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topConcert 1 / 1a
5 pm, Sunday 6th April
St Mary Star of the Sea Church
Cnr Victoria & Howard Sts, North Melbourne
and
8 pm, Sunday 13th April
St Mary of the Angels Basilica
Cnr Yarra & Myer Sts, Geelong
'they heard a voice from the sky...
choir and poetry in conflicted times
The Astra Choir and soloists conducted by John McCaughey
Michael Bertram, MASS (2002)
soloists, choir, violoncello and organ
Graham Hair, LAMENT FOR SANTA SOPHIA (2000)
10-part choir & soloists with computer processed bells
Carlo Gesualdo, Josquin Desprez, Clemens non Papa,
MOTETS (16th century)
Bo Holten, BLAKE CHORUSES (1995)
Francesco Pavan, O VOS OMNES (2007)
A program set in two large architectural spaces in Melbourne and Geelong. The Melbourne concert marks the re-opening of the spectacular Star of the Sea Church, the second performance joins the music series at Geelong's bluestone Basilica. Two works of 21st century Australian music - by Michael Bertram and Geelong-born Graham Hair - create an expansive sonic environment with Renaissance motets and recent Danish and Italian pieces.
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Concert 2
5 pm Saturday 3rd May
ASSEMBLY HALL
160 Collins St, Melbourne
Reconstruction
a concert revisited after 30 years
The Astra Choir conducted by John McCaughey with Tristram Williams (solo trumpet)
György Ligeti,
LUX AETERNA (1966)
16-part choir
Max Reger, EIGHT SACRED SONGS, Op. 138 (1916)
on early German poems, 8-part choir
Luciano Berio, SEQUENZA 8 (1983)
solo trumpet
Hugo Wolf, SIX SACRED LIEDER (1881)
on poems by Eichendorff, choir a cappella
Wolfgang Hufschmidt, BEATITUDES (1969)
eight motets for choir
- THE DAY WILL COME!
text by Brecht, actor, voices and instruments
This 30th anniversary concert repeats the program of 27th April 1978 in Assembly Hall, the start of Astra's second historical phase as a contemporary choral organisation when John McCaughey succeeded George Logie-Smith as Musical Director in 1978.
This season also marks the 50th anniversary of the Astra Choir itself, founded by George Logie-Smith in 1958.
Ligeti's Lux aeterna opens into a choral terrain of explorative and retrospective elements. Tristram Williams is guest soloist in Berio's virtuoso trumpet Sequenza of the same era.
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Concert 3
5 pm Sunday 1 June
LITHUANIAN HOUSE
44 Errol St, North Melbourne
concertino, sonata, street fugue, folk chorus
Michael Kieran Harvey piano
Miwako Abe violin
Craig Hill clarinet - Dominic Harvey horn - Elise Millman,
bassoon
Aaron Barnden, violin - Christa Jardine, viola - Timothy Phillips
- percussion - Kim Bastin, piano
The Astra Choir conducted by John McCaughey
Martin Friedel, INVISIBLE LANDSCAPES (2008)
concertino after Calvino for piano & ensemble -
first performance
– STREET SLOGANS FROM WALTER BENJAMIN
(1995-2008)
choir, piano, instrumental obbligati
Leos Janacek, CONCERTINO (1926)
piano & ensemble
- THE WILD DUCK (1885)
choir and piano
– THE WOLF’S TRACK (1916)
melodrama/folk-tale, soloists, choir and piano
Lawrence Whiffin, PIANO SONATA No. 1 (1961 rev.2007)
solo piano - first revised performance
– REVOLUTIONARY FUGUE (2008)
choir and soloists - first performance
Mark Pollard, BEATING THE RUSTY NAIL (2007)
violin & piano
Gretry, Lully, Mehud et al, STREET SONGS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION (1789-99)
Two large new works by Melbourne composers for pianist Michael Kieran Harvey form the centre-piece of the next Astra concert at Lithuanian House, North Melbourne. The contrasting backgrounds and forms of the works – a concertino by Martin Friedel and a sonata by Lawrence Whiffin – open into a colourful landscape of choral and instrumental sound in the surrounding program.
Martin Friedel’s new concertino for pianist Michael Kieran Harvey takes its unusual scoring of piano with high strings and low winds from Janacek’s Concertino of 1926, which is also performed in the concert. Janacek achieved a unique musical character in his works, derived from his use of traditional Moravian song, folk-tale and observation of the natural world. Friedel’s new concertino, titled Invisible Landscapes, takes further inspiration from the writer Calvino and his notion of invisible cities, conjuring imagined distant places.
Lawrence Whiffin’s First Piano Sonata goes back to his period in France of the 1960’s, and is now premiered in a substantially revised form. It is accompanied by another premiere – his Revolutionary Fugue for chorus, also rewritten from an earlier tape piece for car-horns that was a reaction to the street demonstrations in the era of the Algerian conflict and the 1968 student protests. The concert extends further to the street songs of the French Revolution period 1789-99.
Violinist Miwako Abe also joins Michael Kieran Harvey in a performance of the extrovert work Beating the Rusty Nail, composed last year for them by Mark Pollard.
