Graeme Skinner’s superb new biography ... [a] meticulously researched book, drawing on copious archival material such as letters and press notices, as well as interviews both with Sculthorpe and many of his associates, has the feel of a grand symphony, its peculiar music made audible by fact rather than intrusive authorial interpolation.

- William Yeoman, The West Australian (3 January 2008)

Peter Sculthorpe, the Skinner version [is] a 693-page book which its raison d'etre happily concedes is THE accurate story of his life. "I've told everyone that if they find a discrepancy ... then Graeme's [book] will always be right," says the generous artist. The massive Skinner publication is the most detailed account yet of the man that the author describes as Australia's best-known living composer and widely regarded as the country's most important creative spirit.

- Alison Andrews, The Launceston Examiner (1 December 2007)

- Peter McCallum, The Sydney Morning Herald (15-16 December 2007)

- Robyn Holmes (Curator of Music, National Library of Australia), Sprint: National Library Bookshop Newsletter (Summer 2007-2008)

Skinner does important work that documents Sculthorpe's earlier career and music, drawing on interviews, letters and published reviews ... thoroughly researched and Skinner certainly knows the material ...  A book of this importance [is] certain to be used as a reference in years to come ...

- Matthew Westwood, The Australian (8-9 December 2007)

Skinner’s biography chronicles the first half of Sculthorpe’s career ... during which Sculthorpe pioneered an identifiably Australian style of music ... Ultimately, this is the story of a man who wished not just to compose, but to write distinctively ‘Australian music’ – and who succeeded magnificently.

- Gleebooks & Readings, Summer Reading Guides (Summer 2007-2008)

This work offers a significant authorised biography of Australia's best-known composer featuring more than 60 images. It presents a reflective side of Sculthorpe not previously revealed in print. More than a biography, it examines an episode in Australia's musical past through the eyes of its key player and includes previously unseen personal correspondence spanning two decades. This book has been said to have comparable significance for music as David Marr's biography of Patrick White had for Australian literature ...

- Blackwell Online (January 2008)

This superb book is a fitting monument to Peter Sculthorpe’s place in Australian music ... while the book is a meticulously, scholarly and exhaustive account of a life in progress, Skinner has also developed his theme of Sculthorpe's contribution to Australian music ... While the biography presents an expected structure - in the sense that we are told much about Sculthorpe's family background, education and deep attachment to his hone state and city – it is Skinner’s real insight into the struggles Sculthorpe had in finding a distinctive Australian voice that is most illuminating.

- Christopher Bantick, The Hobart Mercury (23 February 2008)

... one of the great strengths of the book (apart from its comprehensive and meticulous research) is the deft way in which the author interweaves discussion of the music with the details of the composer’s life: our art does emerge from what we are and what we have learned and imagined.

- John Carmody, The Australian Literary Review (6 February 2008)

GRAEME SKINNER (editor)
The Composer Speaks:
Composers and their colleagues discuss Australian music
(Proceedings of the Australian National Composers’ Conference, 1988);
Sydney: Sounds Australian [Australian Music Centre], 1991;
paperback, vi + 198; ISBN 0-646-04851-1

Abstract: The Spanish primatial cathedral of Toledo possesses one of the largest surviving collections of indigenously produced plainsong sources deriving from any major ecclesiastical institution in Western Christendom. The collection, here described and listed for the very first time, comprises about 170 volumes for the Mass, Office, and processions, including atlas-size choirbooks produced for use in liturgical functions held in the cathedral’s own choir, and smaller volumes for its various chapels. Around thirty books of non-Toledan provenance have been added to the collection, forming a musical repository comprising in excess of 22,000 folios.

