Sad news today that The Song Company, after 42 years, is being wound up.
Its final series of concerts was of Heinrich Schutz’s Schwanengesang. Reading between the lines, I’m guessing that the imminent demise of the ensemble was already on the cards when Schutz’s “final musical testament” was programmed.
I almost went. It was a great program and a rare opportunity to hear a seminal work. But I didn’t. So I guess I was part of the problem.
Pictured is the performance I should have gone to, with the core company augmented by “young artists.”
The above object comes to my attention from time to time. It normally lives in one of my many “man drawers.”
It is the metal tip of a scabbard. The remainder of the scabbard and the sword itself are wrapped in an old towel and shoved to the back of my bedroom wardrobe.
There used to be two swords. My father and his younger brother played with them in their childhood in the 1930s on a sheep station in the Murchison (inland from Geraldton in Western Australia) . At some point, they got one each. One of my cousins told me that the other is now missing – possibly snaffled by a burglar at some point. The sword I have has a few nicks on the blade which my father told me were caused by him and his brother in their play.
The sword was made in the reign of William IV which would mean it dates from the 1830s. Possibly it belonged to an ancestor who was sent with his regiment to Wales to subdue the Rebecca Riots. These were rural protests carried out by men disguised in female attire in about 1839-1843. The ancestor married an heiress and stayed in Wales. My great-grandfather was a younger son packed off to the colonies with £1,000 in 1876 at the age of 16, the same year his eldest brother came of age and inherited. If the swords had any familial history, he must have been the one who brought them here.
Within a few years my great-grandfather joined a consortium of “squatters” and made a fortune establishing pastoral leases. I suppose my sword could have been wielded as part of that, but more likely guns did the job.
Earlier this year my nephew came to visit from Western Australia for the first time as an adult. I had toyed with passing the sword on to him but contemplating the complications he might meet in taking it home on the plane I didn’t raise the subject.
The sword is not particularly valuable. Similar swords change hands for about $300. This is not really so surprising. There must have been many such weapons made. They are basically military junk. I do not consider my sword a beautiful object. It lurks at the back of the wardrobe glowering with a stored value of malevolence.
“Did you hear the Volkmar last night?” D asked me yesterday.
I hadn’t. “Volkmar,” the rather old-fashioned name of a former-East-German friend of ours, is our private nickname for tawny frogmouths (also here). These our our favourite bird and last year were finally declared by The Guardian to be Australia’s after years of running-up. Last spring we watched a family in the park at nearby Cup and Saucer Creek. It can be difficult to spot them. Local photographer David Noble canvassed the riverine area fairly thoroughly without spotting this pair – though to be fair it was a bit away from his main search zone along the Cook’s River.
D had heard the distinctive low-pitched call (sometimes called an “oom”). He said he didn’t go outside to look for it because his torch needed recharging.
I had commented a day or so earlier at sunset at how maybe 30 noisy miners lived in the backyard trees one block down and two blocks up from our house.
D said, “Maybe we have the Volkmar here because we have so many trees.” Not in our yard, but in the backyard next door and the backyard next-door but one.
One Thursday night a few weeks back (this post has been a while in the works) to the New Theatre in Newtown to see their annual “Mardi Gras season” play, A Perfect Arrangement. I went with D and our (lesbian) friend B. For the uninitiated, the New Theatre is the surviving form of a 1930s agit-prop theatre group.
Thursday night is the cheap night. Tix were $30. Combination of that and the Mardi Gras bit produces a singular audience. Lots of frugal older gay men! I suppose I have to count myself in for that.
The play was OK. The ‘perfect arrangement’ of the title is a double marriage between a lesbian and a gay couple in order to maintain outward appearance in Washington DC in about 1950 at the time (as it soon turns out) of the “Lavender Scare.” This saw gays and (to a lesser extent lesbians and other gross moral turpitudents) targeted and purged from government service, one rationale being that they were a security risk as vulnerable to blackmail. Bob works at the State Department and Norma is his secretary. For ease of exposition here, their other halves are Jim and Millie.
The play starts with a moment when the “perfect arrangement” is being put to the test. Bob and Norma’s boss, and his wife, have come for a cocktail party. The conceit is that we are a studio audience watching an “I Love Lucy”-ish sit-com on a studio set. From time to time Millie shares domestic tips to camera in the manner of an advertising spot. It is all highly stylised in a comic laugh-a-minute kind of a way – all, fittingly, very artificial. a kind of pretence within a pretence. I found this stuff a bit hard to take – basically because the forced comedy, together with the accents which actors were obliged to assume, seemed a technical challenge too far for the cast.
