TSO Westlake Booklet

462 017-2 NIGEL WESTLAKE out of the blue TASMANIAN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA One of my earliest encounters – so I thought – was shot over a three-year period. The team with the music of Nigel Westlake was at a music travelled 20,000 kilometres in and around the camp, when four camp percussionists southern polar ice cap to look beyond the known, entertained us at lunch with a performance of ‘past the edge of everything’, and capture Omphalo Centric Lecture. The music was as visually the spirit of exploration and inquiry that compelling as its title – the performers were has always been associated with Antarctica. In clearly having tremendous fun and so were we, 1991 the brief was passed to Westlake: ‘to Nigel Westlake b. 1958 the listeners. They had to play it at least once compose music that captured the awe-inspiring Invocations [20:35] more, for dessert. grandeur, beauty, desolation and harshness of the images.’ Concerto for bass clarinet and chamber orchestra What I didn’t realise at the time was that I had 1 I 3:49 already been hearing Nigel Westlake’s music in Westlake’s original sketches were scored for solo 2 II 2:23 the various signature themes on SBS-TV and guitar and orchestra, and John Williams became 3 III 7:58 ABC Radio and Television. Most of the latter involved early on, viewing the rushes of the were written in 1987 when Westlake was picture and agreeing that it would make a 4 IV 6:25 composer-in-residence for ABC Radio, and he marvellous vehicle for solo guitar. As it turned Nigel Westlake bass clarinet was subsequently to win the gold medal for out, practical constraints meant that Westlake had Alison Lazaroff-Somssich obbligato violin Best Original Music at the New York to abandon this plan for the score, at least International Radio Festival Awards. temporarily. But the following year the Antarctica [22:01] Australian Broadcasting Corporation suggested Suite for guitar and orchestra Nigel Westlake is one Australian composer whose presence extends well beyond the concert hall. that he write a guitar concerto for Williams and 5 The Last Place on Earth 6:36 He has composed incidental music for the Bell the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra as part of the 6 Wooden Ships 4:16 Shakespeare Company, television ABC’s sixtieth birthday celebrations, providing the 7 Penguin Ballet 3:10 documentaries, the Flying Fruit Fly Circus, for opportunity to revisit his original ideas and 8 The Ice Core – cadenza – Finale 7:59 four Imax films devised for super screens and 3D resume the collaboration as originally planned. (Around the same time Westlake joined Williams’ Timothy Kain guitar technology and for the film Babe and Babe II: Pig group Attacca as a performer and composer for Alison Lazaroff-Somssich obbligato violin in the City. When, in 1982, Westlake studied film music at what was then the Australian Film and tours of the UK and Australia.) Vanessa Souter obbligato harp Television School, it represented his first formal The resulting concert suite is far more than an 9 out of the blue ... [10:23] musical education after leaving the New South arrangement of selected movements from the Wales Conservatorium High School at the age of for string orchestra original film score. Rather it is a reworking of the sixteen to work as a freelance musician. Total playing time 52:59 music, incorporating material that was not Antarctica, the earliest of the three works on this included in the film. Dissociated from the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra disc, began life in the cinema, as the score for imposing images on the Imax screen, Westlake’s David Porcelijn conductor John Weiley’s film Antarctica. Filmed in Imax, it music has been able to take on a life of its own 2 3 without losing the qualities that made it, in John elements – an unexpected harmony, a strange the ‘Finale’. This final section of Antarctica is lively Invocations, a concerto for bass clarinet and Weiley’s words, ‘wild, funny, dangerous, colour – which are then assimilated in the return and rhythmic, its uplifting mood reflecting the chamber orchestra. exhilarating and deeply moving.’ of the opening theme. optimism that surrounded the signing of the Invocations is in four movements, following an Antarctic Treaty just as the film was being The four movements of Antarctica are drawn One of the wittiest moments in Westlake’s original overall pattern of slow, fast, slow, fast. Westlake completed. from the primary themes of the film: the desolate film score is the ‘Penguin Circus’, guaranteed to describes it as deliberately sparse, emphasising grandeur of the pole, the life it sustains and provoke a smile if not a giggle. ‘Penguin Ballet’ John Weiley describes Antarctica as a noisy place instrumental colour and ‘intimate interplay’ human presence in the region, both historically shows another, less comical side of these – citing the sounds of human presence: between the soloist and orchestra. This gives and today. curious birds – so clumsy on land, so graceful generators, motors, shrieking stoves. He might the work chamber-like qualities and a delicately in the water. John Weiley’s film captures a In its original guise ‘The Last Place on Earth’ was also have mentioned the natural sounds of wind poised sound world, even when the music is at normally unseen aspect of penguin behaviour, and cracking ice. But, he says, ‘when it stops accompanied by an aerial of the ice cap, shot in its most energetic. what can only be described as a kind of the full daylight of the midnight sun. In a there is a kind of epiphany. You are here. That’s underwater ballet below the ice cap. But leopard when the music starts.’ Nowhere is this more apparent than in the first luminous opening the guitar freely plays a simple seals are well familiar with this display, and the movement. It begins with cunning unisons – the motive above a repeated harp pattern and the For Nigel Westlake music started with the emperor penguins must leave the water at piano doubling the solo bass clarinet, joined by unearthly effect of strings playing without clarinet, under the inspiring tutelage of his father fantastic speeds, escaping through a hole in the vibrato. The sparseness of the textures suggests Don Westlake. As a clarinettist he worked with marimba, solo violin and harp, then by the lower ice to avoid being eaten. the isolation of the ice cap; the building of numerous orchestras, chamber groups and strings. Their colours exposed by the absence of a orchestral sound to crashing chords and anxious Westlake mirrors the mercurial fluidity of the session bands. But it was the bass clarinet in traditional bass line or accompanying chords, these tremolos, its savage power. In close up, we hear penguin ballet with a rippling ‘pas de deux’ for particular that captured his imagination, and in instruments stake out the striding opening theme. fragments of melody and small musical motives solo guitar and harp, playing in the highest part 1983 he travelled to Amsterdam to study with Later, sinuous string melodies, hovering around just combined, tossed about by harsh rhythms; a of its range. The full strings are entrusted with a Harry Spaarnay, that instrument’s greatest a few notes, provide contrast. brief cadenza for the guitar; and a brazen swaying ritornello, and ominous rumblings from advocate. In exploiting the bass clarinet’s six- The agitated second movement develops more pounding theme that emerges from the opening the lower strings warn of the presence of the octave range and its impressive palette of tone complex textures as the bass clarinet and solo idea. The music then ‘pans’ away, ending in the leopard seals. colours, Spaarnay had rescued the bass clarinet violin engage in a dialogue. And there is a spirit of transparency with which it began. from a mundane role as an ‘adjunct’ to the The final movement comprises two sections, ‘Ice adventure in the bass clarinet’s special technical symphony orchestra and given it credibility as a ‘Wooden Ships’ is a tribute to those first Core’ and ‘Finale’, linked by a formal cadenza for effects as the soloist plays with harmonics, solo instrument. explorers who bravely risked their lives in the guitar. An ice core extracted by Antarctic multiphonics, flutter-tonguing and swooping vessels that would splinter under the pressure scientists can reveal changes in the earth’s Years later Richard Mills invited Westlake to glissandi above a relentless accompaniment atmosphere and phenomena such as the hole in of the frozen ice. Harp and pizzicato strings as write a concerto incorporating the entire clarinet from the strings and snare drum. well as guitar create a delicate effect in a the ozone layer. For this section of the music family. Westlake found, however, that once he movement that is lyrical, even nostalgic. In the Westlake creates ethereal effects with pitch began to explore ideas for the piece his The third movement begins with the bass clarinet central section the comfortable harp bending from the guitar and hypnotic repeated fascination with the bass clarinet and the alone – here cast in a meditative and accompaniment and wind counter-melodies are patterns in the harp. The cadenza gradually builds enthusiasm Spaarnay had imparted took over. introspective role. Important harp and piano disturbed by the guitar introducing ‘foreign’ momentum, anticipating the main melodic idea of The concerto for the whole family became parts provide a bell-like accompaniment, over 4 5 which we hear the moodily expressive melodies but blank pages. It took months for the stream of Nigel Westlake of the solo part. Effective use is made, too, of ideas to re-establish their flow.

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