.
Day three, and the second part of the
Festival has decamped, traditionally, from Lookout Point to the Memorial Hall
at Dunwich, 25 kilometres away. Piano had made the journey in the night. The
artists had been installing themselves since dawn, and we arrived at 10am for a
somewhat different kind of concert to the gourmet slices of great works which the
last two days had delivered to us.
Today we had an Entertainment, devised by
Rachel Smith, aptly titled Minjerribah Miniatures. Minjerribah is the place where
Dunwich is situated and the miniatures were a series of short musical pieces,
plucked from all round the world – Australia, France, Germany, Czechoslovakia –
illustrating various aspects of the natural world, and linked by readings of a
set of brief aboriginal tales, the creation myths of the local trees.
We had beautiful morceaux of Debussy
(Smith, Hankinson) and of Dvorak (de Wit, Breen), alongside pieces by Jacob
Druckman and Maria Grenfell featuring the water-shining marimba (Vanessa
Tomlinson), a little Sculthorpe (Emmerson), Karin Schaupp’s light-fingered
guitar both solo in atmospheric pieces by Paul Stanhope, Richard Charlton, and
teamed with the strings of the festival in Paul Hoghton’s In Amber, and we had a little bundle of ‘firsts’ from Paul
Hankinson: a new arrangement of the Elgar ‘Sea Slumber Song’ for string quartet,
plus two items from his new Schubert-inspired collection: a solo Fantaisie for
piano based on the very duo we had heard the previous day, and a freewheeling
‘Spinnrad’ (Smith, de Wit, Hankinson) which brought the hour and a bit of
Entertainment to another standing ovation end.
It was a joyous morning only made tricky
for me by the fact in this accoustically loud (and just how loud we were soon
to find out) hall the young reader failed to project her voice beyond row four.
Insert here my standard rant about ‘what do they teach in drama schools these
days’.
Lunch. Lunch is always an event in Dunwich.
I shot up the road to the local grocery-cum-café, the Fruit Barn, because I
knew very well that (bypassing a number of other eateries) everyone ‘in the
know’ would be doing the same, and the queue gets enormous. So I sat in the
sun, in my new hat, and devoured an excellent spinach roll and a large plate of
three-salads (no lettuce) with a grand milkshake in a good old-style metal
container. It seems milkshakes, REAL milkshakes are making a comeback, in
Queensland, at least. Hurrah, say I.
Back to the hall for a cold chardonnay
before the afternoon’s final session. Just in time! The hall, in which both bar
and toilets are situated, was closing for final rehearsals. So all we oldies,
with failing legs and weak bladders, not to mention a thirst, had to stand
around outside for 45 minutes before, a bare eight minutes before curtain time,
we surged in, sprinting for seats and the loo and grabbing a hurried glass …
something organisational is perhaps to be reviewed before 2018.
And so, to the final concert.
Well, now I know what an oud is! And isn’t
it a magnificent instrument? Like an overgrown lute crossed with a melon. Since
Joseph the oudist is a master of his machine I was able to appreciate its
intricacies as I dreamed myself back again in a smoky Tangiers bar of the
1960s… Well, almost. In Tangier the music was not amplified. I wish it hadn’t
been here. The electrics made all the music sound rather unsubtly the same, and
the volume, in the small hall, was somewhat overwhelming. However, when Jacob
the oud was joined by the solo strings in a composition of his own (Eye of the Beholder), and tempered his
instrument to blend with others, the result was truly lovely.
This weekend, this tale, has been pretty
much one of undiluted enthusiasm. I suppose it needed one disaster, one full-scale
failure, to bring me back into the real and too often unlovely world. We got
it.
Commissioning an original work for a
Festival is fraught with perils. Especially if you don’t play it safe. And this
year Straddie didn’t play it safe. And they missed the target.
The four programme columns describing Yitzhak
Yedid’s Chad Gadya for clarinet,
violin, cello and piano spoke of a ‘playful children’s song’ which was quoted
in full. The composer also spoke at length before the playing started. He
refused the microphone, so I didn’t hear what he said. But it seems to have
been mostly the same stuff. Why don’t composers simply let their music speak
for itself? Admittedly Australia isn’t half as bad as Germany in this
connection, but it’s a pernicious habit.
And then the piece. Well, I’d rather be
trampled on by the unrecognisable goats than have to suffer it again. It goes
down in my book on the page ‘great fiascos of my musical life’. The violinist
(Smith) and the cellist (King) might as well have been miming. They were almost
entirely obliterated by the young lady with the frightened hair who took the
piano part. I couldn’t see from the back row seat that I had (forewarned)
taken, but I’m pretty sure she was playing with her fists rather than her
fingers. And, oh my heart went out to the clarinettist, who had played so gloriously
and warmly in Schumann and Brahms: here he was reduced to imitating a train
whistle, an eviscerated cat, a raped peacock, and other prosaic vulgarities.
Yes, undoubtedly one of the maxi-nadir
moments of my 60 years of all-sorts of concert-going.
Fortunately, there was a second part to the
concert. No amplification, no fisting, no factory whistles or crucified
penguins, just fine music finely played. Dvorak’s piano quintet in A Major (Rowell,
Smith, Henbest, King, Emmerson). Here the audience really leapt into its
enthusiasms to such an extent that folk exploded into applause at the end of
the first movement and I found myself following suit! And Dvorak gave us a
sophisticated, musical sforzando, just to show how it can be done. It was a
fine and fitting ending to a first-rate Festival, a hugely enjoyable extended
weekend of music, on a sweet and sunny island amongst the most amiable of people
…
Just say, I have already got my name in for
a season ticket for 2108.
Oh!: The Kurt Award for my favourite musical
moment of the weekend? You guessed it. The Poulenc. Run very close by a
dead-heat between the Schubert duo and the opening Haydn …
Footnote: there must be thousands of
Memorial Halls in Australia and New Zealand. Most, I suppose, just generally in
memoriam of all the folk who died in this war or that. The population of
Stradbroke Island being what it was, the walls of the Dunwich Hall seemingly
hold just two plaques. The one above my seat was dedicated to infantryman
Albert Joseph (‘Bert’) Tripcony (1893-1917). Bert was a Moreton Bay man. He
died in action in Picardy, France, at the age of 24, one hundred years ago this
year, in one of the most useless wars of last century. Requiescat in pace,
Bert. Oh, although the plaque happily doesn’t mention the fact, folk of these
racist days have seen fit to point out emphatically that Bert was of the
aboriginal genre. Does his race matter? Never mind, Bert, to me you are just one more brave young Australian
man who gave his life for … what?
