Composers Seize Their Opportunity To Shine With A Contemporary Cutting Edge
The Age
Friday February 8, 2008
ONE of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's less publicised initiatives, these Composers Awards ensure that young creative musicians have - if they're lucky enough to be chosen - the chance to work at their music in a mobile environment, gaining invaluable experience on what can and cannot be done with a sizeable body of performers dedicated to ensuring high-quality exposure for untried material.
On Tuesday night, four composers heard their music live; so did a snugly packed gallery at the Iwaki Auditorium, bearing witness that this annual event might be in need of a new venue; roll on the new Melbourne Recital Centre.While the direct result of this flurry of activity on the actual pages of the four scores and at the orchestra members' desks is immediately satisfying for all concerned, in the longer term two of these works will be presented during the MSO's series of four Metropolis concerts. But in Tuesday's field of four, Robert Dahm's Noumen sounded an unmistakably original voice. Organised into sequential, often interlocking parcels of sound, this score offered more than sonic effects with some rich sound complexes involving instrumental duets, particularly paired trumpets, but still preserved a keen awareness of solo woodwind and string textures.A thoroughly contemporary work, Noumen outclassed its program companions in several fields but principally by engaging listeners with a fluent and mature dialectic.More immediately appealing was James Rushford's Fur, which divided the available chamber orchestra forces into two discrete bodies that offered isolated sonorities in an exploration that for much of its length focused on sound-making techniques still considered unorthodox: breathing into wind instruments without sounding a pitch, rustling paper, playing above the bridge or on the stringholder, blowing across the tops of bottles, operating inside a grand piano. Rushford's construct was at its most effective in its pointillist detailed pages, played to an attentive and responsive group of onlookers.Paul Castles presented his Aurelian Unturning , a piece that began by juxtaposing dynamic levels and bursts of group colours with high enthusiasm, the night's penchant for brass here at its most vivid with passages featuring fierce, even funny plosions for horns, along with solos for trombone and tuba that stressed their lyrical potential. The work's content impressed most for its chameleonic nature, some grating discords melding into writing for strings that bordered on the lushly romantic.Finally, Brisbane-based Nicole Murphy's Border struck a blow for accessibility with a two-part structure that began with flowing repeated motives making deft use of the bass clarinet's middle register, then changed to a sparked-up quicker movement. Murphy avoided tedium by clever use of interpolated irregular bars in her work's first section, but the more active latter pages made their point by hammering home her message, the piece's final abnegation of pounding rhythm coming as a welcome, and probably intentional, relief.
© 2008 The Age
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