Graeme KOEHNE Inflight Entertainment

555847 bk Koehne US 5/01/2005 02:35pm Page 5 Sydney Symphony Graeme The Sydney Symphony is Australia’s largest and busiest orchestra. Established in 1932, the Sydney Symphony has evolved into one of the world’s finest orchestras as Sydney has become one of the world’s greatest cities. Many of KOEHNE the world’s finest artists have appeared with the orchestra including Georg Szell, Sir Thomas Beecham, Otto Klemperer and Igor Stravinsky, Lorin Maazel and Charles Dutoit. As Chief Conductor and Artistic Director from 1993 to 2003, Edo de Waart took the Sydney Symphony to a new level of excellence. He was succeeded in 2004 Inflight Entertainment by Gianluigi Gelmetti. Powerhouse • Elevator Music Takuo Yuasa Diana Doherty, Oboe Currently the Principal Guest Conductor of the Ulster Orchestra in Northern Ireland, the highly regarded Japanese Sydney Symphony • Takuo Yuasa conductor Takuo Yuasa regularly performs throughout Europe and the Far East. He has held positions as Principal Conductor of the Gumma Symphony Orchestra in Japan, Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and his success with the Ulster Orchestra in Belfast has seen a third extension of his contract there. He has a most successful recording career and he is an exclusive Naxos Artist for whom he has recorded with the Sydney Symphony, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland and in Budapest, as well as with the Ulster Orchestra. He has earned many fine reviews and particular acclaim in the Penguin Guide for a wide range of repertoire, with music by Britten and Rawsthorne, Honegger and Vieuxtemps, Webern and Schoenberg, from Macdowell to Macmillan, Schubert to Rimsky-Korsakov, Pärt, Górecki, Glass and Nyman, with a newly emerging strand of music from Japanese composers such as Yashiro, Moroi and Yamada. Takuo Yuasa was born in Osaka, where he studied piano, cello, flute and clarinet from an early age. At eighteen he left Japan to study in the United States at the University of Cincinnati, where he completed a Bachelor Degree in Theory and Composition. He later moved to Europe to study conducting with Igor Markevich in France, then with Hans Swarowsky at the Hochschule in Vienna and with Franco Ferrara in Siena before he became assistant to Lovro von Matacic, working with him in Monte Carlo, Milan and Vienna. Since winning a Special Award at the Fitelberg International Conducting Competition in Katowice, Poland, Takuo Yuasa has frequently conducted the major orchestras there including the Warsaw National Philharmonic and Polish Radio National Symphony Orchestras. His career has brought acclaimed appearances with major orchestras throughout Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Graeme Koehne 8.555847 5 6 8.555847 555847 bk Koehne US 5/01/2005 02:35pm Page 2 Graeme Koehne (b. 1956) relatively obscure, 1950s pop song. He liked the song, accommodated The Beat’s powerful influence… As in not a value that a contemporary composer should of imaginative excitement I get from the music I hear in Composing “Freestyle” especially admiring its construction, without realising the previous pieces of my “trilogy”, beyond the basic consider, but I think that music which does not set out to the cinema or on soundtracks into the Concert Hall.’ that it had been penned by a composer of outstanding rhythmic drive I haven’t used any of these composers’ entertain often ends up being boring. To entertain Unchained Melody, Powerhouse, Elevator Music, Tchaikovsky being early musical enthusiasms. Later, classical credentials, Alex North, but mostly he liked actual material. I’ve made some observations about the means to excite the senses and the imagination and it James Koehne Inflight Entertainment… just reading the titles, you inspired by his principal composition teacher Richard the association of ‘letting go’ which the title conveyed. ways they “use” an orchestra, and launched my piece certainly does not preclude the possibility of a more (James Koehne is brother of Graeme Koehne and would not suspect that this is a recording of ‘classical’ Meale, the imprint of Boulez and other composers of He felt he was discarding the weighty baggage of off on its own tangent. The basic material of Elevator “intellectual” engagement with musical materials. Artistic Administrator of the Adelaide Symphony music at all. It is exactly the irony Graeme Koehne the avant garde was profound. Subsequently he contemporary ideology, and letting loose with the full Music is a twelve-tone row, consisting of two In the oboe concerto, I’m aiming to bring the kind Orchestra) intends, for while he deeply appreciates the history and extended his interests to the music of Ravel and the neo- resources of his own compositional technique to create interlocking hexachords. I