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2011Take nine composers and hear how magic is madeNovember 19 2011 HALCYON: FIRST STONES
HALCYON has always been defined by its sense of adventure. First Stones, then, is a natural next step in an expedition into the jungle of contemporary art music, a hands-on collaboration with nine emerging composers. Their performance was the culmination of six months of development, including two intensive workshops with the musicians and the composer-mentor Elliott Gyger. The results were impressive: nine well-formed new works, all displaying their own, distinctive voice and all performed with a thrilling mix of commitment and virtuosity. Individually, each one was persuasive. As a whole, this blind chocolate box of new works provided some fascinating revelations about the voice as an instrument, as a mouthpiece for words, and a conveyor of meaning. Nicole Murphy's Temple Bell was an exquisite place to start: voices integrated seamlessly into the musical texture, with words coming later, all building to a delicate denouement. James Wade's The Voice of the Ancient Bard was heavily pregnant with meaning, to the point of self-consciousness at times. Pedro Oliveira Woolmer's In Eternity and Chris Williams's That a Circle, This a Line were also ambitious in scope, but managed, through vocal and instrumental textures, to cut through the sheer weight of their philosophical texts. In The Queen, Owen Salome repurposed a natural history text on insects to create a disturbing buzz of sinister intent. Meanwhile, Peggy Polias's Digital Lullaby was a counting song for the 21st century. Lachlan Hughes's Lines Drawn of my Cartilage was a brave rejection of structure and control, while Anastasia Pahos's Seeking Eurydice took traditional modes and rhythms to tell a story. As for Damian Griffin, he bypassed the burden of meaning with his delightful and curiously sensible nonsense song Fzzzt-Pop! As a bonus, this slickly-produced concert filled the gaps for scene-shifting between works not with the usual agonising talks from the stage from shy artists, but with a rough documentary, fleshing out the story of this six-month process. It was a nice example of how the process and presentation of new music can engage, enlighten and entertain. Versatile Schultz finds it pays to go by the bookSept 18 2011 Sydney Morning Herald, September 21, 2010 Schultz has selected five texts, moving from golden lyricism and love to a stormy list of Sei Shonagon's dislikes before a quiet close. The first song, A gift of paper, is a quietly radiant duet for soprano and mezzo-soprano in which Sei Shonagon states she will use the gift of some paper to write things she sees, hears and knows. Schultz's setting shares some affinities of classic female vocal duets in exploring the golden sound of female voices a third apart. It is a world away from the ''flower duet'' of Delibes's Lakme but shares some affinity with it as an orientalist representation of the female. The third song, Language of women, erupts into something of a tantrum. While the conception of the final two quiet numbers was imaginative, the instrumental accompaniment could tolerate more detailed working. The concert began with a performance by Jenny Duck-Chong and instrumentalists of Books I and II of George Crumb's Madrigals, which take lines of intense expressive power by Federico Garcia Lorca. These works are superb examples of Crumb's capacity to isolate distinctive sounds to colour and capture a moment, and are masterpieces of modernist miniature expressiveness. Joseph Schwantner's Sparrows used haiku by Kobayashi Issa in a series of opulent pictorial settings for soprano (Alison Morgan) and instrumental ensemble, conducted by David Stanhope. Schwantner's music undulates and flows, with the soprano often beginning each verse on high pitch before beginning a slowly soaring ascent. The instrumental backing highlights, enhances and airbrushes this with textures that, to my ear, were sometimes a little false and cosmetic. This was another beautifully and thoughtfully constructed Halcyon program. 2010From static to dynamic, and magic in betweenSeptember 13 2010 HALCYON WHERE THE HEART IS Sydney Morning Herald, September 15, 2010 This typically thoughtful program, Where the Heart Is, drew out themes of recent Australian vocal music through elegant symmetry. Each half began with works that built on static harmonies and turned away from Western music's complexity. Ross Edwards's Maninya pieces move from a slow rhapsodic improvisation around a seventh chord to a quick section with rhythms that add notes unpredictably, urging the other on like a collective sacred dance. In Maninya I, for voice and cello, the origin is non-Western but non-specific, creating a sense of personal ritual. Anne Boyd's Cycle of Love, for voice, flute, cello and piano, alludes to Korean styles and instruments, setting five ancient haiku-like texts by anonymous women poets. Mezzo soprano Jenny Duck-Chong maintained mesmeric concentration, even in a somewhat dry and unforgiving acoustic. The second works of each half turned from the spiritual to the temporal world's dissonance, fracturing and deceit. Elliott Gyger's Petit Testament uses one of James McAuley and Harold Stewart's ''Ern Malley'' hoax poems. One detects the authors' schadenfreude as they planted booby-trap metaphors, close enough to poetic language to resemble poetry but far enough away for laughter when the trap is sprung (although the texts have exerted more enduring fascination than either intended). Gyger's setting was delightfully stiff and contrived, relishing the polished artistic surface and letting it unravel. Mary Finsterer's Sentence for Dinner fragmented the text with precision. The final works were song cycles. Andrew Schultz's To the Evening Star is symmetrical and applies diverse styles to 19th-century English poetry, sometimes conspiring in the allurement of their picture painting (as in the outer poems by Yeats and Blake) and sometimes subverting it (the quick, spiky setting of Hopkins). The central poem by Wordsworth, full of self doubt, drew warmth and empathy from soprano Alison Morgan. Ruth Lee Martin's Wimmera Song Cycle, sung by Duck-Chong and Morgan, adopted an ambient style, with the outback images of Kevin Hart's poetry creating a sense of cushioning reverence. blues, myth, philosophy & the landOctober-November 2010 HALCYON, WHERE THE HEART IS Ross Edwards’ Maninya (1981), inspired by the natural environment, comprises hypnotic if rhythmically complex series of apparently meaningless syllables sung by Jenny Duck Chong to Geoffrey Gartner’s talkative cello in passages that evoke lullaby and reverie and closing with a cello jig. Elliott Gyger’s Petit Testament, like From the Hungry Waiting Country (2006 and soon to be released on CD) in the Extreme Nature program, responds to Australian poetry, here in the form of the last of the Ern Malley hoax poems. Once again Gyger provides Duck Chong and Alison Morgan the opportunity to “highlight one of our particular skills—the illusion of singing ‘as one’ and masquerading as one another” (program note). As Gyger writes, “My setting re-enacts James McAuley’s and Harold Stewart’s dazzling feat of ventriloquism (two real poets masquerading as one fictional poet) in employing two voices to project a single musical lie, slipping unpredictably between unison, heterophony and interior dialogue.” The sopranos dexterously managed the overlaps, sharply articulated modulations and shared sentences while the Stuart & Sons piano (played admirably by Sally Whitwell) provided a resonant other voice, alternately dramatic and ironic, lyrical or ‘going to pieces.’ Gyger aptly evokes both fraudulent excess and the odd beauty of the poem. One of two highlights of the concert was Andrew Schultz’s To the Evening Star (2009; Best Song Cycle, Paul Lowin Awards), a reflection, writes the composer, on the inner creative life, responding to poems by Yeats, Hopkins, Longfellow, WH Davis and Blake. Yeats dreams lyrically of rural escape while the busy piano suggests both the “bee-loud glade” and “the roadway…the pavements gray.” For Hopkins’ Pied Beauty, Schultz and singer, Alison Morgan, hit the syllables hard and rapidly, evoking excitement at the density of natural riches. Longfellow’s anxiety about a creative life only half fulfilled is rendered emotionally, a soaring complaint, the piano thundering in empathy, while Davies’ Money, O! contrastively celebrates being poor but happy in a vigorous folksy, music theatre idiom. Finally, Blake’s To the Evening Star is a gloriously sung prayer for divine protection framed by piano scoring that seems to embrace the whole of the world, the playing constantly pushing out to the bottom and top-most notes simultaneously until at rest. Anne Boyd’s Cycle of Love (1981) is in the form of three sung ancient Korean poems and two instrumental interludes (Gartner’s cello and Sally Walker’s flute in exquisite dialogue). For all the meditative Korean and Japanese influences, the compositions are lively, even dramatic and certainly heartfelt in their longing. The final work, folk singer and musicologist Ruth Lee Martin’s Wimmera Song Cycle (2010), a setting of Kevin Hart’s Wimmera Songs, surprised me with its transparent structure, its deceptively musical theatre character and ease (apt for the uncomplicated syntax of the poet’s finely crafted image-making). Sopranos, cellist, pianist and flautist combined in various permutations to evoke the spread and detail of the land, through moments of delicate observation, pain (“the other silence that fits your head inside a vice”) and the potential for transcendence—“Think like a cloud / Go where the clouds go.” Halcyon, Where the Heart Is…celebrating homegrown music, CarriageWorks, Sydney, Sept 13 RealTime issue #99 Oct-Nov 2010 pg. 49 © Keith Gallasch 2009keith gallasch: continuum sax & match percussion; halcyon Concerts, topology and halcyonOctober - November 2009HALCYON, EXTREME NATURE AS CHRIS REID WRITES IN HIS REVIEW OF THE SOUNDSTREAM NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL (P49), SOME MUSIC HAS TO BE SEEN AND NOT JUST HEARD. BRISBANE-BASED TOPOLOGY’S EAST COAST TOUR GAVE US A LIVE, WORKING BAND WITH A CASUALLY THEATRICAL AND JAZZY SPONTANEITY YOU MIGHT NOT BE EXPECTING FROM THEIR NEW CD, BIG DECISIONS, WHICH OFFERS OTHER PLEASURES. SYDNEY’S HALCYON DELIVERED A MORE FORMAL CONCERT WITH AN OPERATIC INTENSITY IN WORKS WITH BIG AMBITIONS AND VISIBLY COMPLEX INTERPLAY BETWEEN PERFORMERS. ... The Sydney duo, Halcyon (soprano Alison Morgan, mezzo-soprano Jenny Duck-Chong) gather composers, instrumentalists and other singers around them to create distinctive, inventive concert programs. Extreme Nature featured bold new works from expat composers recently returned to Australia, Elliott Gyger and Nicholas Vines. Gyger’s From the Hungry Waiting country (2006) draws on Australian poems (mostly of an older generation: Harwood, Stow, Riddell, Hart-Smith, Buckley, Hope) and Near Eastern religious texts in response to “a profoundly ethical dimension to the emerging ecological crises” (Gyger, program note). Morgan and Duck-Chong were joined by soprano Belinda Montgomery and mezzo Jo Burton to execute the demanding interweaving and layering of texts, surprising glissandi and humming, buzzing insectile vocal noise. Genevieve Lang’s harp entwined beautifully and at times dramatically (buzzing too and twanging) with the singing, making the instrumental interplay with the four superb voices the highlight of the work. It was fascinating to watch the exchanges between these artists, heightened by the various re-groupings of the singers, with the harpist a logical extension of the line-up rather than as sidelined accompanist. Save for the final text, AD Hope’s Australia (an odd choice, Gyger admits, but deployed to target political rather than intellectual poverty), making sense of the poems is hard work and best left until a recording is made available. Countering Hope’s bitterness, the work ends moving from an almost staccato rendering of lines that then flow into neat harmonies, with an almost Swingle Singers’ jazziness, and a final, musing lyricism. From the Hungry Waiting Country is a complex, consuming work, at once grim and beautiful. In their onstage intermission dialogue, Gyger and Vines discussed the relationship of their music to “large masses of text.” There was agreement that their approach is “not directly semantic...not every word will be understood, but the work will be ‘semantic’ from a different direction [as] a lattice of reference, starting with poetry that is already complex.” It was suggested that “words are musical regardless of meaning” and that “the poem is a kind of music.” Nicholas Vines writes that his Torrid Nature Scene (2008) “is at its core a squelchy, lusty romp” but one intended to counter the technologising of our lives and values. In the dialogue with Gyger, Vines said he thought “lush” was not a word typically associated with Australia, but that he wanted to create “a febrile density” in his work, and so he does. The text, a poem by Andrew Robbie, is already dense with ideas and images, and Vines adds nine instrumentalists to engage with Morgan and Duck-Chong. After the opening Wagnerian flourish we are introduced to a sonic world that is certainly lush, rich in operatic soaring, quackings, glides, post-orgasmic gasps, relished words chewed over, and ringing, starry bursts of voices and ensemble as one. In memorable, intense, sustained passages for one singer, the other counters with an undercurrent of noises evocative of nature and the body’s own musical otherworld. Torrid Nature Scene is almost overwhelmingly dense on a first hearing, but its strange beauties are many (its hyper-literary text best left impressionistic). Extreme Nature was an exhilarating if demanding concert, its cogency in no small part the contribution of conductor Matthew Coorey. ... Delicate bites, then a main course to satisfySeptember 29, 2009HALCYON The first part of Halcyon's latest concert, subtitled Willow Songs, was like a whistle-stop tour of the 20th century in haiku. The tour did not take in the obvious attractions: no wars or revolutions, artistic or otherwise. It did, however, offer the delicate whiff, like a tea-soaked madeleine, of the work of six composers from six decades in miniature. Roberto Gerhard's Sept Haiku (1922), for instance, had a tentative astringency from a composer avid to embrace the new. By contrast, the three songs from Anne Boyd's Cycle of Love, written in 1981, were sensual and assured, using the flute as a kind of vocal alter ego, a wise and wordless commentator. Russian-born Elena Firsova's Seven Haiku (1991) tapped into the troubadour tradition and the two songs from Ton de Leeuw's Haiku of 1963 took sounds and placed them in different spaces and silences, as if under a microscope. Julian Yu's Four Haiku (1992) demonstrated how you can create a complete song from just one note. It was fascinating, beautifully performed by the soprano Alison Morgan and the mezzo-soprano Jenny Duck-Chong, with their classy line-up of instrumentalists. But madeleines do not make a meal, so after Morgan and the pianist Stephanie McCallum's post-modern palate-cleanser, a neat rendition of Colin Matthews's Strugnell's Haiku, it was time for the main event. Willow Songs was commissioned by Halcyon, with financial support from Barbara Blackman. It was a good investment. As the composer Andrew Ford says, Anne Stevenson's Willow Song is a ballad waiting to be sung, and Ford finds a gentle lyricism to illuminate the words, enriched by extremes of timbre from piccolo and bass clarinet. This work is an intimate engagement with sensuality, from a woman's point of view, and Ford's music treads carefully, serving the words well without making overly grand gestures of his own. I particularly liked the tough, worldly-wise voices of Eros and the Cold Woman, spiked with percussive textures. Fools Gold was an excruciating mixture of fun and folly, and Epigraph hung in the air, pregnant with meaning. Poetry and religious texts woven in labyrinthine cross-referencesAugust 11, 2009CLASSICAL THE program cover had two gorgeously coloured snails, hinting at endangered musical species beyond the concert's environmental theme. If so, Halcyon's immaculately prepared and impressively detailed vocal performances, under the conductor Matthew Coorey, should contribute something towards sustainability. Elliott Gyger's cycle From the Hungry Waiting Country for harp (Genevieve Lang) and four voices interweaves seven texts by Australian poets, with eight religious texts, creating a beautifully complex labyrinth of cross references. Prompted by Sydney's 2004 dam crisis, it was a poetic and ethical reflection on the metaphorical meanings attached to water's abundance and absence. Gyger's music is carefully worked in a way that draws the listener in through its detail. The intersplicing of text and music was subtle and, as with reading a passage by Joyce, one had the impression that there were meanings to be mined on future hearings. In intimate lines by Randolph Stow, the textures were animated, complex and bubbling below the surface. Mark O'Connor's The Rainbow Serpent expanded massively