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concert 4
5 pm, Sunday 28 September
GASWORKS THEATRE
21 Graham Street, Albert Park
choir & percussion
Speak Percussion (Eugene Ughetti director)
The Astra Choir with soloists and keyboards conducted by John McCaughey
Elliott Carter
TO MUSIC for chorus (1937), CANTO for timpani (1966)
Johanna Beyer
THREE CHORUSES (1937), MARCH FOR 30 PERCUSSION INSTRUMENTS (1939)
Stefan Wolpe
TWO CHINESE EPITAPHS for chorus and percussion (1937)
Neil Kelly
CHORUSES FROM DISSIDENT CONSONANCES (2007)
Andrew Byrne
WHISPERS AND CRIES for voices, percussion and instruments (2008)
first performance
The coming Astra concert with choir and percussion at Gasworks Theatre forms an upbeat to the 100th birthday celebration of the composer Elliott Carter in December 2008. Music of Carter is set between works from the earlier generation of his American contemporaries and new works from younger Australian composers influenced by this heritage.
This event also provides the Australian launch of Astra’s double-CD of choral and chamber music by Johanna Beyer, recently released in the USA by New World Records. As a highly original figure of 1930s American modernism, Johanna Beyer has only recently achieved recognition seven decades after her death. This concert features both her choruses, previously premiered and recorded by the Astra Choir, and the new element of her percussion ensemble music, not previously performed in Australia. Written for John Cage’s touring ensemble in 1939, these works are among the earliest composed entirely for percussion – a vital new element of modern American music from which Elliott Carter developed many of his techniques and ideas about music.
Choral works by Beyer and Carter from 1937 are joined by a third work from the same year by Stefan Wolpe. His Chinese Epitaphs for choir and percussion originated in Palestine while he was in flight from Nazi Germany, before settling in the USA. The political tone and content of these choruses is echoed by Melbourne composer Neil Kelly’s choral settings of Lithuanian texts from the period of national liberation.
This concert continues a valuable association between the Astra Choir and the percussion ensemble Speak Percussion. The new work of the program was written specially for both groups by New York-based Australian composer Andrew Byrne. Whispers and Cries is conceived as kind of compositional mobile, in which independent modules of sound from singers and percussion instruments create changing configurations in the space of Gasworks Theatre.
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concert 5
6 pm, Saturday 15 November -
BOOKED OUT
8.15 pm, Saturday 15 November - EXTRA PERFORMANCE
6 pm, Sunday 16 November - BOOKED OUT
ELEVENTH HOUR THEATRE
170 Leicester Street Fitzroy
Shakespeare / Dostoyevsky
a collaboration with Eleventh Hour Theatre
Jerzy Kozlowski (solo bass), Jane Nolan and David Tredinnick (actors), Anne Thompson and William Henderson (directors), Kim Bastin (piano), The Astra Choir and soloists conducted by John McCaughey
Dimitry Shostakovich, FOUR VERSES OF CAPTAIN LEBYADKIN,
op. 146 (1974)
poems from The Possessed by Dostoyevsky, for bass & piano
Helen Gifford, SIX SETTINGS FROM SHAKESPEARE(1974-2006)
Songs and Dramatic Declamation for 6 solo singers -
first performance
with CHORAL SETTINGS by Igor Stravinsky
and Martin Wesley Smith,
ENACTMENTS AND READINGS by William Shakespeare and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
The final work of Shostakovich, a cycle for bass and piano after Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed has been described as a micro-opera of a unique parodistic character. It follows Jerzy Kozlowski’s sell-out Astra performance of the same composer’s Michelangelo cycle in 2006. In this concert it is woven into a larger fabric of theatre and music, with Helen Gifford’s new set of ‘declamations’ after Shakespeare and the collaboration of actors and directors from Melbourne’s adventurous theatrical voice, Eleventh Hour Theatre
Bookings essential via Astra office (9326-5424) or email: info AT astramusic DOT org DOT au
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concert 6
7 pm, Sunday 7 December
CENTRAL HALL
20 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy
Carter 100
brass ensemble, choir, percussion
Tristram Williams, Mark Skillington (trumpets),
Geoff Lierse (horn), Robert Collins, Charles MacInnes (trombones), Speak Percussion
(director Eugene Ughetti), Kim Bastin & Joan Pollock (keyboards)
The Astra Choir conducted by John McCaughey
Giovanni Gabrieli, IN ECCLESIIS (1605)
soloists, 2 choirs, brass ensemble & continuo
Elliott Carter, MUSICIANS WRESTLE EVERYWHERE
(Emily Dickinson) (1945)
– BRASS QUINTET (1974) 2 trumpets, horn & 2 trombones
– PIECES 5-8 FOR FOUR TIMPANI (1950/66)
Carl Vine, AFTER CAMPION (Thomas Campion) (1989)
3 solo voices, choir & 2 pianos
Claudio Monteverdi, MADRIGALS FROM THE FOURTH BOOK (1603)
with music by Heinrich Schütz, Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli and Edgard Varčse.
The 100th birthday on December 11, 2008 of Elliott Carter - still alive and composing in his centenary year – is celebrated on the preceding weekend in this second of two concerts. One of the composer’s most brilliant and challenging ensemble works, the Brass Quintet, provides a focal point among the vast context of music and poetry, in American and other traditions, from which Carter developed his compositional language.
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