Abstract: La Catedral de Toledo cuenta con una extraordinaria collección de libros de coro de canto llano, conservados actualmente en el Archivo Capitular, que han pasado inadvertidos para la gran mayoría de los investigadores durante casi un siglo [...] En realidad hay unos 150 enormes volúmenes de pergamino, grandes como atlas y de gruesas tapas, y unos 50 libros de canto de menor formato, Empezamos la catalogación de la colección in situ a finales de 2002 a petición del canónigo archivero, y el trabajo quedó concluido en dos años. En estos momentos se está ultimando la publicación del catálogo completo, que esperamos apareza en inglés y español. Este artículo-comunicación es una breve presentación preliminar de los Cantorales y del trabajo realizado, al que se añade como apéndice un “catálogo provisional” con una breve descripción física de cada libro.  

Set to Music
(Event 307, 25 May 2008, Sydney Theatre Company @ The Wharf)
SWF chair, Sandra Yates, GRAEME SKINNER and Jacqueline Kent discuss documenting the remarkable lives of composer Peter Sculthorpe and concert pianist Hephzibah Menuhin. Peter Sculthorpe is Australia's best-known living composer and is widely held to be the most important composer the country has yet produced. Graeme Skinner tells the fascinating story of his rise to prominence, his quest for a personal voice; and his arrival at a place in the collective heart of the nation. It is also a social history, charting the rise of modernism in Australian music through the eyes of its key player.
 

Abstract: In 2003, the two Australian authors had the rare opportunity to prepare a modern catalogue and numbering sequence for an ancient Spanish liturgical library, Toledo Cathedral’s collection of 170 indigenously produced manuscript plainsong choirbooks (cantorales). Noone’s discovery and subsequent transcriptions of a series of cathedral inventories (from 1503, 1539, 1580, 1600, 1649, 1790, and 1809) and other key documentation informed Skinner’s codicological analysis of individual volumes, their copying and preservation. Several previous shelving systems dating back to the late sixteenth-century were also taken into account in formulating the new catalogue scheme, organised chronologically (late-15th century to late-19th century) and by genre, and which has been adopted by the Cathedral archive for its own use.

The eagerly awaited Sculthorpe Requiem brings a further jewel to a wide audience ...
The work is dedicated to the memory of his parents but has wider spiritual and
ecological concerns, as Graeme Skinner’s notes tell us ... An essential release
from one of the world’s greatest living composers.
- Ivan Moody Gramophone (July 2007)

From the booklet essay: As a still relatively young nation, Australia could be thought to be fortunate to have collected so few notable dead composers! For most of the 20th century, almost every composer we could claim was very much alive. Yet, sadly, this did not stop us from losing track of some of our most talented, who went away and stayed away, as did Percy Grainger and Arthur Benjamin (the only Australian composer blacklisted by Goebbels), or returned too late, like Don Banks. And we are now rediscovering many other interesting stay-aways, like George Clutsam (not just the arranger of Lilac Time), Ernest Hutchinson, John Gough (Launceston-born, like Sculthorpe), and Hubert Clifford. Meanwhile, among those who valiantly toiled away at home, we are at last realising that names like Roy Agnew, John Antill and David Ahern might not just be of local interest, but reasonably take their place at the head of any roster of composing ‘dead white males’.
         Even more so than for men, settler Australia’s short musical past is remarkable for its roll-call of significant females: Margaret Sutherland (perhaps our greatest deceased composer of either sex), Miriam Hyde, Dulcie Holland, Iris de Cairos-Rego, Esther Rofe, Marjorie Hesse, Linda Phillips, Ina Mornement, Phyllis Batchelor... the list goes on, and on. It’s been argued, of course, that women were left to do the hard yards at home between the wars, precisely because Australia so actively discouraged its men from composing that they had no option but to go away. Equally true, relatively few of our composing women flourished ‘abroad’ for long, though Tasmanian Katharine Parker (Longford-born and Grainger protégée) did, and Melburnian Peggy Glanville-Hicks is the notable other. Indeed, Edward Cole’s notes for the 1956 American first recording of her Etruscan Concerto make the unique claim: ‘Peggy Glanville-Hicks is the exception to the rule that women composers do not measure up to the standards set in the field by men.’ [...]

