In 2011 Astra celebrated its sixtieth year
Across six concerts
And with many sixnesses!
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Details below are of Astra's 2011 program
5 pm Saturday 16 and 5 pm Sunday 17 April
ELM STREET HALL, 4 Elm St, North Melbourne
FRANZ LISZT 200 – voices and multiple keyboards
Franz Liszt,
VIA CRUCIS - 14 Stations of the Cross (1878)
piano, organ, harmonium and voices
with
Liszt, BEATITUDES
(1859)
solo bass and choir
David Howell, APOCALYPSE
(2006)
six solo voices
first
performance
Peter De Jager,
FRAMES OF THOUGHT (2010)
for piano, organ, harpsichord and celeste
first performance
Jerzy Kozlowski, bass
Kim Bastin,
Peter Dumsday,
Joy Lee and
Sonya
Lifschitz, keyboards
The Astra
Choir, conducted by
John McCaughey
From the heart of the 19th century, Franz Liszt invented the most public and the most private forms of musical art for the twentieth – the international concert star who also used music as a vehicle of experiment and meditation. His 200th anniversary is the occasion for one of his most radical pieces, VIA CRUCIS – not performed or published until the 1920s. The fourteen Stations of the Cross are sketched in brief graphic images for keyboards and interpolated voices. In the refurbished surroundings of Astra’s former home at Elm Street Hall, Liszt’s progressive music is heard alongside two new works from younger Melbourne composers – 6 solo voices in David Howell’s Apocalypse, and multiple keyboards early and modern from Peter de Jager.
Listen to John McCaughey discussing late Liszt on ABC-RN's Music Show.
6 pm Saturday 28 May & 6 pm Sunday 29 May
ELEVENTH HOUR THEATRE, 170 Leicester Street, Fitzroy
PIANO ALONE – a recital from six decades
Lawrence Whiffin, PIANO SONATA No.3
(2010)
first performance
with
Australian piano works from the six decades of Astra’s history
Keith Humble (1959), Helen Gifford (1966), Warren Burt (1971), Mark Pollard (1983), Marguerite Boland (1994), Tom Henry (2006)
Michael Kieran Harvey, piano
Astra concerts continue their 60th year of celebrations in 2011 with an all-Australian piano recital given by one of the country’s leading contemporary performers. The program is given twice, in the fine acoustics and intimate space of Eleventh Hour Theatre in Fitzroy.
The pianist Michael Kieran Harvey has been a
driving factor for new Australian piano works, both nationally and across
the world, since winning the international Ivo Pogorelich Competition in
1993 with Carl Vine’s First Piano Sonata. In these two Astra performances he
premieres a large-scale new sonata, written for him by Lawrence Whiffin in
2010, the composer’s 80th year. The new work is itself a celebration of
Harvey’s brilliant virtuosity, put to work in a richly varied environment of
styles, which extend from the grand contrapuntal tradition of Bach and
Schoenberg to a well-known
French comic opera tune – with a pervasive
sound of chiming bells throughout the work.
The new sonata is set against the background of the last six decades – the 60 years of Astra’s existence. Extending from Lawrence Whiffin’s colleague Keith Humble in the 1950’s to his former student Tom Henry in the 2000’s, the six works speak of changing times and styles, and of the network of personal and artistic factors which are the essence of musical history.
Listen to Lawrence Whiffin and Michael Kieran Harvey discussing the concert on ABC-RN's Music Show
5 pm Sunday 12 June
CARMELITE CHURCH, cnr Richardson & Wright Streets, Middle Park
DOLOROSA / GAUDIOSA – choir, organ, recorder, electronics
Dan Dediu, STABAT MATER (1995)
ten madrigals for choir a cappella, after Gesualdo and Verdi
first complete performance
Carl Vine, THEY SHALL LAUGH AND SING (2008)
choir and organ
with
Steve Stelios Adam, ET DØGN - ONE DAY(2006)
solo recorders and computer
Anthony Briggs, SANCTUS
(2006)
choir a cappella
Steve Stelios Adam and
Michael Hewes,
NEW WORKS (2011)
recorders, voices and electro-acoustic sound
first performance
Gesualdo, Verdi, Gombert, Stravinsky & Rautavaara, Marian motets
Genevieve Lacey, recorders
The Astra Choir and soloists conducted by
John
McCaughey
In one of Melbourne’s most remarkable acoustic spaces, this concert brings together choral and solo voices with renowned recorder player Genevieve Lacey and two of Australia’s leading electro-acoustic practitioners Steve Stelios Adam and Michael Hewes. The program expands outward from new Australian works to the world premiere of a striking large-scale work from the 1990s by Romania’s leading composer Dan Dediu.
