Roger Covell at 85: a Tribute by His Colleagues and Students
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Roger Covell at 85: A Tribute by his Colleagues and Students Edited by Dorottya Fabian and Sonia Maddock Roger Covell at 85: A Tribute by his Colleagues and Students Edited by Dorottya Fabian and Sonia Maddock © Sydney: School of the Arts and Media UNSW Australia, 2016 ISBN-10: 0-7334-3614-5 ISBN-13: 978-0-7334-3614-7 EAN: 9780733436147 Contents Program of the Day of Celebrations ........................................................ 4 Dorottya Fabian: A Tribute to Roger Covell .............................................. 5 Roger Covell’s Awards and Major Publications .................................. 10 Abstract of papers presented .................................................................. 12 Roger Covell’s 85th Celebration and Symposium 5 March 2016, Robert Webster Building UNSW Program 9.30 Welcome and Introduction (Professor Ian Jacobs, President and Vice-Chancellor) 9.45 John Peterson: Birthday Fanfare for Handbells (Handbell Ensemble) 10.00 Emery Schubert: Push bikes and chains: Cognitive mechanism against musical evolution 10.15 Peter Keller: When choral singing meets opera 10.30 Robert Forgács: Mozart’s irst opera seria Apollo et Hyacinthus and its context: the Mozart family’s association with Neo-Latin Drama 10.45 Virginia McGill: Verdi, Wagner and Five Themes: Love, The Hero, Death, Darkness, Festivity 11.00 Break (coffee/tea) 11.15 Christine Logan: Chopin’s heritage and the French Ballades for solo piano – 1 Day 11.30 Kerry Murphy: Henri Kowalski (1841-1916) in the Antipodes and his comic opera Queen Venus 11.45 Dorottya Fabian: A preliminary history of UNSW Opera 12.00 Musical Performances: Conal Coad, Simon Pauperis, Christine Logan (Mozart, Fauré) 12.30 Lunch 1.30 Musical Performance: Burgundian Consort, dir. Sonia Maddock (Byrd, Fauré, Mozart, Britten) 2.00 Gary McPherson: Emergence and nurturing of musical prodigiousness 2.15 John Napier: The company you keep: South Indian music and dance companies in contemporary Australia 2.30 Amanda Harris: Australian Aboriginal Encounter in the 1950s: ‘ethnic dance’ and ‘authentic songs’ 2.45 Jennifer Nevile: ‘I had to ight with the painters, master carpenters, actors, musicians and the dancers’: Performance problems and audience reaction in early modern spectacles 3.00 John Grifiths: Can Heteroclito Giancarli change the world? 3.15 Jane Hardie: ‘Let’s all Sing Alleluia’: the Sydney Alleluia Project 3.30 Break (coffee/tea) 4.00 Janice Stockigt: Jiří Tancibudek (1921–2004): an oboist extraordinaire 4.14 Michael Hooper: Elliott Gyger’s Fly Away Peter 4.30 Vincent Plush: The go-between: Roger Covell and the Creation of ‘The Great Australian Opera’ 4.45 Peter McCallum: Criticism, Covell, and the creation of the Australian composer 5.00 Robyn Holmes: The Covell papers in the National Library 5.15 Closing remarks and thanks 5.30 Musical Performance: Vocal Consort (Covell); Ian Munro (Fauré arr. By Grainger); John Napier, Vincent Plush (Grainger) 6-7.30 Drinks and celebration Dorttya Fabian: A Tribute to Roger Covell Roger David Covell, AM, FAHA, Emeritus Professor, musicologist, critic, composer, and conductor is a living legend and national treasure. It would be hard to think of anybody else who has done so much and in the broadest scope for classical music in Sydney and nationally during the past sixty years or so. His achievements and honours are many and this tribute can only capture some of them. He was born in Sydney on 1 February 1931 but educated in Queensland because his father, Harold Covell died of war injuries when Roger was only one year old and his mother moved to Brisbane to be closer to her family. Not only did Roger lose his father to war but also his eldest brother, Jim, who died at the age Roger Covell as a boy of 20 ighting the Japanese as a pilot. His other brother, Geoffrey, also a pilot, survived the war but developed lung cancer due to heavy smoking between missions and died at age 41. Throughout his studies Roger supported his mother, Margaret Covell, as a budding journalist at the Courier Mail. Musically he was a child of the ABC, as he put it in an interview with Andrew Ford in 2013. He listened to anything and everything the ABC broadcast, and had a special penchant for rhythmically complex pieces. Apparently he liked Purcell’s music so much that he would run the two miles from his primary school to be home by the time the broadcast came on. He enjoyed singing, learned to play the piano, and composed his irst pieces, including orchestral scores, in his early teens. After graduating with a BA from the University of Queensland, he went to Britain in 1950 where he worked as an actor with various theatre companies and also for the BBC and the Festival of Britain. While in London, he formed a close friendship with former school-mate, the poet Peter Porter. Upon his return to Australia he re-joined the Courier Mail in 1955 where he quickly established a reputation. This led, in 1960, to the offer by the