At the end of the first half, B was looking at her phone and radiating her own brand of former-Eastern-Europe unenthusiasm. Forewarned by the reviews, I told her that the second half would be better.
And so it proved to be. The perfect arrangement unravelled as Bob was tasked by his boss with rooting out undesirables from the department. Plot twists came thick and fast.
Part of the perfect arrangement is that the couples have adjoining apartments with a direct communication through a cupboard (just a little bit The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe-ish). This enables a running gag as calls to make the transition through the cupboard are announced as “into the closet.” There are also a number of other predictable anachronisms. A stirring speech culminates in a denunciation of “misogyny” – the speech itself is itself plausible in context but I’m not so sure about the word. The ending, though dramatically necessary, also strikes me as a tad aspirational.
Seeing as the production has now finished its run there can be no spoiler-harm in revealing the most brilliant touch. In the course of the play, and especially the second half, as the deceptions are peeled away, the entire set, on wheels or rollers, inched itself forward each time the lights went down and then came back up (punctuated with a sound effect fulfilling a function something like the Seinfeld “chord”). At first I didn’t notice it but then it became a kind of “pinch me” moment.
Seats at the New Theatre are general admission. As things worked out, this meant that D and I went straight in as soon as the theatre opened, almost half an hour before the show was due to start. Crazy! I can never retrospectively reproach the Sunday afternoon crowd for ABCFM’s free Sunday recitals (RIP) for their zealous early arrival again, even if I put a large part of that zeal down to the natural attraction between a retired person and a free event.
But it meant that I was joined on one side by two older (than I) women. The apparently (though not necessarily*) older of the pair was up for a chat. I think it started with some small talk about the size of the theatre. Other theatres were discussed. The opera. Hansel and Gretel. At this stage my older interlocutor identified herself, in a jocular way, as “the witch.” At some point when I offered some conspicuously obscure morsel of information, she politely said (maybe with an ironic twist) I was very knowledgeable, in response to which I said “you can call me ‘Suppository.'” Which she then proceeded to do.
We had quite a lively conversation. Rusalka rated a mention. We also talked about the play at interval and after the show. By the end I was emboldened to address her as Jezibaba. At some point “Jezibaba” mentioned she had come to Australia from Germany in 1990. I have a German enthusiasm which this gratified.
So as not to leave “Jezibaba”‘s friend out I dubbed her “the detective” when she inquired about some scratches on my arm. (She observed that I either had a cat or a scrubby garden – it is the latter. There’s a particular patch near one of my worm “farms” which regularly inflicts wounds on me. I’m sure my skin is getting fragile with age.)
It was a lively and enjoyable conversation (that intimation of mortality aside) which rather left D (and B, by now) to their own devices. Eventually I had to excuse myself to join D and B outside.
I definitely took a shine to “Jezibaba.” She was such a live wire and so funny. That’s not to diss “the detective,” who wasn’t given much of a chance by either Jezibaba or me to make her own mark. In some ways the encounter was better than the play itself. I’m left regretting that I didn’t find some excuse to break the fourth wall of “Jezibaba” and “Suppository” to pursue some further acquaintance.
*Afternote: “not necessarily” unnecessary given “apparently” but I put it down to the lengths to which one feels obliged to go to avoid offending people on the question of their age.
Last Tuesday, being St Patrick’s day, to the SOH for the first night of Opera Australia’s revival of Eugene O’Negin by Balfe Tchaikovsky.
D and I saw this on its first outing back in 2014.
Back then I was a bit disconcerted by director Kasper Holten’s use of dancing “doubles” for the “young” Eugene & Tatyana.
This time the doubles gave me no trouble. It may be that, as Mr Antmann in Limelight says, the use of the doubles was cut back. I think also because I just took them in my stride as a kind of extra information without trying to make much of them. I am less of the jaded sophisticate I was in 2014. This time, quenching a thirst, I allowed myself to become enthralled by the wonder of live performance. To be honest, I hardly worried about the story. I had not properly refreshed my knowledge of the text or the subject matter. I knew the general outline and I went with the flow.
It helped that I was up close. I revelled in the singers, the orchestra (obviously enjoying a Tchaikovsky outing), the chorus (a full-sized one by Opera Australia standards). I didn’t even have time to check what language Tatyana’s letter was projected in until it was too late to be entirely sure. I think it was in French. Such details will have to await my return towards the end of the run.