on the word ''roar'' then writhed and struggled to shape its form. The final sequence, a setting of A.D. Hope's Australia, which metaphorically describes a cultural desert harbouring unexpected fertility, was the only text that was set in a way that allowed the words to be followed, starting with dry punctuated sounds before mutating into something rich. Nicholas Vines describes his Torrid Nature Scene for two sopranos (Alison Morgan and Jenny Duck-Chong) as a ''squelchy, lusty romp'', though part of its fascination lay in the way the rhythms, contrived words and artifice of style in Andrew Robbie's text kept moving away just as one was about to grasp it: think Lewis Carroll with a PhD in semiotics. Vines's music was full, extravagant and wild, as though it was an accomplice in undermining the listener's attempt to tame it. One sometimes had the impression one was being outwitted in conversation by two clever young men. Poetry unites vocals and instrumentalsOctober 20, 2008Verbrugghen Hall, October 17 COCKING a snoot at ABC Classic-FM-style canonicity, Halcyon proposed its own B-list as contenders for a new music A-team. Only time will tell. Meanwhile, the three works made a powerful statement on what their composers claim as common ground, a creative fluidity in dealing with boundaries between the vocal and the instrumental. In Gavin Bryars's The Adnan Songbook, this creative fluidity is also a sexual metaphor. His setting of eight poems by the US-Lebanese writer Etel Adnan addressed to her lover Simone Fattal bristles with beauty, literary and musical. In her clear upper register, the soprano Alison Morgan floated above a low-lying instrumental ensemble that elsewhere seemed laid by Bryars to trap singers with weaker middle registers. Upon Silence is George Benjamin's in memoriam to Michael Vyner, the artistic director of the London Sinfonietta, whose death in 1989 brought English music to the darkest hour of the AIDS crisis, as Stuart Challender's did here. Mining Yeats's Long-Legged Fly for text, and taking a distant backward glance at the exoticism of Ravel's Shhrazade, Benjamin portrays his multi-faceted subject - administrator (Caesar), artist (Michelangelo), and "femme-fatal" (Helen of Troy) - on the verge of silence. With the sepulchral strings making "no more sound than the mice make", the mezzo Jenny Duck-Chong gave a superbly human and musically accurate impersonation of creativity on the brink. Poetry stands behind everything of Nigel Butterley's, vocal or instrumental. But though he has a mastery of images, his music can seem diffident, withholding meaning until second or third hearing. Orphei Mysteria breaks constraint and communicates immediately. Forget Eurydice, poet Patricia Excell's Orpheus has his head torn off by Maenads either - take your pick - for forsaking Dionysus for Apollo, or for having sex with boys. The point is that whoever has custody of "the shell of harmony" pays. Duck-Chong, supported by Morgan and conductor Mark Shiell and his instrumentalists, more than earned her right finally to enact Orpheus's glowing apotheosis, everyone doing Butterley nothing short of proud. Halcyon - Celebrating 10 YearsSeptember 9, 2008Great Hall, SCEGGS, Darlinghurst, September 6, 2008 There was a wonderful sense, throughout this concert, of being part of an event that was more than just the sum of its songs. It might also have had something to do with the shared experience of braving a particularly miserable, blustery Sydney evening, swept along streets littered with the broken tangle of abandoned umbrellas, or the rich history infusing the sandstone and timber hall. The night featured works drawn from the ten years Halcyon have been making music, a showcase sampling of program highlights leading to the two focal pieces of George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children and Luciano Berio's Folk Songs. Kerry Andrews's luna-cy was an odd opening. Its gasping breaths, siren calls, honking geese and bellbird whistles were, at the very least, illustrative of the fact that vocalists Alison Morgan, Jenny Duck-Chong and Jane Sheldon weren't afraid to veer off the well-worn track. Next 'plum' and 'cherry' from fruit songs by Andrews took a folkloric turn, Janet Agostino's guitar playfully leading Duck-Chong's voice through. 'Promises Like Pie Crust' and 'Echo' from Claire Jordan's Memory were a stronger follow-up, the former rich and enunciative, though wavering, the latter more dramatic, weightier, weaving in with Sally Whitwell's piano. An extract from Damien Ricketson's Seven Relics maintained this tone and anchored the opening set. It was a challenging piece, with Julia Ryder's cello and Morgan's voice building up a fragile tension that drew you closer to the edge of your seat, an understated drama underlying the sombre mood. Sheldon's clear, bright voice was well suited to Katy Abbott's 'Night Thoughts' from It Is Just the Heart, soaring beautifully over the eerie, discordant string quartet scrapings. The delicate forest footsteps and intricate, hushed beauty of 'Miranda's Lament' from Kaija Saariaho's The Tempest Songbook drew another wonderful performance from Duck-Chong, before Morgan closed the opening half pleasingly with Edison Denisov's Archipel Des Songes, a setting of sensual poems by Jean Maheu, built with a weaving, dreamlike tenderness. The main frustration with the opening set was the 'snippet' aspect – a tasting plate of pieces allowed for a variety of flavours, but kept us from experiencing anything meaty enough to really get our teeth into. The breaks between pieces and stage rearrangements broke the spell and it was difficult to get as swept away in the music as the performers all had the ability to help us do. A couple of pieces also seemed a little under-rehearsed, but it might have been that by the time the performers had warmed into a piece, it was wrapping up. This is perhaps the nature of a showcase performance, yet it was mere moments into George Crumb's astonishing Ancient Voices of Children before such concerns were cast aside, replaced with the dramatically reverberant prepared piano and nonsensical vocal skittering. In this cycle of songs to texts by the Spanish poet and dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca, the haunting imagery of the poetry is captured in spirit through Crumb's unusual sense of tension and broken ideas, drawn back together in unexpected forms. Each instrument followed highly individual paths, the prepared piano sounding almost like a double bass at times, the harp rasping away and the clarinet mesmerising like a snake charmer. This could well be a terrifying piece for a singer, asking for a courageous leap into the passionate heart of an aching lament, but Alison Morgan seemed to approach it with relish. Bowing over and singing into the piano, we could see the giant score from which she was singing reflected in the underside of the piano lid. The urgent, troubled whispering was menacing, venomous at times, while the slowly building drums beat with a voice as ancient as that evoked by the piece's title. The measured, mournful tone gave way to a passionate Spanish flavour melding with a baroque drama, the weepy mandolin slides of Stephen Lalor gliding wonderfully over the bright percussion. The deeper into the piece we travelled, the more it opened out and created space for that rarest of beauties, the profound silence. These silences rendered the ensuing tumult all the more frightening, the clanging bells and smashed gong careering into the two lost voices passing through the piano. The torrential rain hammering down outside, and lashing the stained glass windows, was a fitting companion to the draining climax, a fabulous performance where all elements came together and seemed to wring out every drop of meaning this piece had to offer. After a performance like this, Luciano Berio's Folk Songs could only suffer in comparison. I'm not sure why the two were programmed in this order, but after Crumb's magical work, Berio's piece came across as a little too light and short on substance. Jenny Duck-Chong worked well with the material, and drew nicely upon her range, yet it was difficult to engage with. The work came to life once the Sicilian song arrived, followed by the cheeky Italian songs and the sad Sardinian lament. The final song was an Azerbaijani love song that finished the night on a jaunty, rousing upswing, bringing to a close a long, often rewarding evening that fittingly marked Halcyon's first 10 years in existence – hopefully merely the beginning of a long and rich existence. HALCYON Celebrating 10 YearsSeptember 9, 2008Great