Birds | Adelaide Festival 2021 review

This is no mere navel-gazing: Important Australian works are presented along with major works of European music.

Flinders Quartet were among the artists taking part in the Chamber Landscapes program at UKARIA: Picture: Pia Johnson

Birds

Classical Music / AUS

UKARIA Cultural Centre

March 7

Kim Williams’ chamber music programs at UKARIA provide a rare opportunity to reflect on our cultural history though the lens of classical music.

But it is no mere navel-gazing. Important Australian works are presented along with major works of European music. The comparisons are instructive and a sense emerges of the cultural trajectory of this nation through the artistic impulses of individuals.

No Australian composer was more individual than Percy Grainger, once described as Australia’s “ratbag of the century” – a title that should be considered high praise.

The strange mix of sentimentality, bordering on the maudlin, with muscular athleticism, reflecting distinctive traits of colonial Australia, was evident in a selection of piano duets of some on his best known pieces, played by Joseph Abela and Stephanie McCallum.

Margaret Sutherland, one Australia’s first and most distinguished female composers, took on the challenge of setting poems of Judith Wright. The music is tense and often bleak, a far cry indeed from Grainger’s bouncy, folksy dance numbers. The gruelling intensity of the music was strongly projected by soprano Jessica Aszodi.

Sat against this Australian content was Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs, one of the best known and loved works of European music from the turbulent 1960s. The 11 songs in this set require one singer to be in effect eleven different singers, with entirely different vocal styles that reflect the diversity of the folk songs that Berio chose to arrange.

Added to that, the singer is required to sing in English, French, Italian – in Sicilian and Sardinian dialect – Armenian and Azeri. It’s a tall order. Jessica Aszodi did magnificently well, showing her vocal flexibility and the exceptional range of expression of which she is capable.

With the excellent ensemble directed by Jack Symonds it was a thoroughly engaging performance.

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