From the booklet essay ... For an imaginative child growing up in Tasmania in the 1930s, the island of Lilliput that he read about in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels was not in some Antipodes, half a world away. By Swift’s own reckoning, it was just off the north Tasmanian coast, over the horizon perhaps, impalpable, intangible but almost within reach ... Australia’s most revered composer, Peter Sculthorpe is not a religious man, but he has keenly felt the spiritual power of the invisible. Raised in a rural town in Australia’s southernmost island State, he was aware of being surrounded by an unusually rich array of spirits, both presences ... and absences.

From the booklet essay ... The section of Toledo Cathedral's Codex 25 that transmits Guerrero’s hymns was copied in 1549 by the scribe Martín Pérez and the master illuminator Francisco de Buitrago under the supervision of Morales’s successor Andrés de Torrentes (ca. 1510-1580). Torrentes served three separate terms as maestro de capilla in Toledo (1539-1545, 1547-1553, 1570-1580), leaving a large corpus of fine polyphonic compositions that has yet to be published. In 1549, Torrentes selected for copying into a new choirbook a number of hymns from an annual hymn cycle for use at first Vespers of major Toledan feasts that Morales had compiled out of his own and the novice Guerrero’s compositions. As copied, it runs in a chronological liturgical sequence, from Guerrero’s Hostis Herodes for Epiphany (6 January), to Celsi confessoris for the patron of Toledo diocese St Ildefonsus (23 January), and so on. The next hymn in the cycle, Conditor alme siderum, is of special interest. Associated elsewhere with Advent, in sixteenth-century Toledo it was sung with polyphony only at first Vespers of the Annunciation (25 March), and first Vespers of the related feast of Santa María de la O (18 December).

Handel: Messiah
                Melbourne Symphony Orchestra; December 2008 (Symphony Services)
Poulenc: Trio
Nielsen: Wind Quintet
Brahms: Horn Trio
                Melbourne Symphony Chamber Players; October 2008 (Symphony Services)
Philip Glass: Violin Concerto (arr. Dickson for soprano saxophone)
                Amy Dickson (saxophone); Adelaide Symphony Orchestra; Otto Tausk (conductor); October 2008 (Symphony Services)
Bach: Unaccompanied Violin Partita No 3 (BWV 1006)
Sculthorpe: String Quartet No 11 (Jabiru Dreaming)
Haydn/Hoffman: Duet in D (Hob. VI.D1)
Hindemith: Sonata for Cello Alone, Op. 25 No 3
                Melbourne Symphony Chamber Players; July 2008 (Symphony Services)
Constant Lambert: Concerto for Piano and 9 Instruments
                Ian Munro (piano); Sydney Symphony Orchestra; Dene Olding (violin-director); June 2008 (Symphony Services)
Mozart: Dissonance Quartet (K 465)
Shostakovich: String Quartet No 11
Sculthorpe: Sonata for Viola and Percussion (1960)
Stravinsky: Suite from The Soldier’s Tale
                Melbourne Symphony Chamber Players; May 2008 (Symphony Services)
Silvestre Revueltas: La Noche de los Mayas
                Sydney Symphony Orchestra; West Australian Symphony Orchestra; Kristjan Järvi (conductor); May 2008 (Symphony Services)
Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Guitar Concerto No 1
                Karin Schaupp (guitar); The Queensland Orchestra; Ryusuke Numajiri (conductor); May 2008 (Symphony Services)
Sculthorpe: Nourlangie
                Melbourne Symphony Orchestra; Oleg Caitani (conductor); John Williams (guitar); March 2008 (Symphony Services)
Sculthorpe: String Quartet No 9
                Australian String Quartet (national tour); March 2008 (ASQ)

