1:1 CONCERTS | Adelaide Festival 2021 review

The short 1:1 concert is nevertheless long enough to acknowledge the artist in a very different way from the concert hall.

1:1 Concerts. Picture: Greg Kerr

1:1 CONCERTS

Classical Music / AUS / GERMANY

FESTIVAL

Various locations

Until March 12

The idea of a concert for one musician and one audience member seems delightfully simple: an intense and intimate setting of just two metres between performer and player, and it’s Covid-safe too.

It turns out to be more complex than that. The performance is by the audience as well as the performer.

At Carrick Hill I, the audience, am led to a shady spot under a big Moreton Bay and informed by the usher to sit opposite the performer and hold her gaze for a full minute, before she responds with a short quarter hour of flute music.

Do not speak, clap, or otherwise engage with the player, I am told.

On a peerless March day the glorious Carrick Hill gardens, the whole of Adelaide and the gulf are spread out below us. The “venue” is arranged as two chairs within a rectangle of twigs and iridescent blue and white stones.

Flautist Sally Walker, the curator of the concerts and today’s performer, launches into baroque music, a Telemann Fantasie in D to relax by, and a Paganini piece of virtuosity, Caprice No. 9, to definitely impress.

I don’t applaud, but lock eyes once again, in appreciation, before being led away.

Those who have followed performance artist Marina Abramovic will see this as one of the many aftershocks of her remarkable 2010 work, The Artist is Present, where Abramovic sat and held the gaze of an endless procession of viewers in one sitting lasting weeks at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

The short 1:1 concert is nevertheless long enough to acknowledge the artist in a very different way from the concert hall, to make an exchange, and to take away a personal after-memory of a close encounter.