Incredible Floridas: Chamber Landscapes | Adelaide Festival 2021 review

Listening to Incredible Floridas now is to time travel to a different era of music, with a complete catalogue of modernist gestures.

Flautist Geoffrey Collins performed as part of the Incredible Floridas: Chamber Landscapes program. Picture: Keith Saunders.

Incredible Floridas: Chamber Landscapes

Classical Music / AUS

FESTIVAL

UKARIA Cultural Centre

March 7

There are an unusually large number of Adelaide connections in the Chamber Landscapes program.

This program had as its centrepiece Incredible Floridas, by Richard Meale, whose long residence in Adelaide had a major impact here. He taught most of the composers who learned their craft in the 1970s and 1980s.

Meale was the most European-oriented Australian composer of his generation, not only musically but intellectually as well. His taste in poetry was impeccably modernist – Garcia Lorca and Rimbaud, with haiku poet Basho an outlier, but still in tune with modernist aesthetics.

This performance was preceded by a short film made in 1972 by Peter Weir, showing Meale rehearsing and talking about the work. We see him leaving his North Adelaide house to work at the Elder Conservatorium dressed like a public servant – suit, tie briefcase, umbrella – with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth hinting at the other, real Richard.

Listening to Incredible Floridas now is to time travel to a different era of music – the influence of Messiaen and Boulez is audible, with a complete catalogue of modernist gestures on display.

It was avant-garde at the time, but it wasn’t to be the future of Australian music, and even Meale abandoned this path shortly after. But it was fascinating to hear again, in an excellent performance directed by Jack Symonds.

Also on the program were fine performances of two important works by Ross Edwards, a composer much more grounded in Australia and its landscape than the cosmopolitan Meale, and a rather unrepresentative solo flute piece played by its dedicatee, Geoffrey Collins.

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