Hall, SCEGGS, Darlinghurst, September 6 ENSEMBLES come and go in the urban jungle of new music, but the vocal group Halcyon has proved itself a stayer. On Saturday night Halcyon's founders, Alison Morgan and Jenny Duck-Chong, demonstrated how with a fabulous 10th birthday concert. How to No.1: be adventurous. Mounting a performance of George Crumb's Ancient Voices Of Children - complete with mandolin, harp, percussion and a singer with her head in a grand piano - at your very first concert could be considered foolhardy. But they did it then, and they did it again on Saturday night, with the kind of playful flair and well-turned virtuosity which keeps experimentation fun and makes audiences want more. How to No.2: have good friends. While just two people remain at the heart of Halcyon, they have surrounded themselves with an amazing array of composers and performers over the past decade. The first half of the concert was a tantalising smorgasbord of voices, from the English composer Kerry Andrew's loopy Luna-cy to Edison Denisov's mysterious Archipel Des Songes, performed by fine players from every corner of Sydney's music scene. How to No. 3: be good. Obvious, but essential. And for this most important point Halcyon do not disappoint. Luciano Berio's Folk Songs, for example, may sound deceptively simple — after all, they're just folk songs, aren't they? — until you realise they were written for the legendary Cathy Berberian, accompanied by a highly artful orchestration. So when Duck-Chong and her classy band take up the challenge and make these songs their own, it is an impressive and hugely enjoyable achievement. Other standout performances: Jane Sheldon's scarily beautiful top note at the climax of Katy Abbott's Night Thoughts; Alison Morgan's exhilarating and fearless vocalising in an extract from Damien Ricketson's Seven Relics; Duck-Chong's fruity expression in Andrew's Cherry; and the ensemble's performance of Gacela Of The Dead Child, which nearly made me weep. Can it really be 10 years? The time has flown by. Happy birthday, Halcyon. The exotic and quixotic from a man with big ideas FOUR WINDS FESTIVALTuesday March 25, 20082008 Bermagui March 21-23 The artistic director of this year’s Four Winds Festival, Christopher Latham, is a man with ideas – and he is not afraid to use them. His second and final offering for the bienniel festival took as a template the ground-plan of the Villa Rotunda of the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. The contents of the rooms were inspired by the weekend’s serendipitous convergence of cultural festivals: Easter, Purim, Holi, Paramita Day and Mawlid an-Nabi all fell on this year’s autumn equinox. It was exotic and, at times, quixotic. Thankfully, in addition to big ideas, Latham has impeccable music tastes and a handy knack for bringing together some of Australia’s classiest musicians. So if at any point the riot of ideas became laboured, the beautiful sounds flooding across the earthly paradise of the rolling South Coast landscape made it on the whole easy to forgive. A quick pick of these sounds, in no particular order: a miraculously beautiful performance of Vivaldi’s Gloria, sung one voice to a part by the vocal group Halcyon; Ross Edward’s funky Mantras And Alleluyahs, featuring the South Coast choir Heartsong; Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on recorder, and a hit-and-miss Brandenburg concerto; a monsoon raga from Manjiri Kelkar, surfing a sea of umbrellas; Sephardic melodies from the heavenly voice of Mina Kanaridis; Sufi works from Omar Faruk Tekbilek; and claustrophobic tintinnabulations of gongs and prayer bowls from the combined forces of Synergy and TaikOz. One of the highlights was a repeat performance of Steve Reich’s massive Tehillim, featuring Halcyon, Synergy and the specially assembled Four Winds Philharmonia, all held together with energetic delicacy by Roland Peelman, followed by a world premiere of Liza Lim’s Weaver of Dreams, for solo recorder, played with astonishing virtuosity and charm by Genevieve Lacey. The other main focus – in case we needed more to think about – was the music of the guest of honour Peter Sculthorpe. His String Sonata No. 4, arranged for string orchestra and didgeridoo, played by William Barton, emerged almost inevitably from the backdrop of native bird song to open the program. Cello Dreaming, towards the end of Sunday, was an intense, heartfelt close. Perhaps most moving was Sculthorpe’s own reading of D.H. Lawrence’s Song Of A Man Who Has Come Through. Words and silence were, for a moment, king in this sea of music. The artistic directorship of the Four Winds Festival passes to the recorder player Lacey. She inherits a spectacular setting, a loyal and musically adventurous audience and a tough act to beat. Familiar stage feels the shock of the new - TEHILLIMAugust 7, 2007Reviewed by Harriet Cunningham, Sydney Morning Herald As the conductor Roland Peelman pointed out, the City Recital Hall rarely plays host to a concert consisting entirely of new music. Baroque, yes; classical, of course; but cutting-edge, experimental, out-there weirdness? No. So it was with some sense of triumph that the combined forces of Ensemble Offspring, Halcyon and Synergy Percussion took the stage for their opening work, No More than Liquid, composed this year by the Sydneysider Damien Ricketson. Ricketson has a reputation for intelligent and inventive music-making and this work was no exception. Ravel's Jeux d'eau was the first tag for a series of watery references, slipping in and out of the nicely layered gestures like a knowing wink. Although the work was not one of Ricketson's most consistently accomplished, the ensemble found their way through the shallows and depths with conviction. The two vocal works following were rare treats: a hopelessly impractical set of miniatures from Gyorgy Ligeti, and an extended love song from Claude Vivier. Sippal, Dobbal, Nadihegeduvel (With pipes, drums and fiddles) is a setting of poems by Sandor Weores, scored for voice, a miscellany of blown instruments and pretty much every percussive instrument you could think of. It was definitely worth the effort. Jenny Duck-Chong took on the acrobatics of the vocal part with a gleam in her eye and a glow in her voice, while the ensemble hit, blew and scraped with well-disciplined enthusiasm. Vivier's Bouchara was less immediately rewarding, the ecstasy of love getting lost in the agony of sustaining the long phrases. Steve Reich's Tehillim was top of the bill, and only a collaboration of this sort, between multiple new music groups, could have realised this elaborate and thrilling work. The four voices of Halcyon drove the work on with endless energy while Ensemble Offspring and Synergy Percussion kept up brilliantly. Central to the whole shebang was Peelman, who bobbed and weaved his way through the complex rhythmics like a 21st-century Fred Astaire. All three groups should be congratulated for an inspiring collaboration. This concert is repeated on Saturday at Riverside Theatres, Parramatta. Copyright © 2007. The Sydney Morning Herald. TEHILLIM with Synergy Percussion, Halcyon and Ensemble Offspring From water to Psalms10 August 07Reviewed by Steve Moffatt, Manly Daily THREE diverse and rather strange pieces made up the first half of this concert of contemporary music. Ensemble Offspring's artistic director Damien Ricketson's work No More Than Liquid looks at water and the part it has played in music, with references to Telemann, Ravel's piano piece Jeux d'eau and Sibelius's The Oceanides as well as more modern composers like Takemitsu. Scored for oboe, clarinet, horn, strings and percussion including a waterphone - a series of metal spikes filled with water which distorts the pitch when struck and shaken - this work received its first public airing and made an interesting opening. Avant-garde composer Gyorgy Ligeti's work is widely known, though many listeners may not know it as he was a favourite composer of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick and his pieces featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Eyes Wide Shut. Seven of his short songs, brilliantly sung by Halcyon's Jenny Duck Chong, followed. Based on poems by Hungarian poet Sandor Weores they range from the absurd Dancing Song in which there are no words but the direction that the voice is ``virtuoso, dangerous and capricious'' to the rather beautiful Bittersweet, with several mood changes in between. No less of a vocal challenge was the closing piece of the first half, French-Canadian student of Stockhausen Claude Vivier's Bouchara. Written in the composer's invented language