By John Shand, Michael Ruffles and Peter McCallum
Our reviewers cast a critical eye over the biggest performances around town.
Membra Jesu Nostri
Pinchgut Opera
City Recital Hall. April 1.
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★★
In 1705, the 20-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach travelled on foot from Arnstadt to Lübeck – about 480km on today’s roads according to Google maps – to hear Dieterich Buxtehude play the organ. It would be worth walking a similar distance to hear Pinchgut Opera’s superb performance under conductor Erin Helyard of Buxtehude’s set of seven cantatas Membra Jesu Nostri. This was nuanced music-making of exquisite grace, sublime flow and expressive beauty where voices and instruments blended to perfection without losing their distinctive warmth or piquancy.
The performance blended voices and instruments to perfection.Credit: Anna Kucera
That seems almost too pleasurable for a set conceived as an exercise in Lenten piety. Each of the seven cantatas comprises an instrumental “sonata”, a “concerto” for vocal ensemble and instruments (using those words in the early Baroque sense) followed by arias or ensembles and a reprise of the concerto.
Though Buxtehude was Protestant, the words draw on the medieval Latin poem Salve mundi salutare and meditate on parts of Christ’s body. The first (“To the Feet”) establishes spaciousness with recurring long notes followed by decorative imitation. Soprano Alexandra Oomens sang the first aria with a wonderfully bright sound and elegantly turned decoration.
In the second, soprano Lauren Lodge-Campbell’s voice had a sweet silky finish, the melodic lines flowing with natural shape. Bass Andrew O’Connor’s voice in the third had noble richness and tonal depth with darker colours. For the second cantata (“To the Knees”), Helyard led the six instruments in gently pulsating textures, an idea carried over into the concerto and arias. In the first aria, tenor Louis Hurley shaped and tapered with gracious fluency, while in the second, mezzo-soprano Hannah Fraser created a naturally flowing line with softly mellifluous tone.
To start the third cantata (“To the Hands”), violinists Julia Fredersdorff and Karina Schmitz established a mood of dragging pain, carried over beautifully by all five voices in the suspended dissonances of the concerto to create a mood of quiet suppliance. The fourth cantata (“To the Side”) is more vigorous, though Helyard did this without sacrificing the contemplative tone, while in the concerto Ooomens and Lodge-Campbell blended sensuously.
The fifth (“To the Breast”) emphasise gentle softness, while in the sixth (“To the Heart’), the members of the Orchestra of the Antipodes changed to viols to create a texture of quiet sweetness. In the concerto, the voices sustained the emotional centre of the work with glowing sound and imploring phrases. The last cantata (“To the Face’) contains expressive reference to the crown of thorns though opens with broadly flowing lines and ends with an amen enlivened by buoyant cross accents.
Trent Suidgeest provided lighting and projected images of sombre discretion. A subtlety of the performance was the matching of voices with individual instrumental combinations, Oomens with harpist Hannah Lane and Lodge-Campbell with theorbo player Simon Martyn-Ellis, while Laura Vaughan (violone) and Anton Baba (viola da gamba) provided fluent bass.
Helyard conducted from the organ and framed the cantatas with organ Fantasias by Pachelbel. The first drew dwelt on sustained harmonies and the last created a lively link to the final piece Buxtehude’s Laudate, Pueri Dominum with gloriously flowing sequences from Oomens and Lodge-Campbell. Membra Jesu Nostri is popular among early music ensembles for its humble expressive richness though you would have to walk further than Bach to find a better performance than this.
CHERRY SMOKE
KXT on Broadway, March 31
Until April 8
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★
Do you remember falling off your bike, and the little gritty bits of bitumen getting stuck in your grazed flesh? Cherry Smoke is as raw as those wounds, while also having an aura of magic realism. James McManus wrote the play nearly two decades ago, and on one level it’s a prescient look at how the Trump “deplorables” of the future could eventuate – or not.
It tells of four teens, all under 15 to begin, who must make their way in a pitiless, parentless world on the edge of a nameless town in Rustbelt America. Fish (Tom Dawson) is a fighter – by nature and for money.
Tom Dawson and Meg Hyeronimus play teen lovers in Cherry Smoke.Credit: Abraham de Souza
“I look at him, and I just see a volcano waiting for a guy to raise an eyebrow,” says his younger brother, Duffy (Fraser Crane). Elsewhere, the metaphor changes to Fish having wires broken or missing, but you get the point: he’s a kid who is so volatile that he’ll break his own hand if he believes that will make his punch harder when it heals.
