MODART REVIEW

Chris Williams

Seven fledgling composer were taken under the wind of The Song Company for Modart07, which showcased their talent at the Sydney Conservatorium on Saturday September 29, before a surprisingly robust audience.

Concert Review, OPERA OPERA by David Gyger

In association with the Australian Music Centre and ABC Classic FM, this program was no doubt as rewarding for the composers as it was stimulating for the audience in the Music Workshop. Each of the composers was briefly interviewed by the director of The Song Company, Roland Peelman, before their piece was performed, having a chance to explain themselved which all did with considerable clarity.

First came a piece entitled Construction by Alex Pozniak, of NSW, setting a French text though a little surprisingly said in his preliminary remarks that he doesn't speak the language and was primarily interested in exploring the pure sounds of his chosen text by Blaise Cendrars. This led to some startling moments - in particular, the running down to a dead halt on the word ossification and an abrupt revival on the next one - locomotion.

Magnificently performed by a five-member Song Company lieu its usual six, the energetic music and stop-start ambience leading to a very robust final flourish got this intriguing recital off to a highly promising start.

Next came a piece called You in the Night by another NSW resident, Chris Williams, using only the three male voices of The Song Company - a relatively straight-forward setting of text characterised by plenty of vigor and interesting interplay amongst the vocal lines.

Rebecca Harrison's The Humble-Bee was also fairly straight-forward, involving a good deal of humming in bee-buzz-like fashion. Johanna Selleck's Boult to Marina responded impressively to the feel of its text, coming up with a varied and interesting aural fabric which developed impressively.

Perhaps the most innovatively off-beat piece of the evening came from Andrew Batt-Rawden. Entitled < < click your user-name. > >, it was a musical venture into cyberspace involving lots of finger snapping by The Song Company stalwarts as well as brief snippets of text so varied and intermittntly suggestive of incipent seduction it was an ongoing fascination.

But in some respects the most intriguing piece of the evening was Kate Moore's Uisce (a Gaelic word for water), where the performers were placed way upstage and charged with delivering, in the terms of the program note, a piece "laid out like a waterfall where the performers must navigate their way through the score creating a river system of pitches."

With no direction from Roland Peelman, who retired to the periphery during Uisce, the five singers managed splendidly to simulate the flow of a pseudo-waterfall from the odd drip to full force via a gradual crescendo. Fragmentation and sudden robustnesses cropped up on the tortuous way toward a quiet ending, the singers' notes dripping through a background wash as required by the composer.

Fundamental to New Zealander Claire Nash's Epicene Women, which concluded this concert, was a poster from the early 1900s she had encountered in Wellington museum. Headlined Notice Epicene Women, it read: "Electioneering women are requested not to call here; they are recommended to go home, to look after their children, cook their husbands' dinners, empty the slops and generally attend to the domestic affairs for which nature intended them. By taking this advice they will gain the respect of all right-minded people - an end not to be attained by unsexing temselves and meddling in masculine concerns of which they are profoundly ignorant. - Henry Wright, 103 Mein St, Wellington."

Twirling water bottles to produce a humming effect and pronouncing their works in clipped tones embellished by a splendid array of twitches, The Song Company operatives had a real ball with this innovative and entertaining piece, exposing its feminist under-currents with great clarity and ebullient good humor over an underswell of well grounded anger, bringing the concert to an end on a decided high.