the piece is a love song. Interestingly, Vivier was murdered in Paris in the 1980s, it's thought by a jealous gay lover. Not surprising then that this piece is not your conventional ``moon in June'' song but a work which demands much of the singer, in this case soprano Alison Morgan. This was a stunning performance, with Morgan having not only to make sense of a nonsensical text but also to use a number of vocal effects including moving her hand in front of her mouth like a child doing an American Indian war whoop. The other two members of Halcyon, soprano Belinda Montgomery and mezzo Jo Burton, joined the ensemble for the headline work of the night, Steve Reich's extraordinary, jubilant Tehillim, based on four of the Psalms sung in Hebrew and layered over a fast percussive beat and slow chords. One of the founders of minimalism - a term he rejected - Reich had an enormous influence on late 20th century music, some might say to its detriment. This work is from his post-minimalist phase though some of the trademark repetition and simple chord structure remains. But it is a mesmerising piece with four voices singing repeated phrases in a round above percussive effects, including handclapping and an insistent rhythm on a small drum. Marimbas and keyboards were used in some sections and with an ensemble of 20-plus musicians, many of them wired for sound, it was a brilliant achievement to set the stage up in just 20 minutes. All works were conducted with a combination of energy, humour and aplomb by Ronald Peelman. A challenging and immensely enjoyable night. Some great singing and an innovative programSeptember 2007David Gyger, Opera-Opera An astonishingly large and enthusiastic audience turned up at Angel Place on Saturday, August 4, for a rewarding concert which took its name, Tehillim, from the title of Steve Reich’s work which occupied its entire second half. I’m not sure whether Reich’s iconic stature as a voice of the cutting edge of our musical times was the prime drawcard, or the colossal combination of the three performing ensembles involved – the vocal group Halcyon, the instrumental Ensemble Offspring and Synergy Percussion – or the consistently stimulating presence of conductor Roland Peelman who finetuned two of the four pieces; but the ambience of the event was exciting and its overall rewards most satisfying. In his introductory remarks, Peelman said the blockbuster interest of this concert might well be considered to lie in its second half, devoted exclusively to Tehillim, but there was plenty of merit in the three pieces which made up the first half. First came the world premiere of Damien Ricketson’s No More Than Liquid, an intriguing instrumental piece focussing on the less abrasive precincts of percussion capability as well as the tootling instrumental segments of Ensemble Offspring. Then came the Australian premiere of György Ligeti’s Sippál, Dobbál, Nádihegedüvel for mezzo soprano and percussion, a beguiling piece whose vocal element was admirably realised by Jenny Duck-Chong. And finally, in the first half, French Canadian Claude Vivier’s Bouchara for soprano Alison Morgan and ensemble, in which a nonsense language invented by the composer is used to extol the exstasies of love which cannot be boiled down to everyday language. With this trio of preliminary treasures under our belt, the second half of the concert was perhaps rather less overwhelming than it would have otherwise been, though Reich’s music was impressively negotiated by the entire ensemble of voices and instruments. The cumulative effect of this concert was decidedly positive, though perhaps enough light to peruse the printed program as the evening unfolded – between the items of the first half, we were plunged into near-total darkness while the stage was reset – would not have gone astray. STERLING WORK FROM HALCYONJune 2006By John Carmody, Opera-Opera The last concert in Matthew Hindson’s Aurora Festival – “living music” in Western Sydney – curiously put me in mind of a traditional wedding. Yes, it was in a church (7 May), but the real reason was its alluring blend of old and new. The old was the venue, the former Anglican church of St Bartholomew in Prospect. Though this fine Georgian building is currently sandwiched between the Great Western Highway and the Blue Mountains Motorway, it would have been marvellous in its great days: it is sited on a substantial hill with a striking outlook – I now know the origin of the name of the suburb! – and surrounded by an extensive cemetery where the explorer William Lawson is buried, the man who, in 1838, called for the tenders for the construction of the church. The new was a panoply of music for female vocal quartet, here the admired and admirable Halcyon Ensemble (comprising Alison Morgan and Belinda Montgomery (sopranos) with Jenny Duck-Chong and Jo Burton (mezzo-sopranos)) supported by the harpist Genevieve Lang and (briefly) percussionist Claire Edwardes. They also brought something old: an abiding concern, superbly realised, for peerless standards of performance; it was superbly secure singing. Their program was, naturally, of varied interest and musical value but some – notably Elliott Gyger’s From the hungry waiting country, which was receiving its world premiere performance – was, I believe, of enduring worth. As a singer himself (a founder-member of the apparently defunct Sydney Contemporary Singers, he continues to perform actively in Boston where he is a member of the staff of the Faculty of Music at Harvard University) he understands the human voice deeply. Furthermore, he has a fine sense for words. For years, his Christmas cards have featured a brief vocal piece, of 10 bars or so, for diverse forces, their texts in an astonishing array of languages. This major new work is a serious reflection on the importance of water (or the lack of it) for Australia and in it Gyger daringly counterpoints contemporary Australian poets – Randolph Stow, Vincent Buckley, A.D. Hope amongst them – against ancient texts in Coptic, Latin, Syriac and more. It is apiece of great intellectual as well as musical boldness, lasting about 35 minutes. The texture is complex, the writing virtuosic, the effect deeply engrossing and affecting. Perhaps it is 5-10 minutes too long but its relish for sound, its disposition to respond colouristically to the text never falters – when for instance, Stow writes “seven colours flashed”, that is precisely what the music does; when the text is sere (“the red earth arches away to gibber and dune”) the music is elegiac and chantlike. The concluding quartet (with the harp as much as gentle percussion instrument as a plucked one) mixes humming, dry staccato detachment and soft lyricism in an extraordinary fashion. This music demands further hearing; it should receive performances in abundance. We are in debt to Halcyon for introducing it to us. By comparison, Three Songs of Sleep by Stuart Greenbaum (a featured composer in this festival), seemed merely competent but conventional. He mixed solos with “ripieno” but did not leave me hoping for a further hearing. Dan Walker’s tripartite King Ludwig’s Swans was a different matter. This young man’s work is new to me but he shows a flair for achieving interesting vocal textures. At times, the scores was deliberate and hieratic, at others it displayed an adroit overlap of the singers’ lines with some mildly astringent harmonies (yet at the words, “blue lake walk” Walker could bring Stanford to mind); elsewhere his music had a telling richness for such a small cohort of performers. Kerry Andrew’s lunacy was virtually that. It is an almost insane concatenation of every possible way for the larynx to produce sound (sometimes just noise), yet this Londoner did it with such aplomb that one could take it utterly seriously or as a wild joke with equal warrant. Few other performers could bring it off with such dazzling skill. Graham Hair’s O Venezia (in four sections) seemed, at the time, to be written with assurance but, as can happen, it left no serious impression. It is the work of a sophisticated musician but somehow lacks the human element to draw one byond noting the skill to responding to the art. Too much learning is not necessarily advantageous for a composer. So, unexpectedly, Steve Reich’s Know what is above you (for vocal quartet and two restrained percussionists) seemed real and direct by comparison. It had frequently had his stylistic fingerprints, of course (notably in the percussion), but the way in which he sustained the voices against that “bass” was refreshingly “unReichian”. What has become almost old wisdom in Sydney was the way this