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Jerzy Kozlowski Michael Kieran Harvey New Song Cycles

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Jerzy Kozlowski Michael Kieran Harvey New Song Cycles ASTRA 2010 6 pm, Saturday 19 June, 6 pm, Sunday 20 June ELEVENTH HOUR THEATRE Fitzroy, Melbourne Jerzy Kozlowski bass Michael Kieran Harvey piano new song cycles: Michael Bertram at 75, Lawrence Whiffin at 80 Michael Bertram UNDERGROUND SONGS (2008) first performance Everyone Sang (Siegfried Sassoon) Trail all your pikes ( Anne Finch) He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven ( W.B.Yeats) I saw a peacock with a fiery tail (Anon. 17thC) Lawrence Whiffin PIANO SONATA NO.1 (1961/2006) I. Allegro molto II. Andante – Theme and Variations I N T E R V A L Lawrence Whiffin TIME STEALS SOFTER (2009) poems by George Genovese first performance Time Steals Softer (I) Walking Patriots Two Lives A Poet's Office Medi-Whinge 2004 Time Steals Softer (II) UNDERGROUND SONGS / TIME STEALS SOFTER … Sets of songs provoke a special relation between music and poetry – the choice and the order of poems has a formative influence on the trajectory and characters of the music that enters into their space. In the two new song cycles of this concert another influence is at work as well: the voice of the singer himself. Jerzy Kozlowski’s singing has become a well-known part of Astra programs over a long time and a wide terrain, from mediaeval music and Monteverdi to Reger (Eichendorrf), Busoni (Faust), Elisabeth Lutyens (Auden) and Helen Gifford (Shakespeare). Specifically, his two previous Astra solo recitals performing the late song-cycles of Shostakovich (Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky) made a remarkable impression for the possibilities of the medium of bass voice and piano, and stimulated both Michael Bertram and Lawrence Whiffin to compose new sets of songs particularly for him. Michael Bertram’s choice of texts comes from Poems on the Underground, a program that has run in London since the early 1980’s, whereby six poems are chosen for display in tube train carriages for each season of the year, thus ‘performing’ for several million travellers each day. The four celebrated poems of these songs offer widely differing voices and forms of continuity for musical consideration, from the strophic opening of Sassoon to the trick phrasing of the final poem, whose ambiguous grammar allows differing readings across lines. Michael Bertram’s long musical background began as a fulltime chorister at Lichfield Cathedral between the ages of eight and thirteen, continuing from 1952 in Australia with piano studies in Perth and later with Roy Shepherd in Melbourne. After performing and broadcasting as a solo pianist for some years, he studied composition with Felix Werder and Peter Tahourdin, and since the 1970s has produced music performed among others by Keith Humble, Margaret Haggart and Michael Kieran Harvey. His previous vocal works have included a song cycle after Rupert Brooke and Robert Graves, settings of Hopkins and Rossetti, a Mass premiered by the Astra Choir in 2005, and a chamber opera after Ionesco’s Le Roi se Meurt . Lawrence Whiffin’s cycle Time Steals Softer departs from the traditional shorter lyric forms of Schubert or Schoenberg, embracing larger bodies of words in a process of collaboration with their author: The poet George Genovese and I met by chance, leading to a close friendship and collaboration that has so far netted three musical projects based on texts by him. The present song cycle consists of eight songs, generally centred around concepts of time, though they wilfully stray into political and medical areas with a strong dose of ironic humour and philosophical reflection. In choosing the poems to set, composer and poet aimed at achieving maximum contrasts of mood. Two entirely different settings of the short and gentle poem Time Steals Softer begin and end the work. My thanks to Thomas Henry for his invaluable advice regarding the order of the songs. The composer’s 80th year is also an opportunity to experience a half-century of musical evolution between first maturity and the present. The Piano Sonata No.1, written in 1961 and revised in 2006, witnesses to the great energy and confidence of its era. It was produced towards the end of a five-year period of study in Paris with René Leibowitz, who as composer, teacher, writer and conductor was the main proponent of the Schoenberg school in fragmented post-war Europe. Described by the composer as ‘an extended essay in serialism’, the sonata celebrates the possibilities of 12-tone music to create a new sound-world, as well as to reactivate the older tonal forms of sonata and variation, and the textures of polyphony. Following the CD recording of Sonata No.2, the first sonata will shortly be recorded by pianist Michael Kieran Harvey, for whom Lawrence Whiffin is currently at work on his Sonata No.3. – JMcC Michael Bertram 2 UNDERGROUND SONGS (2008) 1. Everyone Sang Everyone suddenly burst out singing; And I was filled with such delight As prisoned birds must find in freedom, Winging wildly across the white Orchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight. Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted; And beauty came like the setting sun: My heart was shaken with tears; and horror Drifted away... O, but Everyone Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done. April 1919 – Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) 2. Trail all your pikes Trail all your pikes, dispirit every drum. March in a slow procession from afar, Ye silent, ye dejected men of war! Be still the hautboys, and the flute be dumb! Display no more, in vain the lofty banner. For see! where on the bier before ye lies The pale, the fall’n, th’untimely sacrifice To your mistaken shrine, to your false idol Honour! – Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720) 3. He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. – William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) 4. I saw a peacock with a fiery tail I saw a peacock with a fiery tail, I saw a blazing comet drop down hail, I saw a cloud wrapped with ivy round, I saw an oak creep upon the ground, I saw a pismire swallow up a whale, I saw the sea brimful of ale, I saw a Venice glass full fifteen feet deep, I saw a well full of men's tears that weep, I saw red eyes all of a flaming fire, I saw a house bigger than the moon and higher, I saw the sun at twelve o'clock at night, I saw the man that saw this wondrous sight. – Anonymous, Westminster-Drollery 1671 Lawrence Whiffin PIANO SONATA NO.1 (1961, revised 2006) I. Allegro molto II. Andante — Theme and Variations INTERVAL 3 Lawrence Whiffin TIME STEALS SOFTER (2009) poems by George Genovese 1. Time Steals Softer (I) a cappella Time steals softer than the light, spreads beyond a nascent vision scanning open sky; unfolding past horizons of an arching depth and height, time slinking slyly binds a seeing to its site... 2. Walking Time glides softer than a glance, Tock, tock, tock, tock, tock, tock... orbits with a gentler motion Under a bowl of open blue, than a pining gaze; suspending a drifting shard or two of cloud objects in the spectral lightness I trundle on the gravel of of its press, it passes frailer an old grey path and listen to than the shyest eye's caress. the sound of footfalls smack the dust; their steady falling scrunch and scuff-uff-uff-uff, Time falls softer than the night, the slide and slur of sheenless shoes, tapers to a dusky velvet's a threadbare hiss of thirsty grass calm unruffled quiet; fainter with thistles hot wind whistles through; than a trace of breath dispersing and then the loud cicada's drone, out of sight, it narrows to a the buzz of bees, a summery thrum, darkness clipped of vision's flight, the rise and fall of feet to join a darkness clipped of vision's height. and form this walking, walking metronome, this walking metronome, tock, tock, tock, tock, tock, tock, tock, tock... And in a kind of swinging dance, a dazzled stupor's rocking roll each step discovers its own place and falls to fold into a flow, a flow where thought and time and space revolve into a hazy trance, and I, the world, my tapping feet, this nuisance fly upon my cheek, all melt and meet in one embrace; while there before my downcast blur the grand mosaic at my feet unfolds beneath my spellbound stare. There go the twigs, the leaves and stones, a dying moth and cracked gum pods, a jagged rim of Styrofoam, some crinkled foil and plastic tops; there go the butts of cigarettes, a yellow fringe of sweet soursop, a corrugated iron fence, and an old discarded piece of cloth; here comes a battered oft-drink can, a sachet of tomato sauce, a plastic straw, some twisted nails, a long-forgotten threadless bolt... Now there what's that? I'll pick it up--- a copper penny, no it's not! My eyes adjust and seize instead a flattened old beer-bottle, bottle top. But then before I know or care, before I think to start to stop, it fuses in the rhythm of the flowing stream of flotsam things that glide beneath my walking feet.
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