Banner Night For Young Composers
The Age
Monday May 7, 2007
MUSIC REVIEW: METROPOLIS 1
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra,at CUB Malthouse, Southbank,May 5. www.mso.com.auIF YOU subscribe to this year's three-part Metropolis series from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, you will enjoy a fair generational balance with some well-known names leavening a sizeable amount of young music, pieces constructed by musicians who present as near-adolescents on an achievement scale. For example, next Saturday, alongside two major figures on the Australian scene over the past 50 years - Peter Sculthorpe and Richard Meale - the program offers works by the relatively junior 40-year-old James Ledger and two tyros in Julian Langdon and Anthony Pateras.On Wednesday, the accent is on establishment British music - Judith Weir, Mark-Anthony Turnage, James MacMillan.But the first program at the weekend had a wide range of young composers on show. The night began with Flying Banner by Liza Lim, whose first compositional steps began at Presbyterian Ladies College and were then fostered by the then Melbourne-based Elision Ensemble. This energetic and richly vivid short piece makes a virtue of repeated chords and a hammer-blow emphasis, fully realising its function as a fanfare.The other piece for large orchestra came at the night's end with Malaysian composer Kee Yong Chong's Tearless Moon, which summons up a massive, wind-heavy fabric, its content taking in a vast field from a quasi-Gaelic folk tune to an exhilarating presto central section that was sustained for an unusually long time. The piece eventually sank away to a duet for trumpet and recorder, the players processing through the audience while conductor Kevin Field tapped out a quiet ostinato on a porcelain bowl.These larger pieces framed three works of more chamber-like content. Soprano Merlyn Quaife sang the solo line in Korean-born Unsuk Chin's Acrostic-Wordplay, seven movements in which the voice often became a strand rather than the leader, with some alarming high notes for the singer.The night's most easily assimilated work, Anne Cawrse's Musaic, was originally worked out for dance: six short movements in a non-aggressive lyric style, more harmonically orthodox than the rest of the program but achieving the main aim of providing not-too-striking changes in character and metre that offer plenty of structured matter for dancers.
© 2007 The Age