Microsoft word - 2012-11.docx

Jonathan Harvey
THE ANGELS
Jack Body
MARVEL NOT, JOSEPH
Arnold Schoenberg
PEACE ON EARTH
Anon. mediaeval, Clemens non Papa, Claudio Monteverdi, Elliott Carter, Will Ogdon, Luciano Berio, Wolfgang Hufschmidt, Solo voices
Introit Trope:
Ben Owen, Robert Franzke, Evan Lawson shepherds Mediaeval songs:
Catrina Seiffert, Louisa Billeter soprano, Jacob Lawrence, Ben Owen tenor Steven Hodgson, Tim Matthews Staindl bass Marvel not Joseph:
Catrina Seiffert, Kristy de la Rambelya soprano Louisa Billeter, Laila Engle alto Jacob Lawrence, Ben Owen, David Howell tenor Steven Hodgson, Tim Matthews Staindl bass Mary:
Xina Hawkins viola, Kim Bastin organ The Astra Choir
soprano
Kristy de la Rambelya, Irene McGinnigle, Catrina Seiffert, mezzo
Louisa Billeter, Jean Evans, Emma Gardner, Maree Macmillan, Susannah Provan, Kate Sadler, Kim Tan alto
Amy Bennett, Laila Engle, Gloria Gamboz, Anna Gifford, Xina Hawkins, Katie Richardson, Beverley Bencina, Jane Cousens, Joy Lee, Joan Pollock tenor
Stephen Creese, Jacob Lawrence, Ben Owen, Richard Webb, Greg Deakin, David Howell, Simon Johnson, Kevin March bass
Robert Franzke, Evan Lawson, Steven Hodgson, Chris Rechner, Tim Matthews Staindl, Chris Smith, John Terrell THE ANGELS (1994)

Anon 11th-14th C.
NATUS EST /QUEM PASTORES /SIT MEMORIA
QUEM QUAERITIS? / PUER NATUS EST
HAC NUBE IRRORANTE
Solo cantio with choir
NOBIS EST NATUS HODIE
male & female choirs & bells
MARVEL NOT, JOSEPH (1977)
solo voices and two choirs, texts from 2 mediaeval carols
__________________________________________
Wolfgang Hufschmidt MARY from Et in Terra Pax (1979)
poem by Brecht, speaker, soloists and instruments THE WORDS ARE GONE… (1978)
A CLEAR MIDNIGHT (1956)
HOME IS SO SAD (2012)
HEART NOT SO HEAVY AS MINE (1938)
IM FRIEDEN DEIN (2012)
___________________________________________
Claudio Monteverdi
SANCTUS from Missa in Illo Tempore (1610)
six-part choir

Anon. 11th C
VIRGA JESSE FLORUIT (11th C)
Trope, soloist and choir
FRIEDE AUF ERDEN OP.13 (1907)
poem by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, eight-part choir

Clemens non Papa
PASTORES LOQUEBANTUR (16th C)
Jonathan Harvey
THE ANGELS (1994) two choirs
Should you hear them singing among stars or whispering secrets of a wiser world, do not imagine ardent, fledgeling children they are intelligences old as sunrise that never learnt right from left, before from after, knowing but one direction, into God, Their melody strides not from bar to bar, but, like a painting, hangs there entire, one chord of limitless communication. You have heard it in the rhythms of the hills, the spiralling turn of a dance, the fall of words, the touch of fingers at the rare, right moment, Anon 14th C, Natus Est /Quem Pastores /Sit Memoria motet with 3 texts
Soprano:
Soprano:
those shepherds to whom the angels said: he whom Isaiah the illustrious sage predicted in divine prophesy, and therefore the angels intone
Aquitaine, 11th C, Quem Quaeritis In Praesepe? / Puer Natus Est
Troped Introit, Mass for Christmas
Shepherds:
Shepherds:
Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son. And now, going forth proclaim that he is born. Shepherds:
Shepherds:
Gregorian Introit:
Gregorian Introit:
Cuius imperium super humerum eius, whose sovereignty is upon his shoulders, Sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper, As it was in the beginning, is now and always Anon 14th C, HAC NUBE IRRORANTE

