Chris Reid reviews Alvin Curran’s Adelaide performances as composer in residence with the Soundstream Collective over at RealTime.
Alvin Curran, Oh Man Oh Mankind Oh Yeah
All posts by matthewlorenzon
Concert guide: 30 October–5 November
A curated list of upcoming concerts. See also the Australian Music Centre concert calendar and the New Music Network concert series.
Wednesday 30 October. The Melbourne Art Song Collective perform Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel alongside the new cycle Sojourn by Dermot Tully. Melbourne Recital Centre, 6pm.
Thursday 31 October. The Australia Quartet celebrates Halloween 2013 with Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night in a new arrangement by Sydney-based composer, Barton Staggs, and a world premiere and performance by Elena Kats-Chernin of her Scherzino arranged for four hands.
James Rushford and Joe Talia perform at Long Play, Fitzroy, VIC, at 8pm with Yuko Kono.
Friday 1 November. David Lockeridge performs the new marimba concerto “Scenes from the Caucasus” Gerard Brophy at the Newcastle Conservatorium of Music, NSW, 2:30pm.
Synergy Percussion present their new program Bespoke for Air: New Thoughts in Sound for Radio at the Bon Marche Studio at the University of Sydney, 7:30pm. James Humberstone, Kate Moore, Julian Day and Evan Mannell have responded to the brief by Synergy, APRA and ABC Classic FM for pieces “that go to record fluently but look striking live.”
Saturday 2 November. Portland Upwelling Festival Artist in Residence, Vincent Giles, presents a multi-speaker sound installation on the Portland foreshore during the festival in response to the marine phenomenon called the Bonney Upwelling. The sound installation runs most of the day.
The Aether Instrumental Quintet première a new work by Gerard Brophy at Sandgate Town Hall, Brisbane, QLD, at 7:30pm.
Chronology Arts commissioned five composers (Leah Barclay, Hayden Woolf, Chris Williams, Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh and Tristan Coelh) to respond to the eighteenth-century Sanskrit poem Bodhasara by Narahari in a translation by Grahame and Jennifer Cover. Downstairs Theatre, Seymour Centre, NSW, 8pm. Repeat Saturday 2 November.
Or, you could hear saxophonist and composer Sandy Evans collaborate with tabla player Bobby Singh in The Sound Lounge of the Seymour Centre, NSW, at 8:30pm.
The Arcko Symphonic Ensemble perform Caerwen Martin’s new piece X-Ray Baby alongside works by Kate Neal, Annie Hsieh and Felipe d’Aguiar. Northcote Town Hall, 7:30pm.
Sunday 3 November. Students from ANAM perform works by J.S. Bach and Australian composers Hughes, Smith, Sitsky and Goldmann at Stones of the Yarra Valley, Coldstream, VIC (approximately one hour from Melbourne), 11am.
Heartswin, Donna Hewitt, Tony Osborne and Gail Priest perform at the last Pretty Gritty of the year—a celebration of contemporary vocal music at 107 Projects, Redfern, NSW.
Ros Bandt presents her new sound work based on twelve months working with a box-ironbark with the permission of Uncle Brien Nelson, Jaara Jaara Elder. Her radiophonic work will be spread through the bush and include sound recordings from underwater, in the air and the sounds of multi-cultural musicians. Meet at Fryerstown School, Fryerstown, VIC, at 3:30pm to walk to the installation site.
Monday 4 November. Adelaide’s The Firm presents Leigh Harrold performing minimalism-inflected solo piano works by Phillip Glass, Quentin Grant and Raymond Chapman-Smith. Elder Hall, SA, 9:30pm.
Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime project.
Concert guide: 23–29 October
A curated list of upcoming concerts. See also the Australian Music Centre concert calendar and the New Music Network concert series.
Wednesday 23 October. Halcyon perform songs by Andrew Schultz, Gordon Kerry, Paul Stanhope, Stephen Adams, Elliott Gyger, Ross Edwards, Gillian Whitehead and Andrew Ford to raise money for “Kingfisher,” a commission of 23 new art songs by Australian composers. Museum of Contemporary Art, The Rocks, NSW, 7pm.
