Category: Feature Articles

a preview by Neville Cohn

As a child growing up in Cape Town, I recall – as if it were yesterday – being taken by my revered music teacher to a chamber music concert at Temple Hall.

It was a thrilling and unforgettable experience. That performance was one of a series of chamber music concerts given under the auspices of the Concert Club which was run by Hans Kramer and his wife Greta.

Fleeing as refugees from Hitler’s Germany, they arrived on South African shores virtually penniless but they brought with them a deep and abiding love for music. And despite the difficulties inherent in founding and maintaining an annual chamber music series, they persevered until the Concert Club became a crucial part of Cape Town’s music life.

When I settled in Australia, I very soon discovered that the Musica Viva series of chamber music concerts had had much the same genesis as Cape Town’s Concert Club. And over more than a quarter century, I have had the good fortune to attend a plethora of ensemble performances brought here by this great organisation. It’s a priceless musical gift for music followers in Perth.

Among the delights coming Perth’s way this year is a program presented by the superb Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge. Founded more than 450 years ago – yes, in 1538! – this peerless vocal ensemble has enchanted listeners and worshippers all across the world not least through a miscellany of fine recordings. Its program for Perth includes music by Byrd and Tallis as well as music written centuries later – in our time, in fact – by John Tavener and Paul Stanhope.

Pavel Haas was a composer who, like so many other Jewish musicians in Czechoslovakia, was murdered by the Nazis. One of the finest ensembles on the international concert circuit has named itself the Pavel Haas Quartet in tribute to a remarkable composer. The program includes works by Dvorak and Haydn as well as by Stanhope, Musica Viva’s composer in residence.

Aficionados of the piano are in for a treat as British pianist par excellence Paul Lewis will give a recital which includes Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata and works by Mozart, Schumann and Liszt.

Another delight is The Harp Consort, an Ireland-based ensemble which brings to its concerts an irrepressible joie de vivre to match its sublime musical skills.

Many Perth concertgoers will relish the opportunity to hear pianist Cedric Tiberghien who has dazzled many listeners here, not least through his superb skill as an interpreter of Messiaen. For Musica Viva, he will team up with violinist Alina IBragimova in sonatas by Beethoven and Schumann.

For booking information, please telephone 1800 688 482.

born Buckinghamshire, England 28 March 1933

died Perth 13 September 2009

My first encounter with John Exton as performing musician was at a recital about 25 years ago in which he played a work that Bach had written for unaccompanied cello. John, though, most unusually, played it in a transcription for viola. I was at the time struck by the profound musicianship he brought to the task. It was a novel take on an established masterwork – but John, more often than not, approached life on his own, often unusual, terms.

Alan Bonds, who teaches violin at the University of Western Australia, recalls long ago domestic chamber music sessions presided over by John.

“It might start with a snack and a drink followed by an hour or two of  Haydn and Mozart quartets, more refreshments, then Beethoven or Schubert dragged out, then, after a midnight snack, Brahms might make an appearance – the quartets or sextets –  which often saw us to dawn. A swim at the beach might follow. I vividly remember John’s son Peter, then about 10 years old, appearing at the door of the living room around 2am, asking ‘Are you all totally mad?’ ”

John viewed the world through a singular prism, a man of very strongly held views, not easily swayed by a contrary opinion and not infrequently obdurate in defence of a point of view.

Young John took up the violin at the age of eleven and in 1950 became leader of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. He then read music at Cambridge, as a scholar, research student and later Fellow at King’s College.

He studied composition in London with Matyas Seiber who is believed to be the only composer to have met his end as a result of being sat upon by an elephant – and, after winning the prestigious Mendelssohn Scholarship for composition, he studied with Luigi Dallapiccola  in Florence.

Two years’ National Service, involving work in acoustics with the R.A.F.,  bore fruit some fifteen years later in connection with an electronic studio in Perth.

Returning to Cambridge in 1960, John married Gillian Chadwick, a cartographer at Clarendon Press, and spent the next three years composing in an ancient thatched cottage with roses over the door and a huge open fireplace. He was awarded a Doctorate of Music by Cambridge University in 1964. He was then Director of Music at Bedales School in Hampshire for three years, before coming to Perth with sons Peter and Stephen. Gill recalls “we saw there was more room here, so we filled some of it with Jane. We bought an old house in Claremont, and John did things to it which gave him enormous satisfaction.“

During study leave from UWA in 1972, John visited several electronic music studios in USA and worked in one in Cardiff, Wales – and bought a fine 18th-century viola, an instrument after which he had long hankered but only played consistently from this time.

