"Plain Sailing in Shore's Heavy Weather"
Australian Art Orchestra, Iwaki Auditorium, October 27
On Saturday night a storm raged inside the Iwaki Auditorium: it rained crotchests and quavers to the point that everyone was saturated with music. The Australian Art Orchestra is back in town. This time around, the program was a retrospective of its output, with most of the repertoire coming from the mid-1990s. Howard Shore's Orbit was the exception, receiving its world premiere at the concert.
Shore was commissioned by the Melbourne Festival to write a short piece for the orchestra. It is a rarity to hear original concert works by Shore as he concentrates o film music. His scores have supported films, including The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia and Mrs Doubtfire. Editing commitments for the long-awaited film Lord of the Rings prevented Shore attending the premiere. Shore has long admired the music of jazz composer and saxophonist Ornette Coleman, and has worked with him. Paul Grabowsky, director of the orchestra, also has a strong interest in Coleman's free form of jazz. It appears that admiration for this jazz musician clinched the association between Shore and Grabowsky.
Coleman has divided the world between those who praise him for his structural elements within free jazz, ad those who think that his work is the personification of 'anti-music'. It can not be said that Shore's Orbit is an imitation of Coleman's style though the new work's strong syntax does have correlations with the jazzman's output.
The premiere revealed a work that is divided into many subsections in which each part allows for an individual or individuals to be in the spotlight. It is exposed and challenging music, and it highlighted the superb talent that lies within the orchestra.
A moody, dark work, Orbit rarely achieves high energy, save for the last few pages. Shore is not aiming at orchestral bombast, but at ensemble nuance. The work has been appropriately named as the spotlight orbits the players illuminating different musical dimensions. There were certainly some unusual effects from both the trumpet and trombone, and yet these improvised statements felt part of, rather than divorced from, the main body of the work.
Orbit has strength of character that should see it remain in the orchestra's active repertoire. Grabowsky's group maintains the aim of bringing the jazz and classical worlds into closer association. Even aspects of non-Western music get a periodic look in. It is a daunting task. To this end, Grabowsky has composed work that has both jazz and classical characteristics. Some of his pieces in the crossover genre have not worked, but his concerto from the early 1990s is one that does find an interesting balance.
The solo piano part was written for the classically trained Michael Kieran Harvey. Grabowsky introduced Harvey as a 'hero of Australian music'. This statement received hearty applause, and rightly so, as Harvey together with Bernadette Harvey-Balkus recently received the performance prize from the Australian Music Centre for their rendition of a two-piano work, Oscillations, by Nigel Westlake.
In a strenuous display, Harvey worked the complete range of the piano and occasionally hit the pitch extremes of the instrument with the palms of his hands. Such techniques might be a little dated, but the classical conceived piano line was in complete, though satisfying, contrast to the more jazz-infused orchestral part. Grabowsky's Five Questions can only be identified within the jazz field as it is basically five set-ups for different improvising groups.
The most interesting coalition was between the guitar (Willy Zygier), double bass (Gary Costello) and violin (John Rodgers) as the players physically intertwined their instruments. Alister Spence's Green Phoenix on Yellow Ground opened the concert. It was written for the orchestra in the mid-1990s, and highlights a number of the group's musicians.
Even though the Iwaki Auditorium was at times too resonant, the orchestra presented a quality performance that was agreeable in both the jazz and classical fraternities.
- The Age (Joel Crotty)