On Constant Lambert: As his friend Anthony Powell observed, "Lambert used to assert that – the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky always excepted – no one had ever been given a less appropriate name than himself." Belying his name, Constant always favoured the mercurial and dark rather than the dependable and light. Like his mentor, Phillip Heseltine (“Peter Warlock”), Lambert championed the unfashionable and unfamiliar, from the even-numbered symphonies of Beethoven, to Satie and Chabrier, and “Negro” jazz. Like Heseltine, too, he had a reputation for heavy drinking that, combined with diabetes, took him to an early grave at 45, though not before being immortalised as the “dissipated cherub” Moreland in Anthony Powell’s novel Dance to the Music of Time. Lambert pursued a busy career as a conductor and journalist often to the neglect of composing, and his small surviving output falls short of his manifest potential.
            Lambert recalled being “thrown head first into society at the age of twenty” when Diaghilev commissioned a score from him for the Ballets Russes. The young Lambert was clever and beautiful, yet his pronounced limp, so his headmaster thought, predisposed him to adopt, as a survival tactic, the role of the opinionated outsider. Finding his milieu in bohemian Chelsea, with Walton and the Sitwells as neighbours, he produced his first success, The Rio Grande in 1927, hailed in the press as “jazz changed into music of genius”. He remained an anti-establishment figure, nevertheless chipping away from the inside, as music-director of Sadler’s Wells Ballet and a regular BBC conductor, at his musical bogeys, English provincialism, German hegemony, and the “isms” of Schoenberg and Stravinsky.
            Lambert may have inherited his outsider’s outlook from his father. George Lambert (1873–1930) was born in St Petersburg of American parents, only to become one of Australia’s most important painters. Constant never visited Australia, but forged several Australian connections nevertheless. When Lambert conducted the premiere of this Concerto, his piano soloist was the Australian-born Arthur Benjamin (also noted for his love of “Negro” music). In the 1930s, Lambert took-in-hand the musical education of a young Australian dancer, newly arrived in London, Robert Helpmann. In 1951 he again chose a young Australian, Gordon Watson, to play the concerto-like piano part in his final ballet Tiresias.
            Late in 1945, Frank Packer invited Lambert to tour Australia and conduct the new commercial orchestra the press mogul was forming in competition to the ABC. Lambert declined, and the orchestral venture failed to get off the ground, thereby also denying Packer the opportunity to live up to the example of his two noted Australian composer forbears, Frederick Packer (1839-1902) and Charles Packer (1810-1883) [...]

GRAEME SKINNER “Maxing Our on good old-fashioned modernism”
The Sydney Morning Herald (12 December 2008)

To the Max: Ensemble Offspring, Carriageworks, December 10
                ROSEMARY JOY’s pianissimo Beauty Boxes (2008) was presented to the audience in intimate cohorts of 10. Clustered around the two performers in a hot-box dressing room, we listened to a scratchy ribbon being stuffed into a crafted wooden jewellery case, and needles punching a soft cloth. These miniaturised “sounds” had charm, though short of using actual musical boxes (as the audience thought it had been promised), the performance could have used a little more artifice.
                Since To the Max took the form of a programmed cresecendo, the violinist James Cudderford’s performance of John Cage’s eerily tuned Cheap Imitation (1977) of Satie registered one notch up. Claire Edwards’s reading of Morton Feldmans’s King of Denmark (1964) was a more nuanced realisation for standard percussion of the potential of Joy’s miniature boxes.
                Helmut Lachenmann’s Dal niente (1970) is an early examplar of the fin-de-siecle fashion for extreme instrumental sports. Perhaps playing around on the brink of articulacy made a purer point then; now Jason Noble’s puckishly burbling and spluttering clarinet reminded of nothing so much as a 19th-century German Romantic water sprite.
                Reaching forte, Louis Andriessen’s Workers Union (1975) calls on any available combination loud instruments. This was the Dutch composer’s paean to disciplined unionism and the dignity of labour.
                “The Max” came in Phil Niblock’s The Movement of People Working. Drone trance amplified through a circlet of speakers heftily counterpointed grainy social-realist videos of South Americans at back-breaking work, hard-core minimalism yet to be dressed prettily as in Baraka.
                Into this hieratic procession of old-fashioned modernist artefacts stumbled a commissioned score by the doyen of Sydney maximalists, Michael Smetanin. An Andriessen pupil, he is not averse to huffing-and-puffing, either. But Swell (2008) was svelte and shapely, its marimba and double-reed colouring gently African – a short, smart work that could be taken anywhere.
 

