MVI and Sydney Alpha Ensemble
14 Feb 1998
Review by John Carmody, February 1998
Colours for the ear
When the sounds of stones being struck mesmerises, then you know you’re listening to genius
A regular concertgoer hears many wonderful things every year in Sydney but very few events have the special quality of last week’s program by the Sydney Alpha Ensemble, especially their performance of George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children.
This is a remarkable setting of five poems by Federico Garcia Lorca which employs a panoply of techniques. The soloists (principally a female soprano but also a boy soprano – that part sung here by a teenage girl) have at times to sing into the innards of the grand-piano and sometimes off-stage (the oboe has a contribution from outside, too); amplification is used; various means are employed to distort the pitch of piano, harp and mandolin.
The overwhelming impression is of the composer’s acute sense of the colours which can be achieved from his small ensemble, especially with careful attention to the variations and counterpoints of dynamics. I was especially delight, for example, by the way a percussionist could, in striking two stones together, vary the timbre by opening and closing his fingers.
All of this has one redoubtable proviso. The music must be done superlatively well to succeed and who in Sydney, apart from the Alpha Ensemble (here under Antony Walker’s painstaking direction), could achieve that? Soprano Alison Morgan seemed to deal with its manifold – almost gymnastic – demands with immense and unstressed skill, to achieve an intense and touching result.
Earlier she had been no less idiomatic in Maurice Delage’s rarely-performed Four Hindu Poems, though the musical interest of the score seems to be confined to the instrumental ensemble. Mezzo-soprano Jenny Duck-Chong contributed Ravel’s Three Poems of Stéphane Mallarmé and Luciano Berio’s Folksongs to this remarkable evening. I have never heard her sing better, especially in the geographic peregrinations of Berio’s arrangements: she had a great affinity with every mood of this chameleon score, from the skittish to the melancholy. Music of great refreshment.
John Carmody