concert (as David Miller’s Grevillea Ensemble often does, too, especially with their recent performance of Vaughan Williams’ splendid Ten Blake Songs for voice and oboe) was a potent reminder that it is principally such devoted, intelligent and insufficiently valued ensembles which continue to make the authentic contributions to our major city’s musical life. STAR CLUSTERSReviewed by Peter McCallum IT LOOKED like a marriage made in heaven, though it was made in Melbourne. Sydney's sophisticated contemporary vocal duo Halcyon flew south this winter to team up with the Flinders Quartet, whose players bring such care and unanimity of musical thought to Australian chamber music. The result was performances of sensitive concentration and rewarding attention to tone and detail. We should be sending young people like this to the world's festivals to demonstrate the breadth and depth of our culture, but the reality is that artists with this kind of dedication are often left to make things happen more or less by chance, sustaining their art on what must often seem like arid soil. That is probably not the kind of isolation Peter Sculthorpe had in mind in 1961 when he wrote the work that was to become an Australian contemporary music classic, Irkanda IV (irkand is an Aboriginal word meaning a remote and lonely place), though metaphors have a way of taking on unintended meanings. The Flinders Quartet began with the arrangement Sculthorpe made for the Kronos Quartet, playing with beautiful balance and intonation, and capturing the work's subtle colour changes. Three Poems in French, by the Korean-American composer Earl Kim, evoked the meter-less song style of Debussy over chords of subdued richness, and Jenny Duck-Chong made the lines glow with regret, as though to show that regret is warmer than despair. The song cycle It is Just the Heart, by the Melbourne composer Katy Abbott, revealed an original voice, setting texts that capture a child's perspective in a museum and, metaphorically, humanness in an imposing universe. In handing beautifully pitched and tonally matched single notes to one another, soprano Alison Morgan and the Flinders Quartet highlighted precisely the kind of musicianship which lifted these performances from the ordinary. Gillian Whitehead's Bright Forms Return (sung by Duck-Chong) disturbed the calm poetic eloquence of Kathleen Raine with extended instrumental interludes while Somei Satoh's Homa (with Alison Morgan) sought the kind of stasis which stretches a single moment into eternity. May these performers share many such moments. A Wide Ranging and Rewarding Evening with Tone BirdsReviewed by David Gyger, Opera-Opera, Dec 2005 A vocal-intensive concert intriguingly entitled Tone Birds drew a satisfyingly sizeable audience to the Music Workshop at the Sydney Conservatorium on Saturday, October 29. Unlike the all-Beethoven concert at the Opera House the night before, there was nothing standard about its repertory: four of its components were composed in the 20th century and the other in the 21st, and at least two of them emanated from the pens of composers who as yet don't even flirt with household name stature. One, Rosalind Page's Hrafnsöngfar, receiving its world premiere performance although it was composed as long ago as 2001, was sung in Icelandic - an exotic tongue which hardly trips off the tongue of very many Australians even in these cosmopolitan times. Impressively and commendably, both the original Icelandic and an English translation of its text were included in the night's program, but a modicum of the brownie points which would otherwise have been liberally racked up by that ploy were lost because the two texts were presented head to toe rather than side by side, requiring considerable back-and-forthing if one was to keep abreast of the sense of the performance. Though it was innovative, as well as economical, to produce a tall and skinny program by folding A4 sheets vertically rather than horizontally, the frustration was infuriating. Purely from a musical point of view, this was an evening in absolute nirvana, with the audience treated to a positive feast of vocal artistry from the core members of Halcyon, soprano Alison Morgan and mezzo Jenny Duck-Chong, solo and in duet, backed by a deliciously varied ensemble of 10 instrumentalists under the baton mostly of Mark Shiell. The concert opened with its most venerable work, Manuel de Falla's Psyche of 1924, and progressed more or less in chronological order. Duck-Chong's delivery of Falla's low-key musings, backed by five instrumentalists under Shiell's baton, was admirably thoughtful, getting the concert off to an engrossing start. In Oliver Messiaen's Poèmes pour Mi Book 1 of 1939, Morgan was partnered by pianist Clemens Leske in four songs with wildly varying moods and texts. Entitled in turn Thanksgiving, Landscape, The House and Terror, they offer challenging scope for a performer to display dramatic skill as well as vocal beauty, and Morgan underscored their nuances and negotiated their difficulties, which were once considered formidable for performers and listeners alike, impressively. Duck-Chong, backed by seven instrumentalists, concluded the first half with Michael Berkeley's Winter Fragments of 1996, a seven-part song cycle whose title has a double meaning which, in the words of the composer, "came naturally, partly because I was at that time considering an opera project based on Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, partly because the music was largely written in a frozen Welsh landscape, and partly because I wanted to write short, spare pieces that combine to create an overall aspect of winter". This interesting, and rewarding, song cycle mirrors its icy provenance splendidly in texts drawn from the works of Shakespeare, James Thomson, Shelley, Longfellow, and Australian David Malouf as well as the composer himself, and provided a varied and rewarding listen in the hands of Duck-Chong and her colleagues. Apart from its linguistic frustrations, Page's Hrafnsöngfar (Ravensongs), the centrepiece of the evening, responded sensitively to the poems of Hrafn Andrés Harðarson, conjuring up Iceland's often savage and austere landscape, born from undersea fires and was impeccably sung and played by Morgan and her colleagues. This rewarding concert concluded with Kaija Saariaho's Grammaire des Rêves of 1988, where both singers were heard in a complex fabric of interweaving voices and instruments. Its text, made up of fragments only, is a collage drawn from the poetry of Paul Eluard; the cumulative effect was a kind of surreal unity effectively evoking the Grammar of Dreams of its title and putting the cap on a highly rewarding evening. Review of Tone BirdsNovember 2, 2005Reviewed by David Vance Halcyon's Tone Birds program of contemporary vocal chamber music - modern if you begin in 1924 with de Falla's languorous Psyché - was devoted to songs whose texts were concerned with landscapes, geographical and psychological. For the inner eye of the imagination, there was much to admire; equally so for the ear, for the quality of the music was finely matched to the poetry. Graced by excellent performances, this program offered an alluring revelation of infrequently heard and, in some cases, new repertoire. If the physical landscapes evoked were those of the northern hemisphere, the emotional landscapes were universal and charted the ups and downs of human experience, from the awful consciousness of the awakening Psyché, through Messiaen's metaphysical love songs to his future wife in Poèmes pour Mi, to a stream-of-unconsciousness collage constructed from Paul Eluard poems as the Grammaire des Rêves by Kaija Saariaho. It may have been Michael Berkeley's chilly Winter Fragments or possibly Rosalind Page's captivating setting of Icelandic texts in Hrafnsöngvar (Ravensongs) that prompted me to recall Wallace Stevens's poem The Snow Man, which begins "One must have a mind of winter". Both composers seem to have that sort of intellect, creating evocative, sometimes treacherous vocal lines to chisel their winter journeys, accompanied by or cloaked in instrumental textures of icy beauty. Particularly appealing was Page's Ravensongs. Convincing musical ideas extended this cycle of lyric poems into an impressive and continuous whole. Alison Morgan's soprano added clarity and brilliance to complement the dazzling colours of piano (Clemens Leske), celeste (Sally Whitwell) and harp (Marshall McGuire). Beneath this surface glitter, however, sang a more profound voice, given to the cello (Julia Ryder), whose lamenting cries and soulful interludes gave no hint of arctic chill