So I have been amused to see the continuing blow-back by some online critics against the concept of the production (eg here, from Canberra, or was that Queanbeyan? also here – accurate if a bit severe on musical aspects) and especially the use of the dancers. I pretty much shrugged all that aside.
There are six performances only. By now, three remain. According to OA’s booking website, there are no seats available for the final performance, which is a matinee. The usual unwanted/overpriced seats remain (rear stalls/front circle) for the other two performances.
On Saturdaynight with P to the first concert of the 2026 subscription series by The Australia Ensemble [“@UNSW”].
I have been going to Australia Ensemble concerts religiously for just on 20 years. In recent years I haven’t posted about them so often. Apart from my general blog slowdown, that’s because I’ve been biting my tongue about the diminution of the ensemble. What was once an ensemble of seven permanent members giving six concerts a year is now down to three permanent members giving four concerts. The reduction of permanent members is down to retiring core players not being replaced. As a pianist, I particularly feel the loss and non-replacement of Ian Munro as the permanent pianist.
Right, that’s out of the way. The program last night was:
KATS-CHERNIN The Grand Rag [2021] (clarinet, piano) ROTA Trio[1973](clarinet piano cello) SHOSTAKOVICH Piano Trio no.1[1923]
STRAVINSKY The Soldier’s Tale (full version) [1918]
Andrea Lam, currently famous from being “on the telly” in the ABC’s version of The Piano, was the pianist for the first half. This was a kind of journey back in time in C minor. The Kats-Chernin and Rota were well in their respective composers’ styles; the Shostakovich not at all. He was only 16 when he wrote it, after all.
There was a long interval. The bar opened (it wasn’t open before the show) though the commercial operators continue to have an attitude about offering free drinking water. I was told last year when I asked that I could use the bubbler outside (it’s all the way round the back in the food court behind the John Clancy). That’s kind of missing the point about why water is offered at concerts. But I carp. You just have to remember to bring your own. Still, I feel a bit nostalgic about the old days when a pretty basic bar service was offered by student volunteers. It felt more friendly. I guess responsible service of alcohol requirements preclude this if you want to serve alcohol.
P and I missed Nikolai Olding who even last year after his parents retired from the ensemble was to be seen distributing programs before the show. Maybe he’ll be back. Meanwhile, thank-you for your service, Nikolai!
Returning after interval the stage had been protectively wrapped in brown paper or plastic. An usher offered us face-masks, presumably to forestall complaints about paint fumes. I wasn’t worried about the fumes, but I wondered if we could have a drop-sheet in case paint was going to fly around. To be honest I was more thinking about the cold – for some reason the hall was extremely chilly. Painters’ paraphernalia had been set up at the back of the stage. The instrumentalists were at the left of the stage to the side.
OK, time for a little explanation.
The Tale was born out of wartime exigency. After the extravagance of the pre-war ballets, Stravinsky and his collaborator devised a form for limited forces – a small ensemble (a septet), three actors, one or more dancers. The Australia Ensemble had their own rethink. Actor Mitch Riley took all the speaking roles (doing the police, so to speak). (Only at one point was this a bit confusing because inevitably the old woman who is the devil in disguise doesn’t seem much different from the devil.) At the back of the stage two painters worked a constantly changing backdrop. Easiest to quote Jason Antmann’s account of this in his Limelight review:
First, a war-torn landscape emerges, punctuated by an explosion that transforms into a tree. A hallucinatory pink elephant appears, followed by a pale green horse – Death’s mount from Revelation 6:8. On the horizon, an onion-domed palace rises, its approach marked by processional flags. It is here the soldier cures the bedridden princess through the power of his music, only for a hellhound to arrive and wipe the scene away.
Here’s Mitch Riley taking a bow:
The ensemble:
View on the way out:
Another view to give a clearer picture of the “hellhound.” The black verticals are rushes which were dipped in black paint
Jansson Antmann’s review already cited really covers the ground pretty much exhaustively. Amongst other things, he points out the “curation” of the program. By the end, the opening with Kats-Chernin’s rag became more explicable.
To me the most interesting thing about the Stravinsky was how necessary economy of means (with a final reach-back to Petrushka) in hindsight turned out to prefigure Stravinsky’s pivot to neo-classicism.
