An all-but-perfect masterclass from this restless 84-year-old genius

HERBIE HANCOCK
Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, October 11
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★½

Herbie Hancock has never made music: he’s always shared it. This was already the case when, aged 23, the pianist joined arguably Miles Davis’ greatest band, and created harmonic atmospheres that suddenly made jazz weightless, while still under maximum propulsion.

Simultaneously, he became a notable composer and bandleader, and by the 1970s his artistry was ever more chameleonic. The floating piano chords with Miles gave way first to even freer explorations, then to a grinding electric funk that, when mixed with hip-hop, even gave him a 1983 hit: Rockit.

Herbie Hancock’s music has always defied categorisation.Credit: Daniel Boud

But trying to define Hancock via idiom was like trying to tie knots in water. There was always a counter project; a new angle; a revisiting of the past that became a reinvention.

A review is not usually a biography, but this concert was itself autobiographical, not just because he revisited Maiden Voyage or Rockit, but because, after six decades in the forefront of jazz, it was a self-portrait of all that makes up the human as well as the musician.

Joining the harmonic weightlessness and sizzling propulsion were his primal, more climactic instincts and his sheer exuberance. The latter makes him seem three decades younger than his 84 years, reflected in his contagious joy in collaboration: a sharing that means his artistry is comprehensively filtered through the prism of his band.

Trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s funky rearrangement of Wayne Shorter’s Footprints was a highlight.Credit: Daniel Boud

As on the last couple of visits, Lionel Loueke’s quicksilver guitar playing is central to the enunciation of that conception, and James Genus’ bass is the foundation that allows it to reach improbable heights. To have a leader and composer of the stature of trumpeter Terence Blanchard join the fold tells you much about the selflessness at play, and his funky rearrangement of Wayne Shorter’s Footprints was a highlight. Nor was it surprising that the drummer is someone to whom Hancock is passing the flame: the 26-year-old virtuoso Jaylen Petinaud; routinely the detonator to Hancock’s dynamite.

Were this just an appreciation of Hancock’s monumental contribution to music, it would inevitably warrant five stars – or more! The performance, however, was slightly compromised by the sound: a surprising lack of definition in the bottom end for the refurbished Concert Hall. And to hear Blanchard’s trumpet not electronically treated at least once would delightfully have further broadened an already expansive palette.

Herbie Hancock: City Recital Hall, October 16.

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JORJA SMITH
ICC, October 15
Reviewed by FRANCES HOWE
★★★½

Jorja Smith doesn’t need to do much to receive applause. Her voice tumbles out of her and she seems to take little notice when it does. As part of SXSW Sydney, Smith played to a crowd of a couple thousand people in Sydney’s mostly seated ICC.

The 27-year-old from the UK’s West Midlands starts by pushing some of her older and more popular songs to the top of her set, which engages the audience from the start. Besides the corny title her debut album Lost and Found (2019) holds up. Blue Lights, the second song Smith plays, is well-received and immediately followed by a later single Addicted.

Jorja Smith’s voice seems to tumble out of her.Credit:

Some of the songs from her 2023 album, and the one she’s touring to promote, suffer from the presence of two drum kits, her vocals losing out in the competition. For someone whose casual stage presence relies heavily on her anything-but-casual vocal ability, it seems obvious her voice should always dominate in the mix.

Despite this encroachment, her backing band and especially the guitar solo to close out Falling or Flying and the strums alongside Go Go Go sound great. Her voice carries Don’t Watch Me Cry and the opportunity to hear her clearly when only accompanied by a piano reveals, for the first time in the set, the startling quality of her voice in its entirety.

Towards the end, Smith returns to her biggest songs, including Teenage Fantasy, finally getting the crowd on their feet.

Overall, the performance is enticing without being spell-binding. Smith’s vocal ability is uncontested, but you don’t expect her to do much more than sing. That being the case, it’d be good to hear her clearly.