Hac nube irrorante
Anon 14th C, NOBIS EST NATUS HODIE
firmamentum potenciam and the firmament announces Ideo nos terrigenæ Let us inhabitants of the earth Cui sol luna et terra For whom sun, moon and earth Laudamus nostrum dominum Now let us praise our Lord, Mariae filium
Jack Body
MARVEL NOT, JOSEPH (1977) solo voices and two choirs
Choir 1:
"Marvel not, Joseph, on Mary mild.
Forsake her not, tho’ she be with child." "I, Joseph, wonder how this may be, If she be with child, it is not by me." The Holy Ghost, with merciful distense,
Wolfgang Hufschmidt, MARY from Et in Terra Pax (1979) speaker, soloists and instruments
[text not available due to copyright]. – Bertolt Brecht 1922 Luciano Berio, THE WORDS ARE GONE… (1978) “recitativo” for solo cello

Will Ogdon, A CLEAR MIDNIGHT (1956) choir
THIS is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best. Night, sleep, and the stars. – Walt Whitman Edward Fairley, HOME IS SO SAD (2012) choir
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, Shaped to the comfort of the last to go As if to win them back. Instead, bereft Of anyone to please, it withers so, Having no heart to put aside the theft And turn again to what it started as, A joyous shot at how things ought to be, Long fallen wide. You can see how it was: Look at the pictures and the cutlery. The music in the piano stool. That vase. – Philip Larkin Elliott Carter, HEART NOT SO HEAVY AS MINE (1938) choir
Heart, not so heavy as mine
Wending late home
As it passed my window
Sauntering this way, Carolled, and paused, and carolled, Upon a toilsome way Set bleeding feet to minuets Weary, perhaps, and sore Ah bugle, by my window, I pray you stroll once more!

Kym Dillon, IM FRIEDEN DEIN (2012) choir
Johann Englisch 1530 / Phillipp Spitta 1898 __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Claudio Monteverdi, SANCTUS from Missa in Illo Tempore (1610) choir
Heaven and earth are full of your glory. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

Anon. 11th C, VIRGA JESSE FLORUIT Trope, soloists and choir
Christ the King, to a virgin without a man, a flower wondrously born from the branch’s flower. The author of life is born without a man, a flower wondrously born from the branch’s flower. Virgula flore de virgula flos more miro. a flower wondrously born from the branch’s flower.
Arnold Schoenberg, FRIEDE AUF ERDEN Op.13 (1907) eight-part choir
– Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825-98) Clemens non Papa, PASTORES LOQUEBANTUR (16th C) 5-part motet
et videamus hoc verbum, quod factum est, that the Lord has made known to us.” Noel. et invenerunt Mariam, et Joseph, et infantem and found Mary, and Joseph, and the child positum in præsepio. et reversi sunt …

