Australian orchestras were all over the newspapers (by 'all over the newspapers', I mean one article every few days...somewhere near the back). The orchestras review was predicting doom, the government was trying to edge slowly away, and the orchestras themselves were trying to talk up their acheivements and 'relevance'. Opinion pieces were launched for and against the review, some saying the orchestras were over-funded and completely irrelevant, others giving the state and federal governments a slap on the wrist for allowing funding levels to drop so far. Then the federal government announced $10 million extra for the orchestras, and everyone cheered right back up; it was business as usual, and everyone seemed pleased with the result. Little bits and pieces have appeared recently, most concerning the orchestras' rejection of the bid to forcibly seperate them from the ABC, but mostly there is nothing.

Several damning statistics from the report will not go away, and no small financial bandaids will change that. Most troubling is the suggestion that the orchestras will have to increase profits by as much as 12% (in the case of the beleagured Queensland Orchestra) PER YEAR for the next decade if they hope to even exist. There is no evidence if Labor were to win the next federal election that they would increase funding (in real terms) for the arts; in fact, before the last election neither even MENTIONED their piddly arts budgets until just two days prior to the poll.

Disturbing.

Review: Eotvos records Berio's Sinfonia

Contemporary classical music is complex. Nothing surprising there. I reckon every listener has a different complexity threshold, though; music that is just below a listener's threshold will contain enough layers of meaning to challenge while also giving direct aural satisfaction; music above this line will baffle then frustrate and ultimately alienate the person. My threshold runs directly through the middle of the compositional output of Luciano Berio. For me, roughly half of his music falls beneath it, including: works inspired by older music, including Folksongs, the folk-inspired Voci, Rendering (the un-completion of Schubert's 10th Symphony); and works with a direct, dramatic impact, including the Bassoon, Trumpet, Trombone and Viola Sequenzas. It's when Berio sounds to me like he is operating out of my reach, and when, no matter how hard I stare at the score, the music still seems impenetrable, that the composer and I part ways.

The masterly Sinfonia, for orchestra and 8 solo singers, leaves me with mixed feelings. As an undergraduate music student I was obsessed with the piece, exploring every nook and cranny as I tried to make sense of the MADNESS. The work was written with the bright vibratoless sound of the Swingle Singers (who make Bach fugues fabulous fun!) in mind, and draws together a huge range of text and music sources, including Beckett, Mahler, Debussy and Berg, while also addressing issues including the futility of art and the assasination of Martin Luther King. Berio had spent a significant amount of time in New York prior to writing the piece, and put the chaotic sound of the city in to the work.

It has been recorded three times before Eotvos' new DG disc, conducted by Berio himself, Pierre Boulez and Riccardo Chailly. The Berio gives great clarity to the work's extensive spoken text, but the orchestral contribution is not always top-notch; you can hear every last glistening orchestral detail in Chailly's searingly dramatic recording, but the singers are often drowned out. It is always exciting to hear a new recording of this hugely complex piece, and Eotvos' new recording with the Gothenburg Symphony (of Sweden) and the London Sinfonietta Voices finds a nice middle ground between these two poles. You can hear more spoken detail than in any previous recording, especially in the third movement, and although it doesn't rival the glorious Concertgebouw in Chailly's recording the orchestral playing has adequate clarity and bite. The piece still bloody irritates me, but every recording sheds light on previously undiscovered beauties in the score.