TSO Kerry Booklet
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476 226-8 GORDON KERRY Executive Producers Robert Patterson, Lyle Chan Recording Producer and Editor Ralph Lane Recording Engineer Andrew Dixon Editorial and Production Manager Hilary Shrubb Cover and Booklet Design Imagecorp Pty Ltd Photography Aerial view of South East Cape, Tasmania © APL/Yann Arthus-Bertrand harvesting the For Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra Managing Director Nicholas Heyward Artistic Administrator Anthony Peluso solstice thunders Orchestra Manager Peter Kilpatrick Marketing Manager Wes Roach Australian Music Program Director Richard Mills www.tso.com.au Recorded 26-30 June 2000 in the Odeon Theatre, Hobart in the presence of the composer. Scores are available from the Australian Music Centre. For more information about Gordon Kerry, please visit www.gordonkerry.com ൿ 2004 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. © 2004 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Made in Australia. All rights of the owner of copyright reserved. Any copying, renting, lending, diffusion, public performance or broadcast of this record without the authority of the copyright owner is prohibited. TASMANIAN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Composing is a very practical activity, and Tasmania Festival. Alban Berg’s Chamber Gordon Kerry is nothing if not a professional at Concerto for violin, piano, and 13 instruments was his craft. Each of the pieces on this CD shows also on the program, and Kerry recalls a varying aspects of a developed musical style. conversation with then-concertmaster Barbara There are common features in the ways in Jane Gilby ‘about how much she enjoyed playing a which the musical materials, while shaping work where the virtuoso role was shared around, themselves into a memorable world in each and there was so much interaction between composition, are articulated by devices which soloists and individual members of the orchestra.’ adapt themselves to each circumstance and idea Gordon Kerry b. 1961 and promote structural coherence. Like most The Cello Concerto Kerry wrote for Truls Mørk artisans, Kerry works to commissions and with and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra thus 1 Nocturne for double chamber orchestra 11’11 particular occasions for performance in mind. became a virtuoso piece for the cello, but one 2 Concerto for cello, strings and percussion 14’31 Each of these pieces was conceived with the where each member of the orchestra of strings Sue-Ellen Paulsen cello knowledge of who would first play them – the and percussion is required to play in a solo Nocturne, for example, was commissioned by capacity. Writing for the Norwegian cellist came 3 Bright Meniscus 8’54 Youth Music Australia and written during Kerry’s about in a happy way when Truls Mørk, in a TSO 4 Heart’s-Clarion for trumpet and strings 13’21 Peggy Glanville-Hicks Fellowship. It was concert where he was soloist, heard the 1994 Geoffrey Payne trumpet composed specifically for the instrumental premiere of Gordon Kerry’s harvesting the complement available at the 1995 Summer solstice thunders (commissioned by the ABC), 5 harvesting the solstice thunders 12’35 Academy, a group of Australia’s finest advanced and at dinner afterwards expressed his interest Total Playing Time 61’03 student instrumentalists conducted by Brett in playing any work Kerry might write for him. Dean. ‘The forces available,’ Kerry explains, Kerry wrote this concerto supported by the ‘practically amounted to an orchestra of Classical Music Fund of the Australia Council and it was Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra proportions and disposition, but considering that premiered with Truls Mørk in Hobart in 1996. The David Porcelijn conductor the focus of Summer Academy is chamber composer is delighted that the TSO’s wonderful music, I chose to divide the ensemble into two. Principal, Sue-Ellen Paulsen, agreed to make this Each contains a wind quartet and a string octet, recording. This concerto is strikingly successful with the solo piano acting as a kind of bridge.’ in combining the demands of virtuosity (as in The context in which a composer hears his own the three short cadenzas it contains, the first music played can be suggestive: when Kerry emerging from the solo cello’s introduction on a was about to begin composing his Cello richly resonant open C string, the third making a Concerto he heard the Tasmanian Symphony conclusion to the piece) with the sense of the Orchestra play his Nocturne in its New Music soloist as first among equals. The orchestral 2 3 strings, often as soloists, enter into dialogue opinion. Though his Nocturne’s challenging idiom landscapes, but also because the term meniscus effects, give Kerry an eagerly exploited range of with the solo cello in often intricate polyphonic reflects a higher expectation of its first vividly evokes surface tension. Something that additional combinations of sounds and ideas, and, textures, and they too are called upon to push performers, Kerry could nevertheless have seems still and calm, like the surface of water, is by contrast with Schoenberg’s relentlessly tense the boundaries of their instruments: unpitched echoed Schoenberg’s words ‘here, a new in fact the product of a complex of energies.’ expressionism, Kerry’s achievement is to pass writing, randomly repeated figures, high spiritual and intellectual basis can be created for Of all the pieces on this CD, Bright Meniscus rapidly from passion to meditation and back. harmonics, col legno and quarter tones. The art; here, young people can be given the is perhaps the one where Kerry’s music Geoffrey Payne and his instrument inevitably interventions of tuned percussion are all the opportunity of learning about the new fields of most beautifully synthesises Romantic and expression and the means suitable for these.’ suggested the last trump, but in writing Heart’s- more telling for being so brief. Tubular bells impressionist elements such as the opening’s Much the same could be said about audiences Clarion, Kerry wanted ‘to avoid the merely announce the first faster section. Then, at the ‘luminous’ octaves, reminiscent of Richard of listeners. Perhaps this was in Kerry’s mind apocalyptic’. The title, from the Jesuit poet Gerard end of the ‘slow movement’, the glint of high Strauss’ Aus Italien. The fast wind writing with when he chose to make Bright Meniscus Manley Hopkins’ That Nature is an Heraclitean percussion announces a nodal point, described which this contrasts will be readily recognised as commissioned in 1997 by the Canberra Fire, and of the Comfort of the Resurrection, by the composer as ‘high, seraphic D flat major part of Kerry’s distinctive sound world. Symphony Orchestra unashamedly use the does have apocalyptic connotations: chords, with the cello repeatedly trying to common chords of the diatonic system – that, The titles of several of these pieces are invitations escape through upward-rising glissandos’. and the fact that the professional but part-time … the Resurrection, to enter into Gordon Kerry’s world of reading, of orchestra might find such an idiom rewarding to A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, Another virtuoso, trumpeter Geoffrey Payne, experience, of imagination. His word-windows put across to its public. joyless days, dejection. was to be featured in Heart’s-Clarion, in which into that world are not manifestos, nor do they Across my foundering deck shone he would be joined by the strings of Brett Kelly’s Here, however, another practical dimension was prescribe a way of listening, though they enrich A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, Academy of Melbourne (they premiered the decisive: the blank sheet of music paper as he and stimulate it. Nocturnes, for Kerry ‘are and mortal trash piece, a Victoria Commission, in 1998). ‘It was began to compose the piece for Canberra set traditionally restful or meditative pieces, but Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire, tempting at first to write a straightforwardly Gordon Kerry thinking of ways to relate it to the night is also the time of dreams (good and bad), leave but ash: flashy piece of virtuosity…but the trumpet can city. ‘I remembered reading a poem entitled passion, fear and various other emotions.’ In a flash, at a trumpet crash, also be a profoundly lyrical instrument; given Canberra in April … by J R Rowland, which The intensity of Kerry’s music is equally found in I am all at once what Christ is, that I was working with the comparatively begins with a beautiful evocation of the the restlessness of the more fitful melodies, since he was what I am … restricted palette and mass of the string landscape in which Canberra sits: as in the serenity of night thought, where longer orchestra, I decided to explore that side of melodies tend to prevail. The expanded chamber ‘The image as used here,’ writes Kerry ‘is more things as well.’ A restriction can be a source of ...distances immense music dimension of the ensemble recalls generally one of hope. The piece is dedicated to clarity and strength. And glowing at the rim, as if the land Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No.1, with Were floating, like the round leaf of a water-plant my sister Dianne who at the time of its Schoenberg, who said there was plenty of good In a bright meniscus. its constantly changing textures and the composition and premiere was bravely fighting a music still to be composed in C major, emergence of smaller groups. Kerry’s polyphony fatal disease.’ The confirmation of hope comes composed his first purely tonal work for 28 The image is a powerful one, both in its sense is sometimes antiphonal and sometimes in the coda, where a series of common chords years, the Suite for string orchestra, for ‘college’ of sweeping vistas that are so common in horizontal, across the two groups. The varied supports the trumpet’s heart-easing, but twelve- orchestras, of whose standards he had a high Canberra, and the luminosity of such interactions, playing as it were with stereo note, melody.