John would often swim against the tide. Although a product of Cambridge University, where the retrieval and preservation of early music performance practice was an article of faith, John would have none of it. His interest was in live performance – and he disapproved of recordings which he felt fossilized the experience of a piece of music.

As Alan Bonds points out, however, although John might have had little time for the music of, say, Elgar or Vaughan Williams, he would nonetheless use some of their works for the Student Chamber Orchestra at UWA and direct them with diligence and fidelity to the score – and there were adventurous excursions into lesser known repertoire by, inter alia, Purcell and Skalkottas.

Bonds, too, recalls with pleasure John’s immaculately prepared recitals with, among others, Madame Alice Carrard in repertoire which ranged from Bach to Webern.

John’s compositions range from orchestral pieces such as “Ryoanji” for 40 strings and percussion to works for solo oboe and solo violin. There are also seven string quartets and some electronic music works. An affinity for instrumental music and instrumentalists did not deter him from creativity in vocal music, producing, for instance, a setting of Hilaire Belloc’s Bad Child’s Book of Beasts for a concert by Kings College choir and a “Story of Christ’s Nativity according to St Luke for Bedales School. A highlight of his work in Perth was presiding over a performance of Bach’s St John Passion.

John’s interest in Buddhism, mainly Zen, had its origin around 1970 and developed

steadily. After a second trip to India in 1993, he encountered Theravada Buddhism which became important to him.

At John’s funeral, wife Gill said: “Our family has always been close and dear to us and some of our most valued times have been around the candlelit dining table, camping in the bush together and building our house in Kalamunda which we completed as a family team.”

Gardening was a long term delight and wife Gill says “he admired nature taking its course and interfered minimally with a mower or hand saw when grass grew or trees fell down. He grew vegies in Kalamunda when the family was at home but not by method. Results were variable.”

His garden, John said, had no weeds, for weeds were plants you don’t want and his were all welcome – and kangaroos came regularly to keep the grass short.

John Exton is survived by wife Gillian, children Peter, Stephen and Jane and eight grandchildren.

Neville Cohn

Stuart Hille contributes this recollection:

On, or very close to, John’s last teaching day within the (then) Department of Music, I came into his office to ask him a question about a particular student.  By this time, I had just returned from my studies in the USA and had taken up a teaching fellowship at UWA.  Of the many tutorials and lectures I gave, at least four were related to John’s course titled ‘Techniques of Musical Structure’.  Every student undertook this course over his/her first two years of the Mus.B. program.  It was a rite of passage about which, even to this day, I have never heard a word from a past student that wasn’t praiseworthy.

Without this two year course students would have had no understanding of modern counterpoint (or how counterpoint, in general, functioned, for that matter), harmonic and linear – including dodecaphonic – negotiation of atonality, and a assortment of related areas of creative techniques of prolongation.  John had designed and re-designed the course in his quest to make its content as creatively and mentally stimulating as he could, mindful of the knowledge he would, initially, need to clear away the musty, derivative and lazy thinking of the secondary school system.  And it was presented to students with a wit they wouldn’t have previously encountered, and in a manner that left no doubt about the depth of knowledge, and adoration of the art of music, of its presenter.

So, on this final day, I knocked on the door and entered the room.  There was John, standing up and leaning on a floor to ceiling bookcase (a position he often adopted when completing the cryptic crossword of The Australian newspaper) and he was discarding, what I assumed to be, a clutter of useless papers and files….clearing out the premises, as it were.  But, to my astonishment – no, my horror – he was throwing out ALL the folders and sheets, two year’s worth of indispensable education, of the entire course.

“What are you doing?” I asked with genuine dismay.  “It’s useless now.  This ‘lot’ (sic) won’t know what to do with it” he replied.  I then responded: “Well I do and I’ll take it” as I, presumptuously, reached into the rubbish bin and rescued every file.  I added: “And I’ll take these too” as I reached across for the other files awaiting to be similarly disposed of.  John then said: “You’re welcome to them Stuart.  Good luck!”.  My telling of the incident is poor because it disguises the fact that he and I were both somewhat outraged that such a vital body of information had nowhere else, other than the trash bin, to go to be further utilised.  The reader would need to have been present to hear the tone with which these words were spoken.

