A S T R A C O N C E R T S 2 0 1 5

8 pm, Monday 31 August CHURCH OF ALL NATIONS Carlton, Melbourne

time and tide nocturne nostalgia

The Seraphim Trio The Astra Choir

PIANO TRIO AND CHOIR: TIME AND TIDE

What is time? A secret – insubstantial and omnipotent. A prerequisite of the external world, a motion intermingled and fused with bodies existing and moving in space. But would there be no time, if there were no motion? No motion, if there were no time? – Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

This concert is the first of three Astra programs over coming weeks with ensemble-music in unusual combinations – choral sound being added to the classic chamber-music formation of piano trio in this evening’s premiered work by Barry Conyngham. In September at the North Melbourne Town Hall, humans and a colony of bees inhabit the same performance space for Martin Friedel’s new creation, composed as sound-complexes of improvising players and singers. And in October we return to the Church of All Nations for a program with four pianos in varied spatial and stylistic configurations – with premieres of new works from three countries by Andrew Byrne, Kym Dillon and Riccardo Vaglini.

Time is the verbal notion with which music connects directly, without recourse to metaphor – which music itself embodies and deepens beyond words. The biggest change in the music of the last 100 years was possibly in the ways it re-ordered temporality, despite the more widely-noted transformations of pitch and sonority. Each of the works in the program bears witness to this heritage, even the trio movement of the fore-runner Franz Schubert, whose late music was rediscovered in the modernist era and described in Proustian terms by the composer Dieter Schnebel as “in search of liberated time”.

Maurice Ravel (1975-1937) belongs with his friend Stravinsky to a modal tradtion in 20th-century music. The two of them were also much engaged, in the years leading up to World War I, in re- defining the sound-fabric of chamber music, in the wake of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. Music based on the modes of earlier music and folk tradition inevitably changes its temporal character and sense of location. Time becomes something more like ‘states’. Traditional linear narrative is replaced in Ravel’s Trio with episodes that unfold in succession and within each other’s space. The second movement, for example, opens both as contrast and as another facet of music already heard. The work also stands at new geographic and historical boundaries – the first movement influenced by the Basque traditions of Ravel’s region of birth (where the Trio was also composed), the second movement by a Malaysian verse form. In the passacaglia of the third, a non-specific historic past is evoked. The Trio was also inluenced by time in a more immediate sense, being composed in enormous haste by Ravel’s painstaking standards – around the outbreak of Wrold War I, for which which he was anxious to enlist. He wrote to Stravinsky that he had compressed five months’ work into five weeks with the Trio.

Philippe Hersant (b.1948) has written a series of choral works with solo obbligato instrument which engage with various cultural spaces from a French modal and chromatic perspective. “Durch Adams Fall” is a chorale from the earliest years of Luther’s Reformation, of some mystery in its open-ended melodic tonality, which Hersant approaches from an inchoate opening, arrives at in a Bach harmonization, and departs from, towards a state of pure contemplation on the last two words of the text – the whole being surrounded by the aura of the solo violin. Franz Schubert (1797- 1828) so famous as melodist of songs, also stands at a far boundary of music expression in the slow time-space of late works such as the rarely-heard single-movement Nocturne for piano trio.

Barry Conyngham first wrote his new work, titled simply Tides, for the Seraphim Trio with string orchestra in 2014, his 70th year. In this form it has still to be performed. As Time and Tide, with specific reference to the famous 13th-century English saying, he has re-written, even re-imagined the work for tonight’s concert, replacing the string orchestra with choir. Textures and currents form the materials, more than the melodies and harmonies which emerge fleetingly, and the instrumental trio is constantly shifting in its own combinations. As with Ravel, the three movements have broad differences of expressive shape but are linked by a sense of common cross-currents.