but rather of smouldering loss and regret. Mark Shiell, sensitive to balance and subtlety of colour, directed an ensemble comprising some of Sydney's best musicians in which Morgan and mezzo Jenny Duck-Chong were the ultimate tone birds, soaring with ease and confidence across remarkable territories. Halcyon days and a vintage performanceJune 2004Reviewed by Peter McCallum New music in a new hall. The sound in the Trackdown Scoring Stage is clear, close and revealing, leaving nothing much to hide behind, although in the case of vocal duo Halcyon (soprano, Alison Morgan, mezzo, Jenny Duck-Chong) nothing much needed hiding. The program was built of nicely thought-out brackets. In the first you might call it the flying insect bracket the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho's Du gick, flog (Morgan with pianist Sally Whitwell) was all sensuous slides and bips. New Zealander Rachel Clement's Fracture started like a mosquito you suddenly become aware of in the night, mutating and flicking in response to the text, while Sally Beamish's Buzz sidled and slipped like a bee on heat. In the next bracket let's call it the surreal love bracket Edison Denisov's Archipelago of Dreams was eerily chromatic. More appealing to me in their simplicity were two songs by Libby Larsen, motivically tight, with apt match of music and text. A fragmented-phonemes bracket after interval was led off by David Bedford's Come in here child, where a first-degree modernist treatment worked in tension with Kenneth Patchen's text. Fung Lam's Amitabha was a still pentatonic meditation, like a morning breeze over quiet water. Ross Harris's Inside the Rainbow Air was solitary and ruminative, while John Peterson's The Return was soaring, rhapsodic and flowing, surging to points of arrival to an expansive narrative text by Michele Morgan. More vintage Halcyon. Review of Sirens, MelbourneJoel Crotty, The Age, Sept 2004 “Sydney-based Halcyon is a quartet of women singers featuring sopranos Alison Morgan, Belinda Montgomery, Jenny Duck-Chong and mezzo-sopranos Jo Burton. The ensemble champions new music, particularly from Australian composers. For their Federation Hall recital the group selected pieces from Australia (Graham Hair, Dan Walker and Ruth Lee Martin), Finland (Kaija Saariaho and Kahlevi Aho) and England (Kerry Andrew). The impressive numbers were Hair’s O Venezia, part one, Walker’s King Lugwig’s Swams and Andrew’s luna-cy. Occasionally accompanied by harpist Genevieve Lang, the vocal ensemble expertly handled its diverse requirements.” Review of SirensReviewer Clive O'Connell September 26, 2005 Sydney's the Halcyon ensemble is a female vocal quartet specialising in the new and the arcane. The group's two sopranos and two mezzos collaborated with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra's principal keyboard player, Josephine Allan, a local string quartet led by Miwako Abe, and the VCA's head of percussion, Peter Neville in a program featuring three motets by British composer Michael Finnissy, one of Ross Edwards' Maninyas , a soporific piece by New Zealander Ross Harris, a short work by Japanese composer Somei Satoh, and the world premiere of Five Senses by Australian composer Graham Hair. We have nothing comparable to Halcyon in Melbourne and the group's singing proved remarkable for its urgent drive, self-motivation (no conductor) and sense of one unit emerging from four distinct vocal colours. The Finnissy motets for solo voice and one string line proved very little - ornate chants over an instrumental drone for much of their length. The Harris work, titled Sleep, O Beloved , induced you to follow directions because of its hieratic, block-like choral movement reinforced by Neville's gentle doubling vibraphone. Pick of the program was the Hair work, a setting of poems by Malouf, McAuley and the famous Judith Wright lyric that gave the work its title. Here the four voices were put to brilliant use, notably in the colourful word-painting of Malouf's Harmonice Mundi, and then a series of evocative solos for soprano Alison Morgan in To the Holy Spirit by Tasmania's noted Catholic poet. But for an ideal illustration of Hair's insight into setting texts, the Wright poem proved the most engaging and gripping. The voices moved together and apart with masterly variety, the text given its due and remaining clear even in verbally complex passages, the accompanying string quartet shimmering with excitement and providing a vivid commentary on the verbal content, separate but equal with the Halcyon voices and having the last say in a postlude of unabashed euphony and humanity: a most moving work, that we could easily have heard again. Review of Floof!Sydney Conservatorium Reviewed by Peter McCallum July 5, 2005 You could say it was a concert of uneasy relationships between the vulnerable human voice and the more mechanised certainty of instrumental sound. Michael Finnissy's Springtime wove fragments of intermingling melody on flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano. Each proceeded independently and the first half proceeded like five love songs, each undisturbed by the other, followed by a second part of more focused and assertive energy. Nigel Butterley's Carmina: Four Latin Poems of Spring brought instruments and sung words into a more formal elegiac relationship, wiath the soprano Jenny Duck-Chong singing in Latin, and the instruments gesturing supportively, as though of like mind. Its final song, By the River, breathed the sounds of sultry warmth and halcyon days. Esa-Pekka Salonen's Floof: Songs of a Homeostatic Homer is built from words rather like the junk email many of us receive with text drawn from God knows where to evade the radars of spam filters. Starting with monosyllabic groans from the soprano Alison Morgan against heavily amplified instruments, the voice part progressed like one intimidated to random nonsense like "I see the eigenvalue in thine eye" against assertive wildness in the instrumental parts which always threatened to overwhelm it. In Simone East's The Voice of the Shuttle, the voice in fact did end up symbolically defeated in the last piece, Cage, with the singer, increasingly hesitant and fragmented, enclosed within a circle of firm, domineering instrumental parts. The work explored the relationship of sound and space with each of its four movements involving a different player layout, producing textures evocative of a broad spatial canvas. In the last work the voice (Alison Morgan), singing in an invented language, was reborn in a pulsating, quivering iridescent texture of slow-moving intensity like a long hymn of love from a distant world. Duck-Chong and Morgan sang throughout as intelligent and able servants of the new. Halcyon and Ensemble Offspring, conducted here by Roland Peelman, are responsible for some of the most innovative and adventurous programs currently heard in Sydney and this concert was a cogent show- case of some of the most original musical thought of our age. Earth Jewels, HalcyonBy Peter McCallum September 9, 2003 The program notes said the pieces had been brought together to tell of our earthly existence. In the first half this provoked, at times, sombre and despondent music, but the second half cheered up, with dance-like rhythms which were earthy as well as earthly. Halcyon for voice and guitar (Jenny Duck-Chong, Janet Agostino) by Queensland-based composer Christine McCombe, was named not after this ensemble but after a line by Christina Rossetti: "My heart is like a rainbow shell that paddles in a halcyon sea." The first song, with a haunting modal melody over a serenade-style accompaniment, was particularly effective. Sun, Moon and Stars, by 20th-century English composer Elizabeth Maconchy (and sung by Alison Morgan with Sally Whitwell playing the beautiful light-wooded Stuart piano loaned for the occasion), set poetry by Thomas Traherne in lines which were often angular and sometimes heavily laden with deliberation - as though a little bit too carefully worked out. The Hermit of Green Light, by Ross Edwards, uses texts by the brilliant Sydney poet Michael Dransfield, who tragically self-destructed in 1973, aged 24. Edwards's accompaniments, in contrast to Maconchy's, were gently stirring in the first song, flowing in the second, unfolding and exploratory in the third and still in the last. In this work, and in Maninya V in the second half, also by Edwards, Duck-Chong sang with a lower register, dark and firm, while the top range glowed with palpability and presence, ringing brightly in the resonant room of wood and gloss-painted brick. After interval an offering of Whitman