Over the years since, I have browsed through this course material and I have thought of ways to up-date it in places and to extend its reach to include ways of rhythmic variation, timbre as a unifying parameter, and even, during an additional year to start to introduce some higher level analysis (rather than the usual abrupt bolt to Schenkerism).  On the whole, I think John would have been pleased with the evolution of his course and I feel it’s about the finest tribute I could make to commemorate such an intensely gifted and creative thinker.

Each page brings back a memory of the day it was presented to me, as a student in class: “Stravinsky went slowly downhill after Le Sacre” or, my personal favourite: “The organ’s nothing more than a box of whistles…it’s true, think about it”.  So many gems, as they appear now, that felt like nasty stings at the time.  These memories show an important part of John’s educative strategy: to hit them when they least expect it and, while the gap thus created – between conscious searching and shock – is there, insert the new information.  This is the essence  of masterful teaching.

I don’t know what I’m going to do the new ‘Techniques of Musical Structure’ and perhaps, for the time being, it doesn’t matter.  I didn’t extricate the files to assuage John’s dark feelings about the department, for that was not my concern.  I delivered them for what they contained and how they could be further enriched.  It was unimaginable to me to try to visualise this mass of intelligence, insight and experience being ditched with the daily collected refuse of sandwich wrappers and cigarette butts.

born Dobrich, Bulgaria February 1961              

died Perth, Western Australia June 2009                          

 

Andrey Popov grew up in a home filled with music. On both sides of the family there were many steeped in the music tradition. As many as fifteen cousins on his mother’s side were instrumentalists, some on violin, others on guitar or mandolin. A grandfather played the harmonium at weddings and public gatherings. Both Mr Popov’s mother Mrs Ljuba Popova and her brother became skilled accordionists.

 

 

On the paternal side of the family were many gifted singers. A great-grandfather sang in the choir of the Alexander Nevsky church in the Bulgarian capital Sofia.  Priests, too, figure prominently on the family tree, including the so-called Red Priest described as a modern Bulgarian Robin Hood who ended his life on the gallows. He is not be confused with that even more famous Red Priest, the Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi.

 

As a child, little Andrey would accompany a neighbourhood friend to the latter’s piano lessons during which the little boy would pay the closest attention to what his friend’s teacher was saying, soaking up what he heard via a form of musical osmosis. Real piano lessons followed with a local who had made good in the outside world. Little Andrey thrived. Later, his progress at Varna Specialist Secondary Music School was so impressive that he was offered a scholarship to study in Poland – but his parents declined this offer to their gifted son.

 

As the boy’s well educated and relatively well-off parents were considered “unreliable” by the Bulgarian communist regime, the young man was obliged to serve his compulsory military service at one of the harshest training camps in Bulgaria. And it was there that two fingers were broken while being trained to use a Kalashnikov firearm. This injury, surely as devastating psychologically as painful physically, effectively blocked his admission to the Sofia Conservatorium of Music. This was a huge blow for a young man nurturing hopes of a concert career. Instead, he enrolled in the Plovdiv Institute of Musical Pedagogy and after graduation he returned to his home town to head the Children’s School of Music.

 

Hugely successful as a teacher in Dobrich, many of his students went on to become laureates of competitions at home and further afield, some going on to distinguished careers as performers. All the while, Andrey maintained a career as a concert pianist, often giving recitals with his violinist wife at hotels and piano bars in the Black Sea resort town of Albena. Both in Bulgaria and, later in Australia, he would receive letters from former students telling of their many successes.

 

Political and economic upheavals from 1988 resulted in the Dobrich school closing due to lack of funding, and Popov was out of a job. Opening a private teaching practice did not appeal so he came to Australia alone, his wife choosing to remain in Bulgaria.

 

A very new kind of musical life began for Andrey Popov in Western Australia where, for the first time, he ventured into the world of dance as a rehearsal pianist, a calling to which he shaped like fine wine to a goblet.