GRAEME SKINNER “Wrapping parts to reveal gem that brought Tolstoy to tears”
The Sydney Morning Herald (25 November 2008)

Australian String Quartet, Angel Place, November 21
                SHOULD I thank the Australian String Quartet’s couturier or Schubert for the case of synaesthesia I experienced during this concert? In either case, by the end of a fine performance of the A minor Quartet, the contrast between the red and green gowns of first violinist Sophie Rowell, and cellist Rachel Johnston encapsulated to visual perfection their sonic relationship.
                Whatever Schubert required in the first and last two movements, from tug-of-war to a united front, found Rowell tempering her wirily resilient treble to Johnston’s utterly dependable bass.
                But the focus, naturally and by design, was the Rosamunde andante, framed by the other three movements like a gem in a setting. Based on a lovely tune salvaged from his incidental music for an awful play, the quartet version capitalises on its C-major simplicity and insistent dactyls to make it a truly memorable Schubert out-take.
                It also suggested the program concept. Tchaikovsky’s D major First Quartet, likewise frames its andante cantabile and its haunting tune, which moved Tolstoy to tears, perhaps because one phrase of it comes straight out of the Song of the Volga Boatmen.
                Making up for having to sit back in the Schubert, the middle voices of Anne Horton’s second violin and Sally Boud’s viola restored one-vote-one-value democracy to the ensemble, especially in the perfectly voiced chording of the terraced finale.
                The one palpable disappointment, given all that the quartet had done to earn it, was the quaint and silly restriction on applauding (as the audience clearly itched to do) at the end of the first movement.
                The one unset gem was Richard Meale’s Cantilena Pacifica. Meale has given this finale of his Second Quartet a life of its own, and ABC Classics is about to release the Tasmanian Symphony’s recording of the version for orchestral strings. But in the original quartet instrumentation, the final movement alone, shorn of all that has gone before it, plunges the listener in at the deep end of an intimacy that can sound not quite earned. With that qualification, the ASQ gave the finest performance I’ve yet heard of this watershed moment in Australian compositional history.
 

GRAEME SKINNER “Poetry unites vocals and instrumentals”
The Sydney Morning Herald (20 October 2008)

Halcyon B3, New Music Network, Verbrugghen Hall, October 17
                COCKING A SNOOT at ABC Classic-FM style canonicity, Halcyon proposed its own B-list as contenders for a new music A-team. Only time will tell. Meanwhile, the three works made a powerful statement on what their composers claim as common ground, a creative fluidity in dealing with boundaries between the vocal and the instrumental.
                In Gavin Bryars’s The Adnan Songbook, this creative fluidity is also a sexual metaphor. His setting of eight poems by the US-Lebanese writer Etel Adnan addressed to her lover Simone Fattal bristles with beauty, literary and musical. In her clear upper register, the soprano Alison Morgan floated above a low-lying instrumental ensemble that elsewhere seemed laid by Bryars to trap singers with weaker middle registers.
                Upon Silence is George Benjamin’s in memoriam to Michael Vyner, artistic-director of the London Sinfonietta, whose death in 1989 brought English music to the darkest hour of the AIDS crisis, as Stuart Challender’s did here.
                Mining Yeats’s Long-Legged Fly for text, and taking a distant backward glance at the exoticism of Ravel’s Shéhérazade, Benjamin portrays his multi-faceted subject – administrator (Caesar), artist (Michelangelo), and “femme-fatal” (Helen of Troy) – on the verge of silence. With the sepulchral strings making “no more sound than the mice make”, the mezzo Jenny Duck-Chong gave a superbly human and musically accurate impersonation of creativity on the brink.
                Poetry stands behind everything of Nigel Butterley’s, vocal or instrumental. But though he has a mastery of images, his music can seem diffident, withholding meaning until second or third hearing. Orphei Mysteria breaks constraint and communicates immediately. Forget Eurydice, poet Patricia Excell’s Orpheus has his head torn off by Maenads either – take your pick – for forsaking Dionysus for Apollo, or for having sex with boys. The point is that whoever has custody of “the shell of harmony” pays.               
                Duck-Chong, supported by Morgan and conductor Mark Shiell and his instrumentalists, more than earned her right finally to enact Orpheus’s glowing apotheosis, everyone doing Butterley nothing short of proud.
 