Spatial tableaux and physical movement of voices are central to the history
of collective singing. In this concert they give expression to seasonal themes linking the earth-bound and the celestial – shepherds and angels, images of the ‘real-existing’ and the domestic set among wider expanses of time and The physical building of the Sacred Heart Church with its generous spatial and acoustic qualities in a sense becomes the main actor, the voices the vehicle, in the program’s thematic and musical pathways. Three of the larger pieces, by Jonathan Harvey, Jack Body and Wolfgang Huschmidt, follow an old tradition by splitting the choir into two separated bodies of sound – with distinct functions and imagery in each case. A leading figure internationally and in British music for the last half-century, Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012) died just a few days ago on December 4. He
is equally known as choral and electro-acoustic composer, sometimes combining the two worlds, and was also noted for his interests in spirituality and world religions, much drawn to Eastern philosophy. The Angels was
written for the divided sides of the King’s College Cambridge choir, one half articulating the poem by John Vernon Taylor, former Bishop of Winchester, the other half forming a suspended harmonic web for the poem’s “limitless communication” of “intelligences old as sunrise”. Tropes from the late Middle Ages were texts and melodies interpolated into
the much older Gregorian liturgy, providing both a poetic elaboration and in some cases a dramatization of sections of the Mass for important Feasts, out of which grew the first European theatre of mystery plays. This concert’s Gregorian chant Introit from the Christmas Day Mass is preceded by a solo trope voice, challenging the shepherds who have arrived at the crib and conjuring the presence of Isaiah, whose text forms the Introit itself. This trope version was transcribed from an 11th-century Aquitanian manuscript by Australian scholar Greta-Mary Hair, and first performed in modern times by Jack Body (b.1944) has been among the most prominent composers of New
Zealand for several decades, active across the Asian region with particular knowledge of the music and culture of Indonesia, and producing a broad body of work in all kinds of instrumental, vocal and electro-acoustic music. His interests in cross-cultural composition are reflected even in his early choral piece Marvel not, Joseph, in which two 15th-century carols are
reworked and superimposed, using two contrasted groups of soloists and choir. A lower spectrum of voices focuses on the sense of shock around the human figure of Joseph (“Marvel not, Joseph”), while a higher, more distant choir multiples the serene Latin/English carol “Ave, plena gracie”. Wolfgang Hufschmidt (b.1934) belongs to a tradition in Germany flowing from
the poetry and theatre of Bertolt Brecht and composers such as Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau. Formerly Rector of the multi-discipline Folkwang Music University in the Ruhr, he has frequently collaborated in his work with other artists such as the writer Günter Grass. His oratorio Et in terra pax opens with a web of remembered Christmas-music sound, panning between two separated choirs, as if in the wind, and providing lodging for Brecht’s early poem Mary. In a few lines
Brecht sketches with characteristic laconic skill the vastness and materiality of the historical subject of Mary, focussing on the physical reality of a building long The solo cello piece by Luciano Berio (1925-2003), like the Walt Whitman poem
that follows it in Will Ogdon’s chorus, advances into the “wordless”. Subtitled a “recitativo”, the cello work initially spells out in 6 musical letters the name of its dedicatee Paul Sacher, the Swiss conductor and patron of a generation of contemporary music. From there the recitation progressively passes to animated trope-like elaborations in virtuoso cello sound. The four succeeding choral-poetic settings continue threads of the program’s imagery. Will Ogdon (b.1921) is a significant 12-tone composer of his generation
in the USA, and was a founding figure of the celebrated contemporary Music Department at the University of California, San Diego. His Whitman setting sketches in two brief pages a musical space “away from books, away from art” to the cosmic night and stars. The program also pays homage with an early choral piece of Elliott Carter (1908-2012), who died just a month ago on November 5,
and whose 104th birthday falls two days after the concert, on December 11. His madrigal after Emily Dickinson, like so much of his later music, embodies two kinds of energy in parallel, the house-bound, melancholy narrator and the cheerful figure “wending late home” past the window. Puctuating these two works from the oldest current generation of American composers are two others representing the newest generation in Australian music. Edward Fairlie and Kym Dillon are both graduating in the Honours
Performance course at the VCA in the last year of its existence as an integrated degree with improvisation and classical students. Both are performer-composers with backgrounds in jazz as well as in contemporary art-music composition. Edward Fairlie’s Home is so sad provides links to both Brecht and Dickinson in
Philip Larkin’s ironic meditation on the contingent physicality of a dwelling. Kym Dillon’s Im Frieden Dein takes the identical German chorale text used by Italian
composer Aldo Clementi, in a work performed at a recent Astra concert with new Italian music. Clementi’s setting, written following the bombing of Bologna Station in 1982, breaks off at the midway point of each of the three stanzas, stopping with three elemental experiences – the pathway, the meal, the joining together. In Kym Dillon’s version, this quality of interruptive conclusions is further marked by brief references to the original chorale melody. The 6-part Mass Sanctus movement of Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643)
takes up the last words of Jonathan Harvey’s opening piece, in an almost wordless descending wall of sound, based on combinations of many melodic quotations from an earlier Renaissance motet by Nicolas Gombert. The concert also concludes the 500th celebratory year of Gombert’s direct contemporary Clemens non Papa (c.1512-1556). Unusually among the great
Renaissance figures, Clemens did not travel to work in Italy, but remained in the Franco-Flemish region which was the cradle of the whole Renaissance style. Of Clemens’ several hundred motets, his Pastores loquebantur is one of the
most vivid and depictive, giving expression to the speech of the shepherds, their arrival, a moment of awe at the sight of Mary, and their return through the night. Arnold Schoenberg’s famous early chorus Peace on Earth starts with a
similar journey of the shepherds, accompanied by the continuous bell-motive from the skies peace on earth – before launching into impassioned lament for the wars which have continued through human history, and a tonal vision of future peace. Musically the work forms a series of four grand variations corresponding to the four stanzas of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s poem. Written not long before the First World War, the work was later to be described by Schoenberg as an “illusion for mixed chorus”, but not performed until the late 1920s because of its perceived musical difficulty. – JMcC Astra notes with sadness the death of Lawrence Whiffin on November 18. A familiar presence in the concerts over the last three decades, both as composer and audience member, he wrote two works for the Astra Choir: The Piano Tuner (1980) and Perception of the Straight Line (1984). A host of other works premiered at Astra concerts included Murchitt, a daydream (with William Henderson, 1997), Concerto for Violin and Five Instruments (for Miwako Abe, 1999), Fiesta for recorder & ensemble (for Genevieve Lacey, 2004), Time Steals Softer (Song cycle for Jerzy Kozlowski, poems by George Genovese, 2010), and Piano Sonata No.3 (for Michael Kieran Harvey, 2011). The range of these works indicates the variety of his imagination and abilities. He will be much missed in the wider music scene in Australia and by his many friends, colleagues COMPACT DISCS