 

Leading ballet teacher and examiner, Diana de Vos, recalled her first meeting with Popov in 1997 when, with that other fine ballet instructor Leslie Hutchinson, she auditioned Popov for a post accompanying classes at the Terpsichore Dance Centre. “His piano skills were first class; he was a brilliant addition to our staff”, she recalled. “His music was quite inspirational, affecting us all emotionally. He knew, almost instinctively, what was required.”

 

Serendipitously, Popov had found a new, hitherto unexplored, path in music, going on to work at the Graduate College of Dance and the W.A.Academy of Performing Arts. Heather Baskerville, regional co-ordinator Royal Academy of Dance, recalls the pleasure his playing gave to so many, working, inter alia, for the Cecchetti Ballet Society and the many activities of the Royal Academy of Dance. She also remarked how, on more formal ballet occasions, Popov would routinely dress “in a black dinner suit to help lift the mood of the occasion and in doing so elevated, yet calmed, the otherwise nervous candidates.”

 

One of many amusing anecdotes concerned the intense nervousness of a student about to go on stage. She asked for something to calm her to which Popov responded by giving her two small white tablets which she was told to suck very slowly as she played. The performance was brilliant and the student, gushing in her thanks for the pills which had soothed her nerves, asked her teacher: “What were those marvellous tranquillisers?” Pokerfaced, he told her “Tic Tac, peppermint flavour”.

 

His was an idiosyncratic sense of humour, his responses invariably delivered dead-pan. Heather Baskerville recalls seeing Popov clutching a number of coloured pencils. She enquired what they were for. “You’ve heard of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony?”, he asked. “Well, I am writing Popov’s Unstarted Symphony”.

 

Yet another anecdote gleefully recounted concerned a fellow dance repetiteur who routinely used generous amounts of hand cream before playing the piano. The class was followed by one Popov was to play for. He seated himself at the keyboard, played for a moment or two on the now-slippery keys before exclaiming: “Look how lucky I am. I am playing in yogurt”.

 

Many of Popov’s friends in the dance world talk of his enterprising cooking skills.

Parties hosted by Popov and his mother Ljuba were, by all accounts, memorable events – and for all the right reasons. Fascinated by Asian spices, he would often experiment with this or that combination of flavours to tempt dinner guests.

 

The last years were blighted by increasingly serious illness, much of it the result of heavy smoking, an addiction he was unable to overcome. There were stays in hospital and long periods when work was impossible. Friends rallied around the household in Bedford. There seemed a visible improvement. Then, unexpectedly, there was a heart seizure that proved fatal. The good die far too young.

 

At the funeral service, there was a touching reminder of Andrey Popov’s artistry as mourners listened to a recording he had made of selections from the ballet repertoire.

 

Andrey Popov is survived by his mother Mrs Ljuba Popova and a brother in Sofia.

 

Neville Cohn Copyright 2009

 

 

 

A Centenary Tribute

 

by Neville Cohn

 

 

Her dirt poor parents in Boulder were so short of money, that her clothes were made from old flour sacks – and her  shoes were hand-me-downs two sizes too big for her. It’s almost certain that these slights and embarrassments made the little girl long to be famous and rich. And that is what happened to Eileen Joyce – or little Ellie as she was known in Boulder where her parents settled not long after Ellie was born in Tasmania in 1908.

 

One hundred years on, there will be many a commemorative recital in her honour around the world. So, too, in Perth which loomed large in Joyce’s affections, so much so that towards the end of her life, she donated significant monies for the building of the Eileen Joyce Studio on UWA campus in memory of her parents.

 

During the 1940s and into the 1950s, Eileen Joyce was arguably the second most famous of living Australians, second only to Don Bradman – and she earned buckets of money in the process.

 

She was glamorous, she was feted wherever she went – and the clothes she wore were almost as a big a talking point as her performances. Eileen Joyce would say that, in her mind, certain colours suited certain composers: lilac for Liszt, yellow for Schumann, blue for Grieg, red for Tchaikowsky and so on. And she would frequently give recitals in which she would wear a different concert gown for each work on the program, a habit that would surely have been sweet compensation after her poverty-stricken youth. And these were not gowns made by some anonymous suburban dressmaker. On the contrary, they sported the labels of some of the priciest couturiers in the world, such as Worth and Norman Hartnell, the Queens’ dress designer.

