'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!