NEW - Move Records, Australia:
ASTRA 60: Piano Recital by Michael Kieran Harvey
Australian piano works by Lawrence Whiffin (Piano Sonata No.3), Keith Humble,
Helen Gifford, Marguerite Boland, Tom Henry, Mark Pollard and Warren Burt.
JOHANNA BEYER: STICKY MELODIES. Choral and Chamber Music 1932–43
(double-CD) Astra Chamber Music Society: Merlyn Quaife (soprano), Craig Hill (clarinet),
Miwako Abe, Aaron Barnden, Erkki Veltheim, Rosanne Hunt (string quartet),
Nicholas Synot (double bass), Kim Bastin (piano), Peter Dumsday (piano).
The Astra Choir conducted by John McCaughey.
Michael Kieran Harvey, piano: THRENODY.
Australian piano compositions by James Anderson, Andrew Byrne, Stuart Campbell,
Michael Kieran Harvey, Keith Humble, John McCaughey and Carl Vine.
Keith Humble, piano: BAGATELLES. Liszt, Bartok and Humble,
recorded at Keith Humble’s last public recital, at La Trobe University in 1993. Lawrence Whiffin & William Henderson. MURCHITT A DAYDREAM. CD & book.
Merlyn Quaife (soprano), Tyrone Landau (tenor), William Henderson (reciter), instrumental ensemble and the Astra Choir, conducted by John McCaughey. Kim Bastin and Joan Pollock, pianos: WHITE AND BLACK.
Schoenberg, Second Chamber Symphony and other works for two pianos Astra Concert Archive: “ACHILLES FALLS…” Astra Choir, soloists & ensemble.
Stefan Wolpe with Webern, Beethoven, Brahms.
Choral works with song, melodrama, instrumental solo and chamber music.
Miwako Abe (violin), Tristram Williams (trumpet), ensembles conducted by John McCaughey.
Astra Concert Archive: “FIRST AND LAST THINGS…” Astra Choir, soloists & ensemble.
Bach, Lechner, Busoni, Kagel, Hindemith, Martin Friedel, Wolfgang Hufschmidt, Paul Celan.
from Bach via chant, speech-chorus & poetry to Busoni Fantasia contrappuntistica.
Kim Bastin & Joan Pollock (piano duo); Margaret Ricketts and William Henderson (speakers).
Helen Gifford: CHORAL SCENES. The Western Front, World War I (1999)
Poems by René Arcos, August Stramm, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard Kipling, Frederic Manning,
Siegfried Sassoon, Wilhelm Klemm, Charles Vildrac, Edmund Blunden, Laurence Binyon,
Apollinaire, Vance Palmer.
The Astra Choir, speakers & instruments, conducted by John McCaughey.
The Rector, Fr Brendan Lane and Diane Carey, Corpus Christi College; Dr Greta-Mary Hair; The Eleventh Hour Theatre. Astra concerts receive support in 2012 from numerous private donors; the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria; The William Angliss Trust; Diana Gibson; The Ian Potter Foundation; The Robert Salzer Foundation. Chair: Graeme Leak Manager: Gabrielle Baker Musical Director: John McCaughey PO Box 365, North Melbourne, Victoria 3051, Australia ABN 41 255 197 577 Tel: +61 (3) 9326 5424 email: info@astramusic.org.au web: www.astramusic.org.au

Source: http://www.astramusic.org.au/program-notes/2012-11.pdf