haven’t used any of the techniques of ‘classical music’, he laments the classicists, under the important influence of Virgil a good time for the audience, and for the orchestra. conventional twelve-tone methods of developing this separation and exclusion of influence between popular Thomson, with whom he studied in New York. All this Unchained Melody was a great success with both material, though. That’s where Baxter, Mancini and entertainment and classical tradition which has illustrates just how uncharacteristic and novel an parties, if not with critics. Koehne immediately Barry come in… which introduces a possibility I wish developed since the early twentieth century. Indeed, individual’s musical path can now be, particularly an conceived the idea of completing a trilogy of short Schoenberg had thought of - one day while playing Diana Doherty there is a polemical intention behind the use of titles like Australian musical upbringing. Indeed this is perhaps orchestral pieces exploring aspects of the musical tennis with Gershwin, perhaps.’ these, aimed at undermining the modernist stylistic the signal characteristic of ‘Australian-ness’. Joyfully language he began to conceive as the ‘vernacular’, The productive association between Graeme Diana Doherty was born in Brisbane and began studying violin, piano and oboe at the ages of six, seven and eight hegemony over contemporary classical music. With lacking a dominant musical tradition, Australians are echoing the architectural philosophy that he was Koehne, the Sydney Symphony, its Chief Conductor respectively. She studied at Queensland Conservatorium and at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, their self-deprecating edge, the titles take little digs at free to explore everything that comes our way and to studying in the work of Demetri Porphyrios, Quinlan Edo de Waart and Artistic Administrator Timothy where she was awarded the MENSA prize for top graduating student. She won the Other Instruments section of the the pretensions of contemporary composition and of synthesize our choices into a style of our own, freestyle, Terry and Leon Krier. Calnin during the course of the 1990s culminated in the ABC Instrumental and Vocal Competition and was named Most Outstanding Competitor Overall for 1985. classical music’s institutions in general. They also just as the great Australian swimmers practise. Koehne’s next work in the trilogy, first performed concerto for amplified oboe and orchestra, Inflight Receiving an Australia Council Overseas Study Grant, she studied in Zurich with Thomas Indermuhle and took provide indicators to the sources of an almost buried The fundamental musical language that Graeme by the Sydney Symphony in 1993, would move further Entertainment (1999). The piece belies all expectations courses with Maurice Bourge. She won first prizes in the International Lyceum Club Competition, the rival tradition of orchestral music in the twentieth Koehne has developed is essentially neo-classical, in away from contemporary compositional models, this of this form, or its title. It is a concerto of symphonic International Chamber Music Competition in Martigny and Prague Spring Festival Competition of 1991, where century. Contradicting the assumption that orchestral that it employs traditional compositional techniques of time germinating from a Rumba rhythm, as he has long proportions, a showpiece for orchestra as well as the she was awarded an additional prize for best interpretation of a Czech concerto, performing Martinuº. She was joint music’s twentieth century lineage has passed smoothly development and variation, and the endless expressive been a fan of the early Latin band-leader, Xavier Cugat. brilliant soloist for whom it was written, Diana Doherty. winner of the 1995 Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York. Between 1990 and 1997, Diana from Schoenberg to Webern to Boulez, for example, potential of diatonic harmony, all cloaked in richly The title, Powerhouse, was chosen in homage to Graeme Koehne’s programme note for the work Doherty was Principal Oboe in the Symphony Orchestra of Lucerne and a member of the Basler Koehne’s titles reflect an interest in such examples of imaginative orchestration. He places great emphasis on Raymond Scott, the uniquely humorous and inventive explains his unconventional approach: Kammerensemble, the Lucerne Wind Soloists and the trio La Patisserie. Her first CD of concertos by Haydn, low culture as 1950s pop tunes, cartoons and television, this aspect of his work, in the hope that audiences will composer featured in many Bugs Bunny soundtracks. ‘The oboe, by virtue of a classical association with Mozart, Martinuº and Zimmerman with the Symphony Orchestra of Lucerne was released

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