Thursday 24 October. Ken Murray and The University Guitar Ensemble première Richard Charlton’s Other Dimensions at Melba Hall, Parkville, VIC, at 7:30pm.
Friday 25 October. German baritone Guillermo Anzorena, Australian pianist Michael Kieran Harvey and cellist Judith Hamann perform James Hullick’s post-apocalyptic chamber opera Bruchlandung at the Iwaki Auditorium, Southbank, VIC, 7:30pm.
Tura New Music’s Crossing Roper Bar Tour comes to Hearson’s Cove, Karratha, WA, at 7pm. Features Wagilak Songmen from Ngukurr, Arnhem Land; Stephen Pigram and members of the Australian Art Orchestra.
The Queensland Symphony Orchestra perform the first symphony by Mark Isaacs amongst works by Pärt and Britten. South Bank, Brisbane, QLD, 7pm.
Saturday 26 October. Ensemble Gombert perform Melbourne composer Vaughan McAlley’s 40-part motet Omnes angeli amongst others by Tallis and Carver at The Dome, 333 Collins st, Melbourne, VIC, 8pm.
Sunday 27 October. The Melbourne Composers League and the Grainger Wind Symphony present a concert of music for wind ensemble by composers from Melbourne, plus a guest work from Japan. Richmond Town Hall, VIC, 3pm.
The Zephyr Quartet perform concert works by film composers Rota, Korngold and Herrmann, as well as a new work by Adelaide-born composer Alies Sluiter. The Promethean, Adelaide, SA, 7pm.
Tura New Music’s Crossing Roper Bar Tour comes to Novotel Ningaloo Resort, Exmouth, WA at 7pm. Features Wagilak Songmen from Ngukurr, Arnhem Land; Stephen Pigram and members of the Australian Art Orchestra.
Tuesday 29 October: Tura New Music’s Crossing Roper Bar Tour arrives in Perth to the State Theatre Centre. Features Wagilak Songmen from Ngukurr, Arnhem Land; Stephen Pigram and members of the Australian Art Orchestra.
Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime joint project.
Speak Percussion, The Black of the Star
Speak Percussion
The Black of the Star
Deakin Edge
Melbourne Festival
16 October, 2013
More than any other twentieth-century work inspired by our scientific understanding of the natural world, Gérard Grisey’s Le Noir de l’étoile [The Black of the Star] continues to capture our imaginations. Perhaps this is because Grisey made sure to embed the mythology of the work’s scientific conceit in the piece itself. Once captivated, the audience are auditory pioneers at the unstable intersection of technology and science.
Le Noir de l’étoile begins with a ponderous voice reciting the words of Jean-Pierre Luminet, an astrophysicist and poet. The voice describes the remarkable discovery of pulsars, the “fantastic compact residue created by the supernova explosions that long ago disintegrated the massive stars.” Who could not wonder at these super-dense masses of neutrons only thirty kilometres in diameter but with the mass of the sun? As the voice explains with fairy-tale cadence, “A thimble of the material from one of these stars would weigh one hundred billion tonnes on Earth.” Unlike their larger cousins the black holes, pulsars are brought down—and perhaps this is their appeal—to human dimensions by the fact that they revolve with the relatively musical frequency of between hundreds of times a second and once every ten seconds. Emitting two beams of light they are, as Luminet puts it, “Like great lighthouses in the heavens, … cosmic clocks marking out their seconds.”
Spaced around the steel and glass mezzanine of Deakin Edge, Speak Percussion were suspended in front of the night sky behind six gleaming percussion batteries. After Luminet’s introduction lulls the audience into expectant wonder, Ughetti begins a gentle pulse on a floor tom. This pulse is eventually taken up at different tempi in other batteries, creating a captivating constellation of musical pulsars. An interjection on wood-blocks also echoes around the room like the light and radio waves that take thousands of years to traverse the galaxy. At other times a roaring snare roll passes between the percussionists and a loud, lone tom strike gives momentary focus to the bewildering sound-scape. The introduction helps give rise to these astronomical metaphors, even though, as Speak Percussion’s Artistic Director Eugene Ughetti explains, the first half was originally composed as Tempus ex machina, a work concerned not with pulsars but with time and space more generally.
