Review by Fred Blanks, The Northern Herald, February 1998
Concerts sparkle like mineral water
Contemporary music (often an inexactly applied term) recently had an extraordinarily effervescent weekend. It began with the ensemble Perihelion playing in Government House, and continued with an awesome clash when The Song Company sang Stockhausen’s mind-boggling Stimmung at the Australian Technology Park in Redfern, while simultaneously the Sydney Alpha Ensemble had an enticing program of 20th-century vocal chamber music at SCEGGS, Darlinghurst. Despite the clash, the Alpha audience was large, and young.
Two short and two long works formed the program.
The musical flirtation with eastern influences which gripped France after the 1899 Exposition influenced Ravel’s Trois Poemes de Stephane Mallarme, sung with just the right touch of trance and shadow by mezzosoprano Jenny Duck-Chong, and also Quatre Poemes Hindous by Maurice Delage (1879-1961), a less forward-looking set of songs, by a French Delius-figure perhaps, confidently sung by soprano Alison Morgan…
The other major work was the evening’s piece de resistance. This was American composer George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children (1970). haunting music often only just above the threshold of audibility (and well below that of traffic noise outside the venue) based on poems of Garcia Lorca.
Forget the absurdities of scoring – a chisel on piano strings, a mistuned mandolin, harp strings threaded with paper – which are incidental, and were typical of the crazy avant-garde around 1970; what mattered was the other-worldly finesse of filigree tones, sometimes a frightening percussion climax, the strange effect of the singer, Alison Morgan at her most perceptive, singing into the piano lid, sometimes eerily echoed by the child voice of 15-year-old Jane Sheldon from North Sydney Girls’ High School.
Tying these works together was excellent playing by the 15 musicians of the Sydney Alpha Ensemble, directly sensitively by Antony Walker.
This was a mind-expanding concert.
Fred Blanks
This review appeared in The Northern Herald