concert 1
Sunday 15 April, 5:00 pm

<p>Good Shepherd Chapel, St Heliers St, Abbotsford</p>

Tickets

For tickets call Astra on (03) 9326 5424, or

Harmonic Labyrinth

In APRIL and JUNE, two significant string chamber works by the late Keith Humble are heard among two contrasting networks of choral music. Humble’s String Trio, written in Paris in the 1950s, belongs in the Germanic expressive tradition of Mozart and Schoenberg. The string quartet Four All Seasons of nearly 40 years later is influenced more by American ideas of a continuous sonic environment and variable open forms.

Concert Head: 

The April 15 concert at the Chapel of the Abbotsford Convent completes the Astra Choir’s cycle of Max Reger’s monumental Three Motets Op.110. Composers from other national origins – Romania, Argentina, Italy and Greece – take up different creative stances towards the cultural tradition of the German chorale and other poetic texts. Dan Dediu’s Harmonic Labyrinth and Fugue sets a sonnet of Goethe, whose famous opening words – “Nature and Art, they seem to flee apart, but then, before you know it, find each other” might be contra-factured in our time as “things sacred and secular, they seem....”

Concert Support: 

Natasha Conrau violin, Zachary Johnston violin, Phoebe Green viola,
Alister Barker cello, Nicholas Synot cello, Calvin Bowman organ
Kim Bastin, Peter Dumsday, Joy Lee keyboards
The Astra Choir with soloists
conducted by John McCaughey

Dan Dediu, Harmonic Labyrinth & Fugue (1999)
Keith Humble, String Trio (1953)
Max Reger, Ach Herr, strafe mich nicht, motet Op.110/2 (1911)
Constantin Silvestri, Night and Dreams (1929)
Mauricio Kagel, The Mutation (1972)
Filippo Perocco, Ich ruf zu dir (2017) 1st performance
Francesco Zorzini, Omnes enim (2017)
Stathis Giftakis, Hilf dem Schwachen! (2017)
Max Reger, O wie selig seid ihr, chorale cantata (1904)