Concert 3
Sunday 29 October, 5:00 pm

Collingwood Town Hall, Hoddle Street, Abbotsford VIC

NEIL KELLY, Works 1991-2021

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.