Nonetheless, despite mostly being in jail for bashing someone on negligible provocation, or earning beer-and-fries money from boxing, he’s loved by Duffy and – more ardently – his girlfriend Cherry (Meg Hyeronimus), a part-time fortune-teller blessed with the odd vision of Jesus Christ. Cherry can coax out Fish’s softer side: a side not just about sex (although they work that goldmine with typical teen gusto), but about caring. Duffy, who is both brighter and less brutal than his brother, finds his own fulfillment in the arms of Bug (Alice Birbara), who’s studying to be a nurse’s aide, and is unable to bear the children she craves.
Directed by Charlie Vaux (for Crisscross Productions), the play christens Kings Cross Theatre’s new home on Broadway in Ultimo – an intimate space, not unlike its predecessor. Vaux’s production stays taut as the chronology skips back and forth as if over a rope, and it catches all the play’s surface abrasiveness. The acting is committed, with Crane and especially Hyeronimus able to wrap us in their vulnerabilities and take us with them.
But the good work is undone by the American accents continually wandering, especially those of Dawson (back to Australian) and Birbara (to English). This becomes more and more of a distraction, undermining the overall quality of the production.
FENCES
Wharf 1 Theatre, March 30
Until May 6
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★½
We build fences around our countries, our jails, our houses and our hearts. As Bono observes in August Wilson’s potent play set in the 1950s, “Some people build fences to keep people out, and other people build fences to keep people in.” Rose has her husband Troy erecting a fence around their yard throughout this play. It’s a stop-start process, partly because Rose wants to keep Troy in, and Troy wants to keep others out.
Bert Labonte and Zahra Newman are reunited as husband and wife in Fences.Credit: Daniel Boud
Having played the husband-and-wife leads when Sydney Theatre Company presented another brilliant African-American play last year, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Bert Labonte and Zahra Newman are reunited in the same relationship here.
As with Raisin, Labonte’s character is the epicentre, and here he turns in an even more riveting performance. The other characters must navigate their way around him as carefully as ships encountering a mine in a narrow strait because Troy doesn’t take a lot of prodding to explode.
When she learns Troy has been unfaithful, Rose describes the soil of his soul as being hard and rocky, yielding nothing. But Troy has been worn and weathered by his childhood, his father, World War II, violence, jail, failed relationships, illiteracy, poverty, menial work, fatherhood and, above all, disappointment that, because of racism, his outstanding talent as a baseballer didn’t lead to a stellar career.
But for all the baseball metaphors that litter Troy’s dialogue, fatherhood sits irascibly in the foreground of Wilson’s play. When Troy speaks of the relentless ferocity of his own father, he’s impervious to the irony. Fatherhood is presented as a trial, but where Troy sees it as a test of manhood, Wilson means it to be a test of empathy and sympathy.
Labonte gives Troy a loose-limbed swagger laced with enough braggadocio for the character to convince himself he’s always in the right. He can be genial with his friend Bono (Markus Hamilton), caring with his brother Gabriel (Dorian Nkono) and even playful with Rose, but with his sons, family is a synonym for friction.
When his youngest, teenaged Cory (Darius Williams), asks his father why he never liked him, Troy’s response is, “Who the hell said I gotta like you?” He then viciously ends Cory’s budding football career, whether that’s to save the kid from the racism and disappointment he endured himself, or to avoid being outshone. His older son, Lyons (Damon Manns), sired with another woman before Troy was jailed, is a jazz musician who implores his father to come and hear him play, but he will never bestow such an overt nod of approval.
If all this makes Troy sound like an ogre, Labonte’s exceptional performance humanises the husk, and makes us understand – even if we can’t always forgive – the failings.
Newman is again a worthy foil, giving us a Rose who credibly still tries desperately to nurture their love, despite everything. Hamilton, Williams and Manns are all superbly realised in a production by director Shari Sebbens that reaches from assured to inspired, especially with Labonte and Nkono. Gabriel had part of his skull blown away in the war, and Nkono rends or warms our hearts at every turn.
Jeremy Allen’s literal set is a joy of its own, exquisitely lit by Verity Hampson, while composer Brendon Boney takes an admirably minimalist approach in an era when few dare present a play uncluttered with music. Fences deserved the 1987 Pulitzer Prize, and this production does it proud. Please see it.
The end of the world has never sounded better
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard
Luna Park Big Top, March 30
Reviewed by MICHAEL RUFFLES
★★★½
If this is the apocalypse, it sounds terrific.