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Ensemble Apex
Lower Town Hall, October 12
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★½

The Lower Town Hall is a large ballroom-type space below the main auditorium, with a noble floor of old wood and lowish ceiling supported by three rows of six pillars. For this orchestral performance of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F minor, “in-the-round”, Ensemble Apex spread out the music stands along the full length with a bulge in the centre for first violins, brass and percussion, and with platforms at the back to ensure visibility of conductor Sam Weller.

Woodwind and horns were placed at either ends of the long line, which particularly suited passages where they added filigree and decoration to ideas heard in the strings. The seats closest to the conductor were given to cellos and double basses to ensure a solid foundation regardless of one’s vantage point.

The audience could sit either behind the conductor (though much closer than in a concert hall) or slot themselves where violas, second violins, cellos or harps might ordinarily be placed. Those in the front row would have been close enough to turn the pages, except that these polished young players used iPads and foot pedals.

It was an opportunity to experience the orchestral sound vividly from the inside, as players themselves experience it. This is more than a novelty. Conductor Ivan Fischer attempts a similar acoustic perspective in his recordings with the Budapest Festival Orchestra, which are created with a single pair of microphones where the conductor stands.

Here the audience can choose its own adventure. I chose a seat that I thought would be near the first violins, but I ended up with a perfect perspective of the second violin part (I can attest that the lead second violinist didn’t miss a note). Woodwind solos, such as the “slinky” clarinet theme of the second subject of the first movement (to use musicologist Susan McLary’s term) and the mournful oboe solo in the second movement were, from my vantage point, more “over there” but still highly audible.

The low ceiling, ordinarily a disadvantage for orchestral playing, provided a benefit by redirecting the sound down to provide keen clarity. The portentous opening brass fanfare that ominously returns throughout was strong and tautly articulated, but not deafening. The pizzicato of the third movement was mostly deft, and it was fun to watch players tossing the idea around.

In such a setting, the artistic goal shifts. Instead of focusing on perfection of overall balance, one listens to each part intensely. The additional scrutiny on each player provides an extra challenge, but Ensemble Apex, led by Anna da Silva Chen, was excellently prepared.

For an encore, Weller played the festive coda of the finale a second time and went and sat with the trumpets. Although one syncopated passage wasn’t quite as tight as the first time through, the exercise demonstrated that close listening among both players and audience generates its own unique brand of engagement and excitement.

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Fanning Dempsey National Park
Enmore Theatre, October 12
Reviewed by PENRY BUCKLEY
★★★★

Playing the new material is always a concern, not least when you have two much-loved back catalogues to draw from. The veteran performers behind Fanning Dempsey National Park, Powderfinger’s Bernard Fanning and Something for Kate’s Paul Dempsey, tell a packed-to-the-rafters crowd they were “quietly shitting ourselves” about what to play.

Paul Dempsey and Bernard Fanning are the veteran performers behind Fanning Dempsey National Park.Credit:

But, from the opening synthesiser pulse of the title track on the supergroup’s debut album The Deluge, they find their older audience receptive to all 10 tracks of the new release, interspersed with some surprises. The effect is that of a listening party (no moshing tonight), with carefully curated sounds linked thematically by a beautiful, fluorescing lighting design that recreates the album’s cover.

David Bowie is the key to this collaboration, which began at a memorial concert in 2017 and continued with a lockdown cover of Under Pressure (a crowd-pleaser in the three-song encore), the fruit of the late singer’s own supergroup of sorts with Queen. The group told this masthead they set the sonic “goalposts” for the album between 1977 and 1985, the music of their youth.

They move from the melancholic, electronic stylings of Bowie’s Berlin-era albums on Strangers and Born Expecting to the kitsch, high-energy Bowie of the 1980s. Lead single Disconnect’s up-tempo chorus is reminiscent of Bowie’s Modern Love, released in 1983.