My favourite bits of the music were actually the two chorales, with their ingeniously abstract invocation of Luther and Bach. This kind of pastiche can be a risk. The scene in the film Gremlins where the Gremlins get into the cinema and watch “Hi ho, hi ho” from Snow White threatens to upstage the rest of the film. That wasn’t the case in the Stravinsky because the pastiche was more mediated.
There is more that could be said. Dimity Hall really dug into the violin part, but everybody had a moment and more. I cannot praise Mitch Riley’s energy too much. I even got used to the voice amplification, though it started off feeling (as ever) too loud for my taste. Yes, I know that’s kind of selfish of me because I was sitting up close.
The whole thing was utterly persuasive. Of course, there was no real surprise in the ending. The devil always gets his man.
It will be hard for the Australia Ensemble to top this in the remainder of the season, but I left the concert with my faith in it restored. It’s just a bit of a shame that we have to wait until June for the next one.
Last Saturday back to the Opera House as foreshadowed to see Opera Australia’s revival of the Moshinsky production of this classic work for a second time. It wasn’t terribly full, despite an apparent position to the contrary on the online booking site. Above is a picture of the house just before “curtain-up.”
I’m happy to report that concertmaster Huy-Nguyen Bui was allowed a bit more time for the solo which I singled out for attention in my previous post (the hint is in the direction ausdrucksvoll – expressive – in the score) and that generally conductor Tahu Matheson seemed to have relented in his avowed “it’s get on, get off!” intention to rush things along. Some moments still seemed a bit peremptory, including the Sandman and Dew Fairy episodes, which were hardly allowed time to sink in.
My friend Ux, whose daughter I took to a performance in 1992, had been to the matinee earlier in the week. She enjoyed it, though other mutual friends/acquaintances were more critical. I sent her a link to the youtube of the 1992 broadcast and she replied:
I feel as if the 1992 production after looking at this was better – stronger or something. The father was very different. Gertrud evoked more pity. Maybe it was all just more emotional…
Subject to a suggestion to Ux that the broadcast also had the advantage of close-up shots, I agreed with her.
I love the work and am fond of the production. I enjoyed the first half and as ever felt a pricking of tears in the dream pantomime when the mother dies – I’m probably susceptible to this on account of my own mother dying in her early 50s when I was 21.
This time, after my possibly nostalgia-enhanced enthusiasm on the first night, I found myself less persuaded by the second half. It is invidious to pick on anyone in particular, but a lot of the burden of the second half is carried by the witch, and I felt that Jane Ede wasn’t threatening enough. This was probably also a matter of vocal heft.
I’ve remarked before on this blog that my golden rule about revivals is that things always get a bit coarser. In this case that was mixed with a bit of a rethink. The thing is that in what is basically a “rom-com” work it is easy to upset the balance of the elements of a production and I feel that is what happened in this case. Others have deprecated, for example, Shane Lowrencev as the father breaking out of the fourth wall for genial drunken interactions with audience members on his way in.
A nine or ten year old Chinese-Australian boy just behind me was vociferously delighted with the comedy. That was another rebalancing of the production, which felt more like a show for kids than I remember it. Like rom-com, kid-adult works involve a tricky balance. The broader comedy (not sure why Hansel needed to look around furtively before taking his matidudinal leak) detracted from the romantic elements (for the adults) at he expense of a broader comedy for the children.
It was Mardi Gras night in the city and a big night at the Opera House. In the forecourt, somewhat inexplicably to me given the competing attraction on Oxford Street, Grace Jones was performing. The thud of her performance penetrated the Opera House foyers at interval. I can’t help wondering if she was the original headline artist that Mardi Gras failed to secure for the (subsequently cancelled) party. Could be – it seems the SOH gig was announced on 11 or 12 December.
The night before when approaching the opera house (for an SSO concert) by the Tarpeian Way I notice that the Botanic Gardens had put up tarpaulins with vaguely cheerful messages which were clearly designed to prevent anyone from “stealing” a view of the performance area in the forecourt below. Shades of Victoria Park Racing & Recreation Grounds Co Ltd v Taylor but what business is it of the Botanic Gardens to prop up the Opera House’s commercial venture? I know, they are going to invoke “safety.” Feels more like unworthy collusion to me.
At the end of the show the egressing crowd was pressing as the opera and Grace Jones audiences left at the same time. (In the Concert Hall Das Lied von der Erde was still playing.) I was prevented by a security guard from taking my preferred, less crowded route up the Tarpeian Steps and indeed it turned out the steps were closed. Meanwhile, a glance at my phone had revealed that while the AOBO had been fiddling, Iran was burning.
