JAZZ
Australian Art Orchestra 30th Anniversary Concert ★★★★
Melbourne Recital Centre, November 15
Three decades ago, composer-pianist Paul Grabowsky envisioned a contemporary jazz orchestra that would play new, original music drawing from multiple genres and traditions. In his liner notes for the Australian Art Orchestra’s debut recording in 1994, the founding director boldly declared: “[This] orchestra is here to stay.”
The Australian Art Orchestra ensemble.
Thirty years on, it’s clear that Grabowsky’s conviction was well-founded. The AAO has become one of Australia’s most admired contemporary music ensembles. Many of our finest improvising artists have passed through its ranks, under the guidance of three successive leaders. All three of them (Grabowsky, Peter Knight and the current artistic director, Aaron Choulai) took part in Friday’s memorable celebration of the AAO’s 30th anniversary.
The breadth and boldness of the orchestra’s back catalogue was on vivid display, as we heard excerpts of works spanning its rich history. The musicians on stage, too, were hand-picked to illustrate various stages of the AAO’s evolution, with several founding members (Scott Tinkler and Adrian Sherriff) sitting alongside younger players such as Sofia Carbonara (the orchestra’s associate artist for 2024).
Grabowsky joined the ensemble to perform two pieces from that seminal 1994 work, Ringing the Bell Backwards, in a new arrangement by Eugene Ball that captured the haunted grandeur of the original recording, as mournful fragments of melody draped themselves over a fractured bolero or were swallowed by bursts of free-form chaos.
Knight’s tenure with the orchestra was represented by his compelling 2018 work, The Plains, where minimalist motifs – rippling, repeated piano patterns, and swiftly beating pulsations – were overlaid by a hazy mirage of electronics and ethereal vocals.
We also heard several works created since Choulai took the reins last year: Carbonara’s glitchily abstract Etude for an Apple, a gorgeous arrangement of Kutcha Edwards’ Homeless (featuring Edwards’ achingly heartfelt vocals), and two wonderfully idiosyncratic compositions by Choulai himself – all signalling the optimism and sense of adventure with which the AAO looks to the future.
Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas
MUSIC
Scotland Unbound ★★★
Australian Chamber Orchestra, Hamer Hall, November 17
Kindred spirits in pursuit of pushing musical boundaries, Scottish guitarist Sean Shibe and Richard Tognetti, the artistic director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, produced a highly eclectic Scottish offering for the orchestra’s final 2024 tour.
Shibe is a classical guitarist also interested in exploring the expressive possibilities of the electric guitar. Using the classic instrument in the first half, he delivered an atmospheric opening with a solo rendition of A Scots Tune from a 17th-century manuscript, full of haunting delicacy. Joining the orchestra, gentle celebrations of traditional Scottish folk idioms continued with James MacMillan’s From Galloway and Da Trowie Burn by Shetland fiddler Friedemann Stickle.
Guitarist Sean Shibe and the Australian Chamber Orchestra perform Scotland Unbound on November 17.Credit: Nic Walker
Ranging from the ruminative to the rambunctious, a bracket of string orchestra pieces arranged by James Crabb ran the gamut of Scottish styles, from Niel Gow’s plaintive Lament for the Death of his Second Wife to the traditional Struan Robertson’s Rant which Tognetti made famous in his soundtrack for the film Master and Commander.
An ACO co-commission, Canadian composer Cassandra Miller’s guitar concerto Chanter, written for Shibe, contained some interesting effects but walked a fine line between tedium and its intended sleep-like qualities with its multiple repetition of ideas.
Striking an entirely different mood with electric guitar in the second half, an arrangement of Julia Wolfe’s LAD, with its angry imitation of bagpipes, jolted the audience into a modernist soundscape that led to slow and fast melodies full of raw energy.
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By contrast, David Fennessy’s Hirta Rounds for strings was a hushed evocation of a remote, abandoned island that cast its spell, even if it outwore its welcome by a few minutes.
Releasing both Tognetti and Shibe’s inner rock stars, selections from Martyn Bennett’s Bothy Culture, a high-energy amalgam of Celtic folk and electronic styles, brought this curious catch-all program to a rollicking end.
Reviewed by Tony Way
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