They also take in a wider look at the decade. A cover of Tears for Fears’ Everybody Wants to Rule the World brings fans running from the bar. While the burgundy-suited Fanning cuts a lithe figure, an arch hand on hip a la the Thin White Duke, Dempsey, a workhorse on his guitar throughout, later taking off his own suit jacket, is closer to Springsteen.

That’s not to say they haven’t broken new ground. Closer Eyes Wide Open, with its prickly analog synthesisers and its opening lines – “No more waving the flag/I’m so done with all of that” – seems both a rejection and a celebration of the past.

As well as what Dempsey jokingly refers to as the “Powderfinger section” of the gig (they play the band’s Pick You Up, as well as Something for Kate’s Monsters), they also join in to play a solo hit apiece, Fanning’s Wish You Well and Dempsey’s Ramona Was a Waitress – proving there is always room for the old material as well.

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Champions
Old Fitz Theatre, October 13
Reviewed by CASSIE TONGUE
★★★

What is the price of making art? New Zealand’s Isabella McDermott, the playwright behind Champions – now making its Australian debut at the Old Fitz Theatre thanks to Little Goat Arts and director Bali Padda – uses her short, searching play to show us the hidden costs.

The four finalists of the fictional Archer award for emerging visual artists are about to start six-month residencies to complete the work they hope will win them the life-changing, career-making prize. When one finalist, Fraser – the rich and privileged oil painter (Bayley Prendergast) – suggests they skip the competition and simply split the prize four ways, the group can’t agree to the scheme, and fractures start to show.

The action in Champions unfolds in a series of interwoven monologues. Credit: Patrick Phillips

As the artists begin their competition pieces, they start musing in a series of interwoven monologues about process and inspiration, work and imagination, sacrifice and compromise. A dinner at the home of the prize’s obscenely wealthy patron is catastrophic for Emmy (Talitha Parker), an outspoken artist and current darling of the art scene.

Claudia (Cat Dominguez, the play’s heart) looks away from old friend Emmy and finds renewed passion and confidence in her sculptural work. Howie (Lincoln Vickery), the unassuming photographer, makes the other artists his subjects and seems resigned to losing. Fraser undergoes a crisis of confidence that brings out his worst instincts.

Padda’s direction is heart-led – for better and for worse. He sensitively handles the play’s thornier topics of mental health struggles and assault, but it’s hard to shake the sense that in doing so he has blunted the play’s sharp edges. His cast is too likeable (and, on Elle Fitzgerald’s stark set, pulsing with Tim Hope’s red-drenched lights, a little too lost) to let McDermott’s sharper, more caustic lines critiquing the art world land with little more than a knowing smirk.

The darkness and difficult plot beats that emerge and resolve feel predictable and safe here, too, and in Padda’s production, McDermott’s weak spots, such as side-stepping plot complications to resolve away from scrutiny or a couple of too-telegraphed plot twists – typical of a writer learning their craft in practice, as all playwrights must – are too easily spotted. It’s all a bit too earnest.

There’s a life-and-death desire to make art matter for art’s sake, and to push against the unfair systems to fund it, that lies at the heart of Champions. If this production digs deep enough as the season progresses, it might just find it.

Ensemble Q and William Barton
Musica Viva
City Recital Hall, October 8
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★

As stagehands prepared subtle amplification, William Barton, didgeridoo player, composer, elder of the Wannyi, Lardil and Kalkadunga people, and engaging speaker of gentle generosity, said he wanted the audience to feel the wind blowing through the spinifex and see the rugged beauty of the sunset at Mount Isa.

His Journey to the Edge of the Horizon for didgeridoo, wind quintet, cello and double bass placed the animated articulations and shifts of harmonic aura of the didgeridoo at the centre of the sound world like a pulsing heart.

William Barton’s Journey to the Edge of the Horizon places the didgeridoo at the centre of the sound world.Credit: Keith Saunders

Barton blended this with clapping-stick beats and occasional vocalisations to highlight a melodic fragment. The outer parts were active, and in the middle section the energy slackened with reflective vocalisations and a cadenza.