Waiting out the crowd and also still a bit stunned by this the shocking if hardly surprising development, I paused on a low brick retaining wall about half way up the first block of Macquarie Street and indulged in a bit of doomscrolling.
I must be getting older. (Well obviously that is so.) A couple of weeks earlier, D and I had been walking in Leichhardt near the old Cyclops Toys factory (now converted to apartments) when we encountered a couple of unusually friendly cats on the street. We sat on the ground to continue the encounter. A woman driving past in a big SUV stopped and from her car asked us if we were were OK. We told her we were. We were too polite to mention that we were hoping she would piss off so the cats wouldn’t be spooked by her monster vehicle. Maybe she was a local and too polite to say openly “What the fuck are you two weirdos doing in my neighbourhood?”
This time, it was a gentleman making his way up the footpath on a mobility scooter who stopped and asked me if I was OK. I thanked him for his enquiry and told him I was fine. “Happy Mardi Gras!” he answered, and proceeded on his way.
Last week to the first night of Opera Australia’s revival of this. At present you can see the 1992 original from an ABC broadcast on Youtube.
There has been some expurgation. Gertrud, the mother, no longer smokes, which deprives us of one of my favourite bits of operatic business, when she absent-mindedly ashes her cigarette in the children’s pencil case.
Under the guise of celebrating Opera Australia’s 70th anniversary (dating back to the Elizabethan Trust company) this year’s season has rather a lot of revivals. Rather than bring back Johannes Fritzsch, conducting honours have been entrusted to Tahu Matheson, the company’s director of music. This is a snippet of the publicity, from Limelight Magazine:
For Matheson, tempo is key to the success of the show. “I like it all to be just slightly faster – certainly faster than it was when I first saw it. When you look at some of the original tempo markings, they’re very, very slow. You start to wonder whether Humperdinck’s metronome was working properly. You look at a passage and think, ‘Wow, can we really say things like that at this tempo?’ So we’ll be moving things along pretty quickly, about an hour each act. After all, this is Sydney in the summertime: it’s get on, get off!”
There will be no sacrificing of intricacy at the altar of speed, however. Conducting Hansel and Gretel is about finding an ideal balance – between musical refinement and dramatic immediacy, between voices and orchestra – so that the music supports meaning.
Forewarned or possibly just pre-sensitised by this, I felt that there were quite a lot of spots where Mr Matheson was rushing it along. Maybe that’s just the way he conducts but I could sense it in his forward driving beat when seen in profile from my point-seat eyrie. Sometimes things felt a bit fast for the singers and the words. Other times it was instrumental moments. It wasn’t so much intricacy as lyricism which was sacrificed at the altar of speed, as in this violin solo just before rehearsal mark 77:
I had to choose the violin part because the full score rather awkwardly goes over the page, but you can also find the spot starting here in the full score (set to Solti’s recording). Huy-Nguyen Bui tossed it off perfectly accurately but it was kind of a waste – blink and you’d have missed it. Something similar happened at rehearsal marks 116-117 in the second half though not so egregiously in terms of the musical [mis]affekt.
The moving moment where Hansel asks Gretel if she too saw their mother in their dream wizzed past with scarcely a consequence. Maybe it wasn’t there at all? (This can be a libretto issue as the revival adopts the Pountney translation on the whole.)
I hate the phrase but the company has also been going through a bit of self-imposed political correctness, as if to atone for the decade of Terracinism. This has already ended in tears (well-remunerated, I am sure) so far as the two women appointed in his wake are concerned. It’s worth quoting a bit more of the Limelight-propagation of this line:
Part of the opera’s appeal is that it treats children as real protagonists, not caricatures. It trusts the audience to journey with them through woods both literal and symbolic. “I think Claudia is doing a beautiful job as director in that regard,” Matheson says. “You can’t just look at the old videos and repeat what was done 20 years ago. Things have changed and nuances have shifted, particularly with regard to presenting gender. She’s using all the wriggle room.”
Hansel cannot be made less of a boy because there is already the need to overcome the credibility gap with a pants role. The gender issue basically means that Gretel is less girly. But the thing is, quite a lot of Gretel’s “girliness” is actually strategies for managing Hansel. It’s part of the plot. And played less “girly” makes Gretel a bit less like a child.
I had better stop being a critic. I enjoyed the performance. It’s a delightful work and production. It’s a bit of a mystery to me why it has not been revived more often. I will go once more, sitting in the opposite point seat. I am looking forward to it.
Stumbling on melons 