The second half of the performance features two pulsar signals, one of which has an Australian provenance. The first is from the Vela pulsar, discovered by scientists at the University of Sydney in 1968, which spins at a rate of 11 times per second. This pulsar is only observable in the Southern Hemisphere and for Speak Percussion’s performance the CSIRO provided a new recording of the pulsar by George Hobbs. Ughetti claims (and I could only get away with this in a journalistic context) that the original recording used by Grisey was made by pulsar expert Dick Manchester, who worked at the Parkes observatory in the late 1960s. The signal sounds like a repeated, clipping sample of static, not unlike something one would hear in a Drum and Bass track.
The second pulsar provides a low, “whumping” sound at a rate of 1.4 rotations per second. For the work’s première in 1991, the signal from this pulsar was broadcast live into the auditorium from the Nançay radio astronomy station in Sologne. Unfortunately, a live broadcast of the Vela pulsar was unavailable for the Deakin Edge performance as the pulsar is not visible at this time of year. At Deakin Edge both signals were diffused by the team of Lawrence Harvey from RMIT’s SIAL Sound Studio.
When the initial metrical spatialisation gives way to the recordings of pulsars, the players are given more elaborate rhythmic phrases. It is as though, after imitating the pulsars (and theatrically conjuring them into the room), the ensemble begins to play along with them. The individuality of the performers comes out, with Ughetti’s dynamic sensitivity and Schack-Arnott’s improvisatory fluidity. But the point of these two sections may not be so much a contrast between machinic imitation and human inventiveness as a contrast between technology and science. While the technology of radio telescopes enabled us to hear the pulsars, scientific conjecture allowed us to interpret and understand them. As Luminet writes in the introduction:
In the electromagnetic tornado given out by a pulsar, the radio waves emitted represent only a whisper, and it is this that is picked up by the instruments. For an astronomer, it is like trying to understand the way a large machine in a factory works by listening merely to the few muffled noises that escape from it. The energy collected is infinitesimal… In 50 years of observations, all the energy gathered by all the radio telescopes in the world is less than that you need to turn a single page of your programme.
In a world where government-funded university science departments pursue narrow techno-industrial aims and objective research centers of global relevance have to be crowd-funded, Le Noir de l’étoile reminds us of the importance of big science—internationally-coordinated, large-scale investigation into the very large, the very small and the very distant—to our cultural and spiritual identity. By 2019 Western Australia and eight countries in southern Africa will be home to the Square Kilometre Array, the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope (actually an array of thousands of radio receptors spaced over thousands of kilometres). The SKA will be fifty times more sensitive and will be able to produce surveys of regions of the sky 10,000 times faster than any other existing instrument. We can barely predict what data we will gather, but when we do I hope our scientific and creative imaginations will up to the task of interpreting and understanding it.
Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime joint project.
Concert guide: 16–22 October
A curated list of upcoming concerts. See also the Australian Music Centre concert calendar and the New Music Network concert series.
Wednesday 16 October: Speak Percussion perform Grisey’s intergalactic percussion work Le Noir de l’étoile at Deakin Edge, VIC, at 8pm.
Thursday 17 October: The Australian String Quartet‘s National Composers’ Forum culminates in a public performance of six new works for string quartet by Jesse Budel (SA), Julian Day (NSW), William Jeffery (NSW), Natalie Nicolas (NSW), Sebastian Phlox (SA) and Timothy Shawcross (VIC). Elder Hall, SA, 8pm.
Friday 18 October: Jon Rose presents “Spin: The Canberra Pursuit,” a performance-installation of junk percussion powered by hacked bicycles. Yes, please. TAMS depot, Fyshwick, ACT, 6pm.