GRAEME SKINNER “Hewitt demonstrates wide appeal of Bach’s 48”
The Sydney Morning Herald (14 October 2008)

Musica Viva Festival, Angel Place & St James’s, October 10 & 11
                BACH’S 48 is a healthy survivor, a musical monument still more regularly played than listened to. Its piecemeal ubiquity with young pianists makes the occasional complete concert performance even more welcome.
                Since, probably no other professional is more intimately associated with the work today, the opportunity to hear Angela Hewitt play the 24 preludes and fugues of Book 1 was festival fare not to be missed.
                Though I usually opt for period-instrument Bach, this particular 100 minutes of his music undoubtedly has wider appeal on the piano. Hewitt’s interpretation is no simple regression to the good old days of Bach a la Myra Hess, or even Glenn Gould. Her approach to the rhetorically variegated preludes could justifiably be labelled “historically informed’, whereas the opposite is true of her innovative utilisation of the piano’s unique capacities in delineating the inner workings of the fugues.
                Occasionally the treble voices suffered, and one or two sudden tempo changes were more wayward than persuasive. But these were a small price to pay for a rare live performance full of interest and insight.
                Unlike Bach’s 48, Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux is far more often talked about than played or listened to, and then usually only by music students and academics. Which makes us doubly lucky in Australia to have a Messiaen performer like Michael Kieran Harvey. In St James’s on Friday, Harvey gave Sydney a lunchtime solo aftertaste of his eight-piano late-night Messiaen spectacular in Melbourne’s super-resonant St Patrick’s Cathedral.
                Messiaen is one of the few composers whose flinty, elemental piano sonorities come alive in such spaces. But even in a padded cell, Harvey’s performance would have been shatteringly good. Better, perhaps, in the case of notated silences and irrational rhythms which space tended to fill in or iron out evenly.
                Still, the natural amplification added so much to the immediacy of bird and insect sounds, as it also did to Harvey’s portrayal of Catalogue not as another Messiaen theological treatise, but as an almost Darwinian vision of the diversity and implacability of nature.
 

GRAEME SKINNER “Long live adventurous and entertaining repertoires”
The Sydney Morning Herald (10 October 2008)

