Collingwood Town Hall, Hoddle Street, Abbotsford VIC
A Retrospective, and a Russian guitar
with Andree Greenwell, Schumann, Nietzsche, Berg and Alma Mahler
Concert Head:
Neil Kelly, a founding member of the international artist-composer collective Slave Pianos, has a long career of cross-disciplinary work on historical and cultural themes of East Europe. This concert brings together a new multi-movement work for choir and ensemble with a retrospective collection.
Concert Support:
choir, solo voices, semistrunka Russian guitar, chamber ensemble of strings & winds
A new commission, Sing for me my seven string companion, centres on a rare instrument: a 7-string semistrunka Russian guitar from the early 20th Century recently acquired by Neil Kelly, which formerly belonged to the legendary Don Cossack Choir 1925-1939. There are a number of inscriptions on the guitar – melodic fragments, quotations. Extending from these, the new work aims to harness the guitar's history and musical energy, building a choral-instrumental fabric to capture elements of the Eastern European folk singing genre.