John McCaughey: Musical Director
Saturday 5 November, 5 pm & 8 pm
Church of All Nations, 180 Palmerston Street, Carlton VIC 3053
Anti-World & World presents new works by Anthony Pateras and Erkki Veltheim, continuing a two-decade collaboration that has explored the porous margins of composition, improvisation, musique concrete and psychoacoustics via dozens of performances, recordings and texts.
This concert features premieres of two Pateras/Veltheim duos (Harpsichord/Mandolin and Banjo/Virginal) and two electro-acoustic quintet compositions, for which they are joined by some of Australia’s leading exponents of new music: Alexander Garsden (Guitar), Chloë Sobek (Violone) and Lizzy Welsh (Viola d’Amore).
Pateras and Veltheim’s shared worldview has compelled them to employ music as a barricade against the inescapable drive towards consumption, convenience and commodification. In this concert, they are interrogating our communal corporeal and psychic absorption by internet-based technology, informed by key thinkers of techno-skepticism from the last 10 years, such as Nicholas Carr, Evgeny Morozov, Isabelle Stengers and Shoshana Zuboff.
Sunday 4 December, 5 pm
Good Shepherd Chapel, Abbotsford Convent,
1 St Heliers Street, Abbotsford
BOOK NOW
Heinrich Schütz, German Requiem (1635), soloists and choir
George Dreyfus, Does He Still Live, Josef Geisel? (2022), choir a cappella world premiere
with
Ruth Crawford, Chant I, To an unkind god (1931), female chorus
John J. Becker, Sanctus, Agnus Dei (1933), male chorus
Helen Gifford. Everything is plundered (2001), soloists and choir, poem by Anna Akhmatova
Beat Furrer, Enigma 1 (2007), 4 choir groups, text by Leonardo da Vinci
Arnold Schoenberg, Peace on Earth (1907), 8-part-choir choir
Astra's concluding choral concert of the 2022 season weaves music from varied historical conflicts around a world premiere from Australia's dean of composers, George Dreyfus.
Composed in his 94th year, the new work for chorus is a memorial for Josef Geisel, a relative in the Rhineland of Nazi Germany who remained, and disappeared without a trace, when George Dreyfus and his Jewish family escaped to Melbourne in 1933.
Heinrich Schütz's celebrated German Requiem of 1635 likewise evokes a period of maximum destruction, the Thirty Years War, making musical life almost impossible, as the composer stresses in a prefatory poem to the score.
Explorative American choral works from the 1930s broaden the context, while Melbourne's Helen Gifford paints a graphic choral soundscape around a poem from the 1920s by Russian Anna Akhmatova.
Schoenberg's Peace on Earth, one of the grand choral creations of the 20th century, carries the angelic refrain "And on Earth peace” through varied textures of conflict toward concluding fanfares of optimism.
Short aural-video programs for online listening and viewing, assembled from the Astra Concerts archive from the 1950s to the present, and introducing new studio works from composers in the period of COVID-19.
Watch and listen to other Quarter-Hour Concerts
© ASTRA CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY (INC.) ABN 41 255 197 577
Get updates about our season program, subscriptions, publishing and more.
Become a Member or Donate
Short aural-video programs for online listening and viewing, assembled from the Astra Concerts archive from the 1950s to the present, and introducing new studio works from composers in the period of COVID-19.
"We, like Salangan swallows..." (New World Records 2018)
Sticky Melodies (New World Records 2008)
Astra on Soundcloud (From Romania - Astra concert, June 2019 - and more)
Music always interacts with the architecture in which it is heard ...
Sound in Space documents with images and recordings how musical and architectural designs have formed an interactive partnership over three decades of Astra events.