Musica Viva Festival, Angel Place, October 8
                FIFTY YEARS ago, the late Charles Berg set an ailing Musica Viva back on track to become the high achiever it is today. Now the Berg Family Foundation is underwriting its latest new venture, a five-day Sydney festival. Day one was certainly a Big Day Out. At lunchtime, ABC Classic FM concluded another of its more-heat-than-light countdowns, for “Australia’s favourite chamber music work”, nothing under 100 years old need apply. Musica Viva artists were on hand to perform the winner live (I’m told Schubert was unavailable for comment).
                At least the evening concert featured recent creativity from an unexpected quarter. Pianist Ian Munro extended his support of overlooked repertoire in a new quintet of his own, performed with the Australian String Quartet. The French title, translated Divertissement On The Name of Erik Satie: A Plagiarist Ballet, hardly does credit to Munro, whose quotes from the schizophrenic Rosicrucian boulevardier – from the Messe des Pauvres to Le Chat noir – added up to a piece that was fresh and thoroughly today.
                There followed not only three more ensembles, a rare treat outside countdowns and competitions. Pianist Bernadette Balkus and Jason Noble, clarinet, gave a firm foundation for Sara Macliver in one of Schubert last works, The Shepherd on the Rock. But not until the darker middle section did Macliver sound fully assured, in time for her golden reading of the final anticipation of Spring.
                After these local warm-up acts came two contrasting visitors. The Austrian Eggner Trio played Dvorak’s Dumky Piano Trio with a passionate intensity that would have won over Charles Berg. Dvorak’s Czech folk fiddlers seemed never far away, though the Eggners carefully avoided the sentimentality that used so often to mar performances of the work.
                The most accomplished act were the veteran New Yorkers of the Juilliard Quartet. To Beethoven’s watershed First Razumovsky they brought the cool, clean, analytical bows that characterised the Galamian-Juilliard string sound since 1949, when the original Quartet was founded. I doubt it was quite what Beethoven intended, but their unimpeachable reading impressed the audience, whereas the Eggners’ Dvorak won them.
 

GRAEME SKINNER “Drifting to a compelling something”
The Sydney Morning Herald (7 April 2008)

Sydney Symphony Meet the Music, Opera House Concert Hall, April 2
                The playing in Schumann’s Fourth on Wednesday night reminded me of an episode in Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker prize winning novel The Line of Beauty when the troubled young Catherine, whose usual preference is The Clash, blindly fishes the symphony from her father’s record collection.
                Hollinghurst’s Nick, who instantly recognises it, is the sort of Gramphone-reader who would usually tell you it was really Schumann’s Second, and that the “magical transition to the finale” was based “obviously, on Beethoven’s Fifth”. But Cat has just contemplated slicing herself, and for once Nick is content just “to see her drifting along in it, not knowing where she was particularly, but grateful and semi-interested”.
                Coming so soon after the orchestra’s creditable performance of Shostakovich’s Eighth (which I heard but did not review), I was bemused at a similar display of collective passivity from the stage. Not that their performance lacked some illuminating quieter moments, or a spirited, but ultimately under-earned, climax. Still, when Andrew Ford came on to introduce the second half, his observation that the Schumann was essentially “about itself” sounded a bit like an excuse.
                The more so since the new work following was decidedly “about something”. Kalkadungu is a collaboration between composers William Barton and Matthew Hindson, and a celebration of the history of Barton’s tribe.
                Barton was responsible for the original concept, the solo content and the central song idea which Hindson wrapped in an orchestral score. The energised opening, “Warrior Spirit I” is perhaps the most compelling few minutes of indigenously-inspired fast music to come from any White Australian beside Peter Sculthorpe. And the viola solo at the heart of the elegy “Bleached Bones” was a perfect answer to Barton singing the song he wrote in his native language when he was 15.
                In the final section, Barton’s didgeridoo harmonics sliced through the full orchestra to scintillating effect. Nor was there any doubt, on the audience’s part, that the new work (commissioned as a result of private, not public, philanthropy) also commemorated a massacre by Queensland troopers of “as many as 200” Kalkadungu.
                Even the furious windschuttling of the full role-call of Howard historians could not have dampened the standing ovation that orchestra, conductor Richard Gill, and the creators rightfully received at the end.
 

Graeme Skinner
Postal address: 45/347 Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst NSW 2010 AUSTRALIA
Phone (with voicemail): (+61-2) (02) 9331 4186
Mobile (no voicemail): (+61-438) 0438 402 545
Email 1: graeme.skinner@bigpond.com
Email 2: gski1960@bigpond.net