 

For years, she was very frequently written about in women’s magazines which informed their avid readers that even Joyce’s hairstyles were dictated by the music she played: hair piled high for Beethoven, drawn back tight for Mozart and let down for Debussy!

 

Some critics blasted her for these “tasteless distractions”, “prostitution of her art” and “cheap tricks”. Eileen laughed all the way to the bank.

 

As a child, Ellie liked to play the harmonica but when an aunt moved in with the family, she brought an item of furniture that would change Ellie’s life forever – a battered old upright piano to which the little girl took like the proverbial duck to water.

 

Ellie was taught the piano at the convent school she attended in Boulder. Enter one Charles Schilsky who would by now be totally forgotten if not for being the first senior musician to spot Ellie’s extraordinary potential and do something about it. Schilsky had come to Boulder as an examiner for Trinity College of Music, London.

 

After hearing young Ellie, he approached the local priest and told him the little girl had a giant talent and needed top tuition. The Catholic church came to Ellie’s musical rescue. Monies were raised in improbable ways. Hats were passed around in Boulder taverns – and more than a few of the winnings from games of two-up found their way to the growing fund. Ellie went to Perth as a boarder at Loreto Convent where Sister John gave Ellie the music guidance she needed.

 

Enter Charles Schilsky yet again. Invited back to Perth to adjudicate at an eisteddfod, he immediately recognised that Ellie was moving forward by leaps and bounds, put in a good word or two and before long young Eileen was on her way to Europe for lessons in Leipzig, Germany from Robert Teichmuller. Here, too, she flourished, absorbing her teacher’s wise counsel like blotting paper. Then she went to England. Sir Henry Wood, founder of the famous London Proms, conducted her debut concerto performance; it was a huge success. Eileen Joyce was on her way to justifying Percy Grainger’s comment that “she was the most transcendentally gifted pianist I have ever encountered.”

 

Her big break came in London. She’d decided to make a piano recording privately which she intended to use as a sort of musical calling card when looking for concert opportunities. But when she returned to the studio to pay for the recording she had made days earlier, she was told, to her pleasant surprise, that her playing was so impressive that, not only did she not have to pay for the recording, she was instead offered a contract to make further recordings on the Parlophone label – and that was the beginning of a career during which many of her records became best sellers, making a fortune for both the recording company and Eileen.

 

This was also about the time that Eileen, a compulsive liar for most of her life, began manufacturing fanciful fictions about her life and career – and these fabrications became increasingly complicated until, later in life, she had difficulty herself in remembering what was true and what was not. Early on, she claimed to have been born in 1912 – but then, many movie actresses also hid their year of birth.

 

In 1937, Eileen married stockbroker Douglas Barratt by whom she fell pregnant. It was not a happy union – and their son John was born sixteen hours after Britain declared war on Germany. Not long after, Douglas was killed on active service.

 

Later, Joyce met  Christopher Mann – and although presenting themselves as a married couple, there are still doubts whether they were legally married or not: another one of Joyce’s lies?

 

Whatever the state of their union, Mann proved a brilliant agent; his connections and shrewd business acumen transformed Eileen into a superstar and earned them a fortune. Her son, though, was to have a traumatic youth and adolescence at Eileen’s and Christopher’s hands. He was packed off to boarding school at the earliest possible moment. And Mann’s attitude towards the little boy would make David Copperfield’s stepfather seem a paragon of enlightenment and compassion by comparison.

 

For the rest of his life, Mann treated John appallingly, at best treating him like some barely tolerated house guest and insisting on the most detailed accounting, literally to the very penny, of the parsimonious allowance he so grudgingly gave the child who was more often than not dumped like some unwanted parcel at boarding school. To her eternal discredit, Eileen never intervened, passively allowing Mann to wreck John’s childhood and adolescence. This indifference to her only child became ever more obvious towards the end of life when Eileen lavished far more affection on her dogs than her only child.

 

When she died, she left money for guide dogs for the blind. Would that she had been equally caring about her son John to whom she left nothing – nothing! – so that, to acquire some dearly loved childhood artefacts, he had to engage an agent to purchase these at an auction sale of his mother’s possessions. But Joyce did leave money to John’s young son, to be held in trust until he turned 25 years old. John did not attend his mother’s funeral.