Pianist Ian Holtham presents four world premiere works by Barry Conyngham, Elliott Gyger, Mark Clement Pollard and Stuart Greenbaum that were written in response to Schubert’s iconic last piano Sonata. Melba Hall, VIC, 6:30pm.
WASO present WA composer James Ledger’s new violin concerto alongside works by Strauss, Ravel and Stravinsky. Perth Concert Hall, WA, 7:30pm. Repeat Saturday 19 October.
Saturday 19 October: Tura New Music’s Crossing Roper Bar tour comes to the Moonlight Bay Suites, Broome, WA, to present the collaboration between the Australian Art Orchestra and the Young Wägilak Group from Ngukurr in Arnhem Land. 7pm.
ARCKO Symphonic Ensemble revisit two works from previous years (Brendan Colbert’s ….floating in the void… and Roger Smalley’s Strung Out) along with Barry Conyngham’s Sky and the premiere of a new work for string orchestra by Melbourne composer Lisa Illean. Fitzroy Town Hall, VIC, 7:30pm. Repeat Sunday 20 October, 3pm.
Sunday 20 October: How could you pass up the Melbourne Bassoon Quartet with a blurb like this?: “My life-long companion, the Heckel bassoon, is worth a fortune nowadays. I can’t just let it rot in its box, so I have started playing again, practice every day, reformed the Melbourne Bassoon Quartet (again), in which I play the fourth bassoon part – yes, I’m 84 and I can manage it.
There is no money in it for any of the bassoonists, it’s all just for the love of playing chamber music. The program is all my own music: The Adventures of Sebastian the Fox always brings the house down, and there are homages to Victor Bruns and William Waterhouse, two old bassoonist friends of mine, both much more famous than me, dead now, but fondly remembered by me. And we play Rush for an encore. I hope we get that far.” (George Dreyfus)
Monday 21 October: Andrew Ford’s “Once upon a time there were two brothers … ” for solo flute/narrator and Ford’s string quartet Cradle Song performed by the Shanghai string quartet. Also, Penderecki and Haydn.
Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime joint project.
Totally Huge New Music Festival Round-up
Photo by Brad Serls
If you missed the Totally Huge New Music Festival live blog, the round-up is available now over at RealTime, featuring Decibel, Speak Percussion, Haco, Warren Burt, Alvin Curran, Agostino di Scipio, David Toop and Michael Kieran Harvey.
Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime joint project.
The Safest Ever Show About the World’s Most Dangerous Topic: The Australian Chamber Orchestra’s “The Crowd”
The Crowd
ACO, ANAM and The Consort of Melbourne
Concept by Richard Tognetti
Cinematography by Jon Frank
Directed by Matthew Lutton
In 1960 Elias Canetti published Crowds and Power, a taxonomy of the crowd drawing on anthropology, sociology, philosophy and psychology couched in a stream of lucid, aphoristic prose. Writing in the wake of the Third Reich, Canetti considered the relationship of the spontaneous crowd to the demonic-charismatic leader. He explored, in an unprecedented way, the survivor whose hidden satisfaction provides a new germ of despotic power.
Waving the book around in interviews, the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s Richard Tognetti and the cinematographer Jon Frank promised a fusion of video and music that would address “the gamut of the crowd experience from alienation to the reinforcement of humanity” (to quote the programme). You can imagine my excitement. Finally, Australia’s premier chamber music ensemble would develop a multimedia programme around some historically significant and eminently relevant intellectual grist.
The ACO, students from ANAM and The Consort of Melbourne proved themselves versatile interpreters of the exciting and diverse programme. In perhaps the most interesting exploration of crowd dynamics (because the exploration is immanent to the compositions and the musicians on stage), the orchestra in Ives, Tognetti, Sibelius, Crumb, Schubert, Dean and Shostakovich is whittled down to the intimate quartets, trios and solos of Debussy, Feldman, Leifs and Chopin.