Settings by English composer/conductor Oliver Knussen brought the first sense of swirling rhapsody to the evening, reaching fantastically to the clouds and plunging to the depths in sweeps of imagery and movement, as though the voice part were poised against the swirling gusts of the piano like an eagle on some great air current which was about to carry it long distances. Sally Whitwell's pianism here was coloured, vivid and bold. Wit broke through in Kerry Andrew's Fruit Songs, which were playful, punning and admirably concise - not unlike a musical equivalent of the visual puns of the poetry of e.e. cummings. Finally, Somei Satoh's The Heavenly Spheres Are Illuminated by Lights took leave of earthly existence, with Alison Morgan's radiant high soprano shining in the heavens against deeply visceral fifths on the marimba and piano. Raising SparksBy Peter McCallum SMH Nov 10 2003 There was the grizzled old man of modernism, rebarbative and truculent, the deft but passionately spiritual young Scottish stylist, and two young Australians of modern and postmodern persuasion, all coming together to make one of the most interesting new music programs of the year. Halcyon consists basically of two singers, Alison Morgan and Jenny Duck-Chong, and its artistic mission is to present new and neglected chamber music involving the voice for which purpose they were joined here by the conductor, Matthew Wood, and diverse instrumentalists. Vocally it was uniformly excellent; instrumentally a little more patchy. In Maiden Aunts, by Australian composer Jane Stanley to a poem by David Malouf, the two sopranos sang much of the text to a common rhythm, primly staying together against more untamed instrumental writing, except for the odd escape into melismatic indulgence. The vocal writing itself was angular and stiff, sometimes effectively, at other places a little inflexibly. The Scottish composer James MacMillan’s impressive song cycle, Raising Sparks, adopted a more striking, incantatory and ritualistic style, grabbing attention with an arresting fluency of style and gesture, alternating serene, chant-like song fragments with an wild, shrieking refrain apparently representing the explosive moment of creation. Duck-Chong was vivid, dramatic and powerful here, holding together its dark narrative with inner intensity and urgency. Paul Stanhope’s Shadow Dancing for clarinet, viola and piano revolved ambiently around a single motive. The first movement inflected it with disjunctions and distortions, the second with more serene calm, while the finale had the character of human/divine dance sometimes found in the music of Ross Edwards. The most impressive work was Harrison Birtwistle’s Nine Settings of Celan. Celan is a post-holocaust poet, painstakingly trying to reconstruct poetic utterance after barbarism and the settings used the dark, miasmic yet glowing colours of low clarinets and strings. Morgan brilliantly maintained a subdued, haunting expressiveness in the difficult vocal part, although the instrumental intonation, balance and tonal control was not precise enough to capture the craggy beauty of the instrumental textures. There was an impression here of a slight lack of differentiation in the characterization of each song. Another intelligent program from Halcyon. Cosmic views: new music in SydneyBy Keith Gallasch 2003 Among new music events in recent months the one that lit me up was Raising Sparks from sopranos Alison Morgan and Jenny Duck-Chong who, as Halcyon, gather skilled musicians around them to present rare contemporary compositions and commissions. The standout in this truly daunting program was Harrison Birtwistle’s 9 Settings of Celan (1996) from his Pulse Shadows series. One of the enduring great late modernists, there is a monumentality about this British composer’s work, a sense of vast movements of nature and thought even when writing for small forces, here sublimely integrated soprano, 2 clarinets, cello, double bass and the requisite pulsing viola (Nicole Forsyth). Sensibly, Halycon reproduced translations of the Celan text in the program allowing for reflection on the poet’s brooding imagery. Morgan, in great voice, enunciated with clarity and in the challenging Todtnauberg, displayed eerie ease in the rapid alternations between the octaves of text spoken and sung. In an hermetic reverie on the divinity scattered throughout creation, the Scots composer James Macmillan’s polystylistic Raising Sparks (to a poem by Michael Symmons Roberts) blends and juxtaposes chant, folk tune, flares and bursts of hurried sound, operatic passion and passages of simple tonal beauty. It’s music that is accessible but that also manages to formally challenge. Equally, Macmillan allows his Catholic faith to open up to Jewish mysticism, musically realised in the opening and recurrent chanting of ‘zimzum.’ (“In the Hasidic tradition the moment of creation can be understood as a divine act of self limitation [zimzum], where God held back his own power and light to make space to create something other than himself”; program note.) By comparison, Australian composer Jane Stanley’s Aunts (2003) to a poem by David Malouf seemed modest fare, rather too literal at times in its enactment of the text, but nonetheless a fine vehicle for the entwining voices of soprano Morgan and mezzo Duck-Chong who seem to become the aunts while at the same time observing them at a distance both ironic and sympathetic. Also on the program, Paul Stanhope’s Shadow Dancing (2001) has a Ravelian summery ease, clarinet jazziness and, in the second movement, an (almost excessive) eastern edge on the viola, all held together by an engaging and finally mellow dancerly propulsion. Raising Sparks was a big concert yielding striking resonances and contrasting visions between the Macmillan and the Birtwistle, from the low chant of ‘zimzum’ in the one as the light of creation shatters across the universe and, in the other, the final, hugely sustained last note on the word “light” following on from Beckettian angst glowing with hope, dimly (the same passage bluntly utters: “Art pap”). This was an exemplary concert—musically brave, thoughtful and meditative. Artists supreme in ivory-towering taskFred Blanks, Northern Herald, November 19, 2003 MUSIC came from the ivory tower and the domestic hearth last week. Some contemporary composers live in ivory towers, professing disdain for the populace below. Making their music attractive - even approachable or comprehensible - is never a primary consideration. The name of their game is not communication with a public but concentrating on a personal expression of their own inner feelings and emotional complexity. In this they resemble some modern poets. Their artistic credo is musical egocentricity, which makes them into intellectual hennits. This actually promotes their reputation among an international avant-garde clique. A prime representative is the leading English composer Harrison Birtwistle, born 1934 and thus approaching a certain venerability. His ivory tower residence is the penthouse. To listen to his music sympathetically requires a form of self-imposed mental discipline. Such was the case when the ensemble Halcyon, now one of the most courageously enterprising and high-standard vocal groups in Australia, performed Birtwistle's Nine Settings of Celan (1996), part of a larger work called Pulse Shadows, at its final 2003 concert in a well-attended Verbrugghen Hall at Sydney Conservatorium last week. The work is scored for soprano, two clarinets, viola, cello and double bass. It sets poems by Paul Celan, a Rumanian Jewish poet (1920-70), who lived through the Holocaust and bouts of depression to produce shattered, minimalist verse. The work lives in gloom and doom. It is slow, high in tessitura, and immensely difficult to sing. Alison Morgan did so brilliantly ¬one felt, conscientiously- there is no way of checking the correctness of each note. Indeed that was the character of the complete long recital, titled Raising Sparks after its main work. This was a cycle of six songs poems by Michael Roberts, born 1963 -by James MacMillan (born 1959) which merited the vocal perspicacity of mezzo-soprano Jenny Duck-Chong in sad, slow, atmospheric, tortuously melodic music inspired by Jewish Hasidic mysticism. The concert also included the premiere of Maiden Aunts (2003) by Jane Stanley (born 1976)-melodiously convoluted, instrumentally imaginative, with a touch of pointillism - and Paul Stanhope's Dancing Shadows (2001), a trio for clarinet, viola and piano which works inside the attractive modern mainstream. |
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