Of the range of heterogeneous sounds in Ensemble Q, who sat around in a half circle, Peter Luff’s horn combined most empathetically, its polished surface finding common grain with the textured didgeridoo tone. Phoebe Russell’s double bass added rapidly pointed pizzicato like a pebbly creek bed, and Trish Dean’s cello provided a flowing angular underlay.

Flute, oboe and clarinet (Alison Mitchel, Huw Jones and Paul Dean) added bird-like calls and whistling, sometimes growling, wind, and David Mitchell’s bassoon partnered Barton’s singing with perfectly matched pitch. It was a coming together of sound worlds and cultures that met the yearning of many in the audience, who gave it a standing ovation.

The other Australian work on the program was Paul Dean’s Concerto for Cello and Wind Quintet, which paired the warm, rhapsodic sound of Trish Dean’s cello playing with the wind quintet’s bubbling pertness. At the start, bass clarinet, bassoon and horn set up a discreetly syncopated accompaniment to a cello melody of increasingly soaring range.

The cello developed this against changing patterns of light from the other instruments, rising to climactic intensity before returning to the opening idea. The second movement explored weaving overlapping lines, while the last was a homage to the irreverent brilliance of the group of early 20th-century French composers known as Les Six (though Dean’s sense of humour is not as dry as theirs).

Listening to the first movement of Brahms’ Sonata for Cello and Piano, arranged for cello, wind quintet and bass, the word that came to mind was “why?” Brahms rejoiced in the noble resonance of cello with piano, but the wind instruments had difficulty cutting back to allow the cello sound through.

The intermezzo-style second movement suited these instruments better. The concert began with a finely disciplined performance of Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet, ranging from rasping impertinence and finely shaded quietness to shades of the sardonic and the grotesque.

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Transfigured Night
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
City Recital Hall, October 10
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★
In the time it took for Sydney’s daylight-saved twilight to turn to darkness, night inside the City Recital Hall was transformed from the playful delight of Mozart’s Serenata notturna, K. 239 to the searing expressionism of Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night, with a rare cameo in between: Respighi’s setting of Shelley’s The Sunset.

Mozart’s popular and bright-spirited Serenata notturna is the sort of work that SSO concertmaster Andrew Haveron would normally have led from the first violin desk while playing, were it not that the ensemble challenges of the later works needed a conductor’s baton.

Anna Dowsley sang Respighi’s Il Tramonto.Credit:

After setting a tempo of portly dignity for the fanfare-like opening for full orchestra, Haveron allowed the smaller group of concertino soloists, led by associate concertmaster Alexandra Osborne, to have their head in shaping phrases according to their own natural musicality.

It gave the playing unpretentious freshness and brought a sense of light spontaneity and wit to the finale, where each soloist in turn played a short cadenza between refrains. Mezzo soprano Anna Dowsley sang Respighi’s Il Tramonto (The Sunset) with a sound of haunting darkness and voluptuous glow to create an atmosphere of sorrowful strangeness.

Shelley’s text tells of how the unexplained death of a youth during the night prevents a couple from returning next day to witness a sunset they had somehow missed due to what Shelley coyly calls the “unreserve of mingled being”. Within an evocative and reserved narrative, Dowsley drew out the climactic moments with stirring intensity and strength.

The poem on which Schoenberg’s tone poem Transfigured Night is based also talks of the nocturnal walk of lovers. However, while the expressive tone is more anguished, the outcome is a transformation to rapturous and joyful serenity.

The work was originally written for string sextet, and Haveron and the SSO created a performance that sustained interest in this sprawling score by drawing on the creative distinctness of lead players to create the inner concentration of chamber music, while using the full ensemble to give power to the dense and hyper-expressive late Romantic harmony.

Although the text talks of transfigured night, it was Haveron and the players’ attention to the transformation of the thematic ideas that gave the performance cohesion and impact.