2 pm Saturday 24 September
IWAKI AUDITORIUM, ABC, 120-130 Southbank Boulevard
in association with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
ANDREW BYRNE IN PROFILE
choir, percussion & solo piano
Andrew Byrne,
WHISPERS AND CRIES (2008)
solo voices, choir, percussion
quartet, piano and organ
A RINGING WORLD (2011)
for percussion quartet, first performance
UNFOLDING (2011)
for solo
piano, first performance
Michael Kieran Harvey, piano
Speak Percussion – artistic
director
Eugene Ughetti
The Astra Choir and soloists conducted by
John McCaughey
This concert in cooperation with the ABC focusses on the work of a single Australian composer, Andrew Byrne. It brings together the Astra Choir and two other major forces in contemporary Australian music – Speak Percussion directed by Eugene Ughetti, and solo pianist Michael Kieran Harvey. The performance will form a broadcast on ABC-FM, and includes the premieres of two new works specifically composed for the occasion.
From his long-time base in New York, Andrew Byrne has developed a distinctive musical voice in an international environment. His CD “White Bone Country” – evoking sound-images of the Australian desert – was released by New World Records in New York in 2009 to widespread critical praise.
Byrne’s music draws together various influences in an original way, from the Minimalist rhythms of experimental American music to a diversity of traditions outside western art-music. This program opens with the 2008 work WHISPERS AND CRIES, a large ‘concert-mobile’ written for the Astra Choir with keyboards and percussion. The two new works were composed for the other performers of this concert. A percussion quartet creates a ‘ringing world’ of vibrating metal around and out of the players’ actions. The virtuoso solo piano work unleashes continuous waves of sustained sound from constantly shifting palpitations.
6 pm Saturday 5 November & 6 pm Sunday 6 November
ELEVENTH HOUR THEATRE, 170 Leicester Street, Fitzroy - NOTE CHANGE OF DATE AND PROGRAM
ERKKI VELTHEIM – violin
A solo recital with works by J.S. Bach and John Rodgers, and improvisations by Erkki Veltheim
with the Astra Improvising Choir
Owing to changed circumstances, an alteration of date and program became necessary for Concert 5 of Astra’s 60th season in 2011. In place of the advertised concert, Astra is delighted to announce a solo recital by violinist Erkki Veltheim, to be presented twice, one week later than the previously announced concert.
Erkki Veltheim is widely known as a major talent in a new generation of Australian music – active as performer, improviser and composer in an extraordinary range of styles and contexts. As violist and violinist he has performed internationally with some of the leading ensembles and orchestras in Europe, and across Australia in groups from the Australian Chamber Orchestra to jazz and his own band Roadkill Rodeo.
Most recently his composition Tract, commissioned for the Adelaide Festival in 2010, was performed in Melbourne at a concert of the Australian Art Orchestra and the Australian National Academy of Music. This work, which boldly combined a large ensemble score and a live-performed Aboriginal song cycle from Arnhem Land, also included an active role for the composer as improvising violinist. His concert for Astra will be his first solo recital on this instrument and extends from Bach’s Chaconne and solo works by the renowned Brisbane-based violinist-composer John Rodgers to further improvisations.
4 pm Saturday 3 December & 6 pm Sunday 4 December
NORTHCOTE TOWN HALL, corner High Street and Westbourne Grove, Northcote
Works by JS Bach (arr. Dieter Schnebel), Johannes Brahms, Keith Humble, Clemens non Papa, Francisco Peñalosa, Kevin March and Franz Liszt
with
Neil Kelly,
CYCLE (2011)
choir, solo violin, celeste and percussion
commissioned for Astra’s 60th year
first performance
Steve Hodgson,
AT THE END OF THINGS (2011)
poem by Arthur
Edward Waite, for solo bass, choir and instruments
first performance
Martin
Friedel,
... YOU SIMPLY GO OUT (2011)
poem by
Raymond Carver, for solo soprano and saxophone
first performance
Filippo Perocco,
TUBA MIRUM (2011)
text from DIes Irae,
for choir a capella
first performance
J.S. Bach,
DER GEIST HILFT UNSER SCHWACHHEIT AUF (1729)
motet,
for double choir, organ and continuo
Jerzy Kozlowski, bass
The Astra Choir, soloists and
instrumental ensemble conducted by
John McCaughey
ASTRA’S 60TH CONCERT SEASON concludes with a kaleidoscopic celebration of music from the Renaissance to the present day. Each half of the program is led off by 60 year-old composers – J.S. Bach, with his Art of Fugue arranged by Dieter Schnebel as a contemporary choral sculpture, Johannes Brahms with a late canon, and Keith Humble with his Nocturne written as a tribute to the Astra Choir in 1988.
No less than four works are premiered in the concert, including two larger choral works written especially for the occasion. Steven Hodgson’s At the End of Things places solo bass Jerzy Kozlowski at the centre of a choral-instrumental tapestry. Neil Kelly’s 60 Cycles is a setting of a famous Nietzsche text for three solo sopranos, choir and instrumental ensemble.
Other first performances include Martin Friedel’s new songs on poems of Raymond Carver, written for solo soprano and saxophone. From Venice, Italy comes Filippo Perocco’s Tuba mirum, a vision of the end of time from the mediaeval ‘Dies irae’.
The 2011 season concludes where it began, with music of the bicentenary composer Franz Liszt – whose ‘Chorus Mysticus’ from the Faust Symphony sets the ultimate last words that close Goethe’s Faust Part 2: “All that is transient / Is but a parable…”.
Bookings - www.trybooking.com.au/YBZ or phone Astra office - 9326-5424