 

Mean and neglectful she may have been towards her son but in other ways Joyce was generous with her time and abilities. She rarely turned down an appeal to play to raise funds for this or that charity. And in wartime England she worked unceasingly, as did, say, Yehudi Menuhin, to play for the troops in hospitals and munitions factories up and down the land. This, too, brought record crowds to her performances whether as recitalist or concerto soloist.

 

Joyce’s success on the concert platform or the recording studio was based on a very shrewd self assessment. A superb technical facility allowed her to play, with ease, any work she attempted at the piano. But she lacked interpretative depth – and she knew it. So she avoided music like the late sonatas of Beethoven, for instance, with which she could not identify compellingly. Hers was essentially a superficial gift – and she  exploited it brilliantly. It won over a huge international audience.

 

Much later in life, she developed an interest in the harpsichord and this at a time when

baroque performance practice was almost unknown – and she is rightly credited with doing valuable pioneering work drawing attention to often neglected early music.

 

In old age, Joyce very much wanted to honour the memory of her parents and she did so, on the advice of the late Sir Frank Callaway, founding professor of  UWA’s School of Music, by donating significant monies to the university to purpose-build a small auditorium on campus. And it is widely agreed that the Eileen Joyce Studio is one of the most beautiful appointed and situated venues of its kind in the world. It houses a collection of historic pianos as well as water colour paintings of Joyce as concerto soloist at London’s Royal Festival Hall. There is also a fine Augustus John portrait of Joyce when young. There’s also an oil paining of her in doctoral robes (she was awarded an honorary doctorate in music by UWA).

 

To mark the centenary, Piers Lane who stood in for Joyce years earlier when her hands were not up to the job, will give a recital of works close to Joyce’s heart at the Octagon on Sunday March 16th at 5pm: the program includes the 24 Preludes, opus 28 by Chopin and Grainger’s arrangement of the first movement of Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor.   Perhaps the recital organisers will arrange to have the paintings and drawings of Eileen Joyce displayed in the Octagon foyer on the day of the recital.

 

Neville Cohn

 

 

 

by Neville Cohn

 

 

 

Perth, in world terms, may be a small city remote from the main highways of the international concert circuit but it certainly punches above its weight insofar as the range and vitality of its music life is concerned.

 

Many a much larger city would have been proud to host the equivalent of Perth’s tribute to the music of Olivier Messiaen, the centenary of whose birth in 1908 has been celebrated worldwide. Early in the year, Michael Kieran Harvey devoted three recitals over two days to the master’s complete Catalogue of the Birds based on the composer’s vast understanding of birdsong – with linking commentary by conservationist Martin Copley. Later in the year, we heard a first rate account of Messiaen’s youthful Les Offrandes oubliees  played by an on-form West Australian Symphony Orchestra. As well, Simone Young presided over an unforgettably magnificent interpretation of L’Ascension.

 

It was good year for pianists, especially Yefim  Bronfman, that prince of the piano, in turn magisterial and scintillating in Rachmaninv’s Concerto No3 in D minor – and Piers Lane marked the centenary of the birth of famed Oz pianist Eileen Joyce with a program of music that often featured in Joyce’s recitals. Sydney International Piano Competition winner Konstantin Shamray did a lap of honour around the country. His Perth recital was memorable for a profoundly meaningful account of Liszt’s  arrangement of the Liebestod  from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.

 

Victor Sangiorgio brought refined musicianship and impeccable fingerwork to sonatas by Cimarosa  as did Angela Hewitt to Bach’s massive 48 Preludes and Fugues over two recitals.

 

Joseph Nolan brought impressive virtuosity to two organ programs at St George’s Cathedral.

 

Dimitri Ashkenazy (son of the more famous Vladimir) was a matchless soloist with the WASO in Nielsen’s Clarinet Concerto. Brahms’ Double Concerto was given a thrillingly passionate reading by the ACO with soloists Richard Tognetti (violin) and Tino-Veikko Valve (cello). Youthful soloists – Rebecca White (violin), Rachel Silver (cello) and Zen Zeng  (piano) – were impressive in Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with the Fremantle Chamber Orchestra conducted by Daniel Kossov. James Ehness’  artistry on the violin was wasted on Bernstein’s rubbishy Serenade. Natalie Clein’s account of Elgar’s Cello Concerto set the loftiest of standards by which all other performances of this concerto should now be judged.