The time and tide that “wait for no man” are expressed in different ways, slow and fast, across the three movements. In the late 1960’s, the composer Morton Feldman spoke of the “anxiety of time” in music, as something to be overcome in contemporary composition. It is, however, possibly a more 21st-century idea that different modes of time-experience can co-exist. In Time and Tide the expressive influences of the two bodies of sound, chamber-music trio and collective singing, flow in both directions. Human voices fill the spaces of the unequal piano-trio combination, which frequently moves to registral extremes around the choir. But the typical motor-energies of bow and strings also move into the choral voices, to express something ‘non-choral’ in a conventional sense – if not the “anxiety” of time, possibly the effort and industry of human endeavour among the inexorable movements of sun and moon. –JMcC

PROGRAM

Maurice Ravel PIANO TRIO (1914) violin, cello and piano

I. Modéré II. Pantoum: Assez vif III. Passacaille: Très large IV. Final: Animé

Philippe Hersant NOSTALGIA. Through Adam’s Fall (2008) choir and solo violin

Durch Adams Fall ist ganz verderbt Through Adamʼs fall was made corrupt Menschlich Natur und Wesen, human nature and being; Dasselb Gift ist auf uns ererbt, the same venom was our estate Daß wir nicht mocht'n genesen from which we knew no healing, Ohn' Gottes Trost, der uns erlöst without Godʼs comfort, which redeemed Hat von dem großen Schaden, us from that mighty damage, Darein die Schlang Eva bezwang, when serpent once did vanquish Eve Gotts Zorn auf sich zu laden. to draw Godʼs anger on her.

Ich bitt o Herr, aus Herzensgrund, I plead, O Lord, from my heartʼs depths Du wollst nicht von mir nehmen that you not will take from me Dein heilges Wort aus meinem Mund, your sacred word from my own mouth. So wird mich nicht beschämen Thus will I never be ashamed Mein Sünd und Schuld, denn in dein Huld, by sin and guilt, for in your grace Setz ich all mein Vertrauen; I place all my reliance; Wer sich nur fest darauf verlässt, whoever firmly trusts in that Der wird den Tod nicht schauen. will never look on death.

– Lazarus Spengler (1524)

I N T E R V A L

Franz Schubert NOTTURNO Op.148 (1827) violin, cello and piano

Barry Conyngham TIME AND TIDE (2014-2015) piano trio and choir - first performance

in 3 movements

The Seraphim Trio: Helen Ayres violin, Tim Nankervis cello, Anna Goldsworthy piano

The Astra Choir conducted by John McCaughey

The Seraphim Trio, from its beginnings as winners of the Piano Trio Prize and Audience Choice Award at the 2001 Australian National Chamber Music Competition, has been active in concerts, festivals and broadcasts across Australia, with numerous projects in Australian composition and inventive approaches to engaging audiences with the repertoire. The Trio‘s 2015 season has included presentation of all the Beethoven Trios in a wide variety of locations and performance contexts.

Barry Conyngham (b.1944) began as a jazz pianist before studies with in and Toru Takemitsu in Japan. His varied life has included being Australian Studies Professor at Harvard, Foundation Vice-Chancellor of Southern Cross University, and he is currently Dean of Music at the VCA and . He has maintained a large output of compositions, with a focus on orchestral and dramatic works with wider forces.

The Astra Choir Kristy de la Rambelya, Catrina Seiffert, Louisa Billeter, Jean Evans, Michelle Surowiec, Laila Engle, Gloria Gamboz, Anna Gifford, Katie Richardson, Beverley Bencina, Jane Cousens, Joan Pollock, Florence Thomson, Stephen Creese, Matthew Lorenzon, Ben Owen, Nicholas Tolhurst Greg Deakin, Lucien Fischer, Peter Dumsday, Robert Franzke, Steven Hodgson, Chris Smith, John Terrell, John Mark Williams

Kim Bastin organ

Concert Manager: Margaret Lloyd Astra Manager: Gabrielle Baker Recording engineer: Michael Hewes Front of House: Stiabhna Baker-Holland, George Baker-Holland

Thanks to: The Church of All Nations; The Eleventh Hour Theatre.

Astra concerts receive support in 2015 from: Private donors; Creative Victoria; the City of Melbourne; The Robert Salzer Foundation; The William Angliss Trust; Diana Gibson.

 ASTRA CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY President: John Terrell Manager: Gabrielle Baker Musical Director: John McCaughey PO Box 365, North Melbourne, Victoria 3051, Australia ABN 41 255 197 577 Tel: +61 (3) 9326 5424 email: [email protected] web: www.astramusic.org.au