The music aside, the concert was deeply disappointing and even troubling, given the status and resources of the ACO and the Melbourne Festival. Ives’ The Unanswered Question opens beneath Frank’s beautiful, slow-motion footage of street scenes in New York. Faces and gestures emerge from the crowd in high definition and high frame rate detail. The mise-en-scène situates the fundamental antimony of the crowd as that between the unindividuated mass and the feeling individual. The gently emerging voices of Ives’ piece suits the images, but the cinematic gesture is a cliché, giving the impression one is watching Koyaanisqatsi with better music.
Tognetti’s suite (which sounds like something between the Carmina Burana and the soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings) breaks in with thumping timpani beneath a quote from Nietzsche: “In individuals madness is the exception, in groups it is the rule.” Cue footage of Nazi rallies and bodies in concentration camps. The message is clear: Crowds are dangerous. There is nothing in the concert to suggest otherwise, no emancipatory crowd to contrast with the despotic ruler or contemporary political example to put the message into context.
The film then vacillates between interminable footage of football matches, street scenes and images of water, providing a pessimistic and narrow vision of the crowd today. After the tokenistic reference to the political crowd, the real axis of The Crowd is football and nature.
But between the show’s creation in 2010 and reworking in 2013, two important crowd-related events have taken place: The Arab Spring in all its complexity and the increased media hysteria around asylum seekers in all its banal horror. It says something about Australia, about our wilful ignorance of the rest of the world and fear of the crowd that the closest one gets to a spontaneous crowd is a football match or a mosh pit.
We like to talk about crises. Here’s one: The ethico-aesthetic crisis of Australian art music. It is revolting to trot out footage from Nazi Germany and the holocaust in the first five minutes of a concert to demonstrate the violence of the crowd upon the individual—and the charismatic leader upon crowds—and then leave the issue aside for an hour of comic relief. You can’t drop half an H-bomb. The use of images from the Third Reich also suggests that violence is only something that happened overseas and a long time ago. Today it is impossible not to know, despite the current government blackout on the issue, that thousands of people escaping their own crowd-related conflicts are held in woefully inadequate conditions in detention centres in and around Australia. If anything, this issue resonates with Canetti’s ideas about our fear of being touched, the distances we create around ourselves, “invisible crowds” and the self-aggrandising effects of “survival” psychology. Even if it appears impossible to film within these detention centres, surely a clever cinematographer would find ways of referencing the demonisation of this crowd by a few politicians and the media for their own ends.
But wouldn’t that be risky? Wouldn’t that be what crowds are all about?
Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime joint project.
Concert guide: 9–15 October
A curated list of upcoming concerts. See also the Australian Music Centre concert calendar and the New Music Network concert series.
Thursday 10 October. An excellent opportunity for enthusiasts, performers and composers alike. The Australia Ensemble convene a workshop with UNSW composer John Peterson and choreographer/dancer Sue Healey on their latest creation, ‘Double Entendre’ for piano quintet and dancers. 1:10pm, Leighton Hall, UNSW.
Friday 11 October. The ACO, ANAM and The Consort of Melbourne perform The Crowd: A programme of works by Tognetti, Crumb, Ives, Dean, Debussy, Feldman, Leifs, Schubert, Shostakovich and Sibelius with projections by cinematographer Jon Frank. Palais Theatre, St. Kilda, VIC, 8pm. Repeat with Cantillation at the Sydney Opera House, NSW, Sunday 13 October, 2pm.
An unmissable opportunity to hear Larry Sitsky and Adam Cook perform the world première of Sitsky’s augmentation of Ferruccio Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntisticca. 7pm, Larry Sitsky room, ANU School of Music, ACT.
Tura New Music and the Australian Art Orchestra present their Crossing Roper Bar tour in the foyer of the Darwin Supreme Court, NT. Also performing are Wagilak Songmen from Ngukurr, Arnhem Land; Stephen Pigram and Paul Grabowsky. 8pm. Also Sunday 13 October, Ivanhoe Farms, Kununurra, WA, 7pm.
Saturday 12 October. Cellist Rachel Scott and classical guitarists Raffaele and Janet Agostino perform Bach in the Dark, a program of works by J. S. Bach, Richard Charlton and Ennio Morricone in the crypt of St. James Church, Sydney, NSW, 7pm.