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard might have skipped Bluesfest, but they arrived at Luna Park on Thursday ready for blast-off. And their psychedelic fusion of prog-blues-electro-metal-whatever (often laced with warnings of climate change catastrophe) was by turns bombastic, blissful and electrifying.
Stu Mackenzie of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. The band has boycotted Bluesfest.Credit: Rick Clifford
An almost laidback early jam quickly gave way to the one-two punch of Wah-Wah and Road Train, the thundering climax to 2016’s relentless Nonagon Infinity.
Newer, and longer, material soon came to dominate the set. In studio form, Hypertension is a 15-minute monster; here it felt snappier and snazzier as frontman Stu Mackenzie whipped his guitar over his head, and its myriad detours were dazzling. Brilliant too was Iron Lung, when Ambrose Kenny-Smith was unshackled from the keyboard to stalk the stage and snarl out a metaphor for a suffocating Earth.
Ice V, also from last October’s batch of three records (they’re prolific), offers the hope that you can dance away the impending doom.
When 90 minutes is divided into just 11 songs, there can’t be too many missteps. A charming but overlong sojourn into electronica (Shanghai) and a hip hop-flute-metal mashup that could have gone a lot worse in other hands (The Grim Reaper) were the weakest links, but were hardly bad. They served as a reminder of the band’s versatility; King Gizzard are often brilliant, but even when they’re not they’re never boring.
But the gravity of rock won in the end. The mesmerising Crumbling Castle and pulsating The Fourth Colour from Polygondwanaland (2017) brought the set to a guitar-laden, psychedelic crescendo. Last was new track Gila Monster, a rollicking slab of metal that hints at heavier things ahead.
Magnificent Magnificat captures the truth of Bach’s music
JS Bach’s Magnificat in D
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Sydney Philharmonia Choirs. Opera House Concert Hall
March 30. Also March 31 and April 1
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½
Conductor Stephen Layton led Bach’s Magnificat in D with strongly shaped musical gestures, radiant balance, and naturalness of phrase and tempo that simply laid bare the music’s magnificence. When musical ideas are moulded with care, with the points of emphasis carefully placed, the tempo and articulation crisply fitted to expressive purpose, they can inspire a sense of enduring aptness that appears to capture a musical “truth”.
This devotedly prepared performance by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra led by Associate Concertmaster Harry Bennetts, Sydney Philharmonia Choirs and a fine quintet of soloists did just that. The use of modern rather than period instruments by the SSO showed that finding that truth doesn’t rely solely on the woody grain of 18th-century wind and the silvery sweetness of gut strings, but, rather, can be imagined through other sound palettes with no less fidelity to the music’s essence.
Conductor Stephen Layton laid bare the magnificence of JS Bach’s music.Credit: Keith Saunders
Take for example, the alto aria, sung with quiet comely grace by Stephanie Dillon where the two modern flutes created delicate brightness for the words he hath filled the hungry with good things (Layton also highlighted the enigmatic ending where the flutes disappear without closure, that the rich, on the other hand, were sent empty away).
Or the ensuing Suscepit Israel where the transparently intricate fabric of the trio, two sopranos (Amy Moore and Chloe Lankshear) and alto, was threaded with the finely etched richness of two oboes. Lankshear sang Quia respexit with gleaming glow against the rewarding mellowness of Shefali Prior’s obbligato on oboe d’amore.
Bass David Greco balanced richness of sound with clear definition in Quia Fecit while tenor Christopher Watson sang Deposuit potentes with projected polished grain. With purity of vowel and openness of sound the Philharmonia Choirs brought splendour to the opening chorus, vigour to Omnes generationes, and paused with arresting drama on the last chord of Sicut locutus before singing the opening chords of the next chorus, Gloria as though the heavens had opened.
The companion work, Passion And Resurrection, by contemporary Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds transformed the brightness of Bach’s work into austere darkness, drawing on the stark new spirituality of several composers from the Baltic states, notably Arvo Part.
It opened with transcendent quiet purity in beautifully tuned declamation from the quartet of soloists positioned in the gallery behind the stage. Soprano Amy Moore, singing from the front, added a contrasting expressive strand of pained human emotion with a voice of insistent pain and impressive intensity. Mediating between the two, the orchestra offers echoes of feeling, while the Philharmonia Choir seized the narrative with striking openness of tone and gripping intensity at the climax before a gentler close of loss and reconciliation.