Sydney Morning Heraldto become their chief Margaret with sons Geoffrey, Jim and Roger music critic. During his forty years tenure (until 2001) Roger Covell not only championed dozens of home-grown composers and performers but also educated and inluenced several generations in a myriad different ways; through concert and opera reviews, reports from overseas (mostly Roger Covell (16) seated second from the left, in the Courier Mail as a participant in a World Youth Speaking Competition European) musical events, opinion pieces and commentaries on policies and events impacting the arts. He has been an eloquent and witty writer as well as an astute observer with an assured sense of quality and ability to spot talent. He never recoiled from going against the tide or saying the not-so-popular. And his ability to put his inger on the pulse and say it with clarity and succinctness have become legendary as evidenced by every one of his articles published in the Sydney Morning Herald. The next best thing that could have happened for classical music in Sydney was the invitation in 1966 by The University of New South Wales for Roger to establish music on its Kensington campus. He joined the academic staff as a senior lecturer, becoming Associate Professor in 1973 and receiving the personal chair in 1983. During his reign the small music unit attached to the Vice-Chancellor’s ofice grew into irst a Department of Music within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and then a much enlarged School of Roger Covell (left) playing Music and Music Education, when in 1993 the Oatley College of Advanced viola da gamba Education amalgamated with UNSW, following the Dawkins reforms. He remained Head of School until his sudden and untimely retirement from teaching due to temporary ill health in 1996. Roger’s contribution to music at UNSW is equalled only by his contribution to UNSW’s reputation through music. His tireless entrepreneurship quickly created a vigorous musical life through weekly lunch-hour concerts, resident artists, and the establishing of various on-going musical ensembles. Being on his own (apart from a loyal secretary) until 1972, when Patricia Brown joined as a new staff member, Roger staged many highly successful documentary-concerts (or “dramatized lectures”, as one reviewer called them) where he spoke and directed musicians. He also single-handedly established UNSW Opera in 1968. This professional chamber opera company was active until 1997. It premiered many new Australian works (e.g. Barry Conyngham’s Edward John Eyre in 1973, commissioned by the company with inancial assistance from the Australia Council and UNSW, or the irst Australian performances of Peggy Glanville-Hick’s The Transposed Heads in 1970) and performed several other operas by various European composers, often for the irst time in Sydney, for instance Britten’s The Turn of the Screw in 1968 or the irst live performance in Australia of Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea in 1969 for which Roger translated Busenello’s libretto into “easy-lowing” English. The opera also became the focus of his PhD, conferred in 1976. UNSW Opera was also the irst opera company to perform at the new Opera House. In July 1973 Roger Covell conducted a double bill of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Barry Conyngham’s Edward John Eyre, in the Concert Hall. The staging was produced by Aubrey Mellor with costumes by Dorothy Duncombe. Their success was such that EMI Australia decided to record their performance of Roger’s PhD graduation ceremony at UNSW Conyngham’s music-theatre piece in 1974 (EMI HMV OASD 7582). The recording was voted “best classical LP produced in Australia” by the commercial radio stations. Fresh off their success in the Opera House they took these productions on tour to Aberdeen and London as part of the Fifth International Festival of Youth Orchestras. They would repeat the feat in 1980 with another lucky group of twenty-six music students and singers travelling to Britain. Over the years Roger and his wife—colleague, soprano, musicologist and choral conductor Patricia Brown—put together some ifty productions (operas and “dramatized lectures”) to great acclaim, covering a huge and varied repertoire from Music for the Dukes of Burgundy and the medieval play of Robin and Marion to works by Monteverdi, Mozart, Rossini, Verdi and Britten as well as new and old pieces by Australian composers (e.g. Alison Bauld’s Exiles and In a dead brown land or the hugely successful show entitled Australia’s Yesterdays and many others as mentioned earlier). Invariably, the reviews were positive, repeatedly praising Roger’s “assured conducting and affectionate concern for singers and orchestra”; his “conspicuous sympathy, enthusiasm and instinct” for the music; his “lowing” singing translations of the original libretti; the excellent casting of singers; his tireless efforts to introduce unduly neglected and little known works to the public, and the “invaluable contribution” all this makes to music in Australia.