John Peterson’s new work Double entendre shares an Australia Ensemble programme with Britten, Bartok and Mendelssohn. Sir John Clancy Auditorium, University of New South Wales, 8pm.
Andrew Ford‘s new song cycle Last Words, featuring the last words of Goethe, Henry Ward Beecher, Alban Berg, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Porter, Noel Coward, Virginia Woolf and Tim Winton’s beloved Fish from Cloudstreet, will be performed at the Port Fairy Spring Music Festival at 11:30am. Catch a discussion with the composer at 10am before the performance.
For the opening weekend of the Melbourne Festival fifteen black teepees will fill Federation Square, each big enough for just two people. The Sonic Flock of one-on-one performances will feature Carolyn Connors, Tanea Hall, Judith Hamann, Micheal Hewes, Masayuki Kawai, Pardon Kimura, Cal Lyall, Peter Neville, Tim Phillips, Belinda Woods, the Amplified Elephants (Teagan Connor, Jay Euesden, Liz Hofb auer, Robyn McGrath, Thomas Lutze and Daniel Munnery) and the Noise Scavengers.
Sunday 13 October. As part of the Melbourne Festival, composer and percussionist Ben Walsh (Tom Tom Crew) fronts a 12-strong coalition of Australian and Indian musicians as they perform an energetic, percussive score set to an action-packed montage of scenes from Diamond Queen, Perth-born Bollywood actress Fearless Nadia’s most famous film. Melbourne Recital Centre, 7pm.
The Song Company perform works by Elena Kats-Chernin and Stephen Cronin amongst works by Gabrieli, Dufay, Lassus and Sculthorpe. Port Fairy Spring Music Festival, VIC, 11:30am.
Tuesday 15 October. Andrew Ford‘s Last Words, performed by the Seraphim Trio and New York-based soprano Jane Sheldon comes to Adelaide’s Elder Hall, 5:30pm. Event includes a discussion of the work between Andrew Ford and Anna Goldsworthy.
Chamber Made Opera: Turbulence
Chamber Made Opera
Turbulence
Composed by Juliana Hodkinson
Libretto by Cynthia Troup
Melbourne Festival of the Arts
A living room in Northcote
Despite being the closest any of us will come to experiencing a miracle, air travel is marked by boredom and sustained physical discomfort. With its staging of the explosive relationship between a mother and daughter in an apartment only wide enough for five seats and an airline trolley, Chamber Made Opera’s latest Living Room Opera Turbulence explores this banal sort of magic that frames and controls our lives. Composed by Juliana Hodkinson and featuring the versatile voices of Deborah Kayser and Anneli Bjorasen (in her first Chamber Made Opera role), the work is a “first” several times over for the company in its 25th year.
A row of fans along one wall generates a drafty hum that is amplified into an ambient drone by Jethro Woodward’s ever-understated sound design. The audience take their seats, the front row facing a white wall. I wondered where the performance would take place until Bjorasen began to hum, “pshh” and “khh” like the pneumatics of an aircraft beside me. This opening is the first duration piece that I have experienced in a Living Room Opera, providing a welcome contrast to the enchanting kaleidoscopism of previous works. It is also the best environment in which to hear Woodward’s minute control of transparent textures, even in a sound world as saturated as a series of amplified fans. Kayser and Bjorasen’s stereophonic sound effects were a delight, making the central seats the best in the house.
Other sounds endemic to airplanes begin to fill the cabin, such as a baby crying (live and recorded), 1950s cabin announcements and Bjorasen struggling with a packet of nuts. Bjorasen leans as the plane banks to the right, leaving me in an awkward position for several minutes.