 

Easily the most satisfying accounts of  symphonies in 2008 were Alex Briger’s direction of Tchaikowsky’s Fifth, taking the WASO through a reading that brought one face to face with the composer. Another work by the Russian master – the Manfred Symphony – was tailor-made for Vladimir Verbitsky who seemed positively to revel in its massive sonic onslaughts. And in Sibelius’ Symphony no 1, Paul Daniel sounded in his element; it augurs well for his tenure as principal conductor of the WASO. Tadaaki Otaka’s direction of the overture to Wagner’s Tannhauser and the Venusberg Music, on the other hand, was a disappointment, one of the WASO’s few dull patches this year.

 

Graeme Murphy’s production of Verdi’s Aida was lavishly mounted at His Majesty’s Theatre. I cannot recall a more visually spectacular offering at this venue in 25 years – although the stage was simply not big enough to comfortably accommodate the vast cast. Aivale Cole was memorable in the eponymous role – and hardly less impressive earlier in the year as Helmwige in a concert version of Act I II of  Wagner’s  The Valkyries. Here, among others, Lisa Gasteen as Brunnhilde and Fiona Campbell as Grimgerde  cumulatively generated the decibel levels necessary to blast a way through a huge orchestra at the Concert Hall. In The Magic Flute, Aldo di Toro was splendidly cast as Prince Tamino – it was one of the year’s best opera portrayals. At the other end of the size scale was the WAAPA production of Robert Ward’s The Crucible. This Australian premier season revealed a work almost entirely devoid of catchy melody, a challenging opus which brought out the best in a cast of student singers who, with very few exceptions, succeeded in articulating the opera’s often intricate vocal lines.

 

Margaret Pride’s Collegium Symphonic Chorus was stunningly impressive in Rachmaninov’s Vespers, sung in Russian for an audience that thronged St Joseph’s Church, Subiaco. The Giovanni Consort’s program at St Paul’s Chapel, Mirrabooka was one of the year’s most finely considered offerings, enhanced by an exquisite contribution by harpist Marshall McGuire. Tony Maydwell’s Summa Musica choir provided fascinating insights into sacred music resurrected after centuries lying on dusty library shelves in Bolivia. And the Soweto Gospel Singers from South Africa brought us earthy, powerfully atavistic song and dance at His Majesty’s Theatre,.

 

Of a deal of chamber music, Pekka Kuusisto (violin) and  Simon Crawford-Philips (piano) presented a program that ranged from the zany to the profound. It was far and away the most novel and satisfying chamber offering in 2008. The Jerusalem Quartet, too, weighed in with a profoundly insightful account of Smetana’s Quartet No 1 – and Nick Parnell (vibraphone) and Leigh Harrold (piano) brought new life to classical favourites. Arnold Bax’s very rarely heard Quintet for string quartet and harp was given a charm-laden reading by the Australian Quartet and harpist Marshall McGuire.

 

Monday morning recitals in January look set to become a valued feature of the city’s musical life. One of the best of these featured Jonathan Paget and Stewart Smith in an arrangement for guitar and harpsichord of Rodrigo’s Fantasia para un Gentilhombre. Paget’s CD – Midsummer’s Night – is one of the most promising debut recordings I’ve heard in some time.) Craig Lake is that rarity: a virtuoso of the theorbo, a guitar-like instrument with a very long neck. His account of  Kapsberger’s Toccata was one of the year’s delights.

 

Cathie Travers, who is as versatile as she is gifted, was both composer and performer in The Healing Garden, gentle, meditative musings which were a response in sound to living on some hectares of tranquil bushland. One of the worst offerings of the year was Arvo Part’s hideously ugly re-working for piano trio of a movement from one of Mozart’s early piano sonatas; this was a grotesque and repellent piece. James Ledger’s Inscriptions, also for the same medium, brimmed  with imaginative, attractive ideas.

 

Coughing, nose blowing and throat clearing blighted many a concert in 2008 with WASO concerts a major exception where outbursts of coughing have been blessedly fewer than at other events. This might well have been due to cough lozenges available free to anyone who calls at the WASO desk in the Concert Hall foyer. But there have also been the maddening irritations of compulsive keyring jinglers, lolly-wrapper cracklers and noisy program-page turners. Mercifully, there were no snorers this year.