Against this background of whirrs, cries and muffled announcements, the opera continues as a duet between mother (Kayser) and daughter (Bjorasen). The couple share text drawn from academic literature on turbulence, the mother singing graciously against a Pocket Piano synthesiser and the daughter growling impetuously into a vintage microphone. The texts provide an underlying theme of chaos and order, along with the observation that “normal times are when disorder wins.” But the opera is set in the 1950s, shortly after the dawn of commercial passenger aviation. Air travel is now more common and accessible than ever before and the world is on average half a degree warmer. We are now faced with the task of explaining the workings of the reading lights and seat levers inside the cabin rather than the turbulent air outside: Why in fact do things work the way they do and why is it so difficult to change our orderly progression towards ecological disaster? Faced with the desertion of our future, are we condemned to sing a solo aria, as does the Kayser when her daughter walks out on her, reminiscing about a “sea as blue as a baby’s eye?” With the sensitivity and warmth of her voice, which it is worth the ticket price just to hear up close, you could imagine Kayser was lamenting the loss of oceans.
As well as introducing a new performer and a new style of chamber opera to Chamber Made fans, the opera is the first Living Room Opera under the new Creative Director Tim Stitz, who made everybody feel welcome before and after the show with a pre-flight talk and post-flight refreshment. Most importantly, Turbulence is the first Living Room Opera to fulfill the company’s claim that the series need not only take place in opulent living rooms of the Eastern Suburbs. The space is perfectly suited to the opera, or the opera to the space, revealing the incredible power of chamber opera to unite disparate environments through artistic aims.
Turbulence runs until 12 October.
Concert guide: 2–8 October
A curated list of upcoming concerts. See also the Australian Music Centre concert calendar and the New Music Network concert series.
Thursday 3 October. To celebrate the introduction of percussion studies at ANAM in 2013, Peter Neville curates New Beats, a showcase of compositions by a number of the country’s rising stars including Wilson, Hsieh, Pertout, Horsley, Bakrnčev and Healey. Melbourne Recital Centre, 6pm.
Chamber Made Opera’s Turbulence by Juliana Hodkinson takes off in a living room in Northcote at 7:30pm. Performances until 12 October.
West Space Art Gallery, Vic, hosts More Talk, Less Action, a series of panel discussions moderated by Clinton Green. This week: “Junk Music: redundant technology and detourned devices as instruments” featuring Ernie Althoff, Rod Cooper, Joanne Cannon and Bent Leather Band. 7:30pm.
Chronology Arts presents Vision of Sound, a concert of three new multi-media works for live electronic or acoustic instruments and projected visuals by Aaron Hull and Greg Hughes (aka Hü), Lani Weekley with Julian Day, and Scott Morrison with Monika Brooks. Sound Lounge, Seymour Centre, NSW, 7:30pm.
New York-based new music trio Dead Language presents a concert based on vinyl scratching including world premieres of works by David Bird, Gust Burns and Bernhard Lang with a support set by Michael Louttit. Apparently it’s BYO, which should be the case more often. THE BOX Art Space, QLD, 8pm.
Online. Lutoslawski at 100 on New Music up Late.
Friday 4 October. Imogen Manins and Tony Gould perform new Australian works and improvisations with David Griffiths at the Melbourne Recital Centre from 7pm.
Saturday 5 October. The Festival of Toy Music kicks off at the Brisbane Powerhouse, featuring New York’s “Queen of Toy Piano” Margaret Leng Tan, Adam Simmons’ Toy Band (Melbourne), Clocked Out and Matthew Horsley (Brisbane) and Toy Death (Sydney).
Tuesday 8 October. The Australia Ensemble perform works by Nigel Butterley amongst Britten and Bartok at Leighton Hall, Scientia Building, University of New South Wales, at 1:10pm.
6:30pm at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, a concert of new Australian music for solo violin performed by Ole Böhn. Featuring new works by Jonathan Mui, Daniel Riley, Alex Chilvers, Sophie Spargo, Harry Sdraulig, Sharon Calcraft and Daniel Manera.
String quartet The NOISE presents Composed NOISE, a concert of seven new works for string quartet by Australian composers Andrew Ford, Rosalind Page, Paul Cutlan, Lyle Chan, Andrew Batt-Rawden, Alex Pozniak and Amanda Cole at the Cell Block Theatre, NSW, 7pm.
Partial Durations 