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'T HE ARTS liND ENTERTAINMEN
Young composers present
wo,r ks of energy, .variety
MUSIC , ,',
By ROGER COVELL
ABC Sfnfouia, conducted by 'Vilfred Leb
maiID, with Virginia Clifton and Mark Isaac.~
(solo pianists), in musk by Michael Bark),
l~l ~:~a~e~dC~~~k' t:a~~~ny Ritchie,
Closing concert: 1983 summer school f01"
young Australian and New Zealand com
.posers ABC with tbe Music Hoard of the
AU6tralia CountiI. ABC orchestral studio,
Cbamvood.
February 19.
MEMBERS of our newest gen-
eration of composers provide re-
assuring tidings in at least one
respect: they seem to be writing
across a wide range of styles, re-
sisting obedient conformity to
anyone kind of modernism.
Though the primary purpose of
the annual summer school for
young composers is to give them a
chance to write for orchestra and
to adjust their scores in extended
consultation with the performers
and with senior composing col-
Jeagues (in this case Barry Con-
yngham and Bozidar Kos), it also
serves as a valuable sampling of
whatever ideas are stirring among
promising musicians with a creat-
ive bent.
The work that most impressed
me on this occasion "ias the Voce
di Petto (literally, Chest Voice) of
the Sydney-born composer Michael
BarkI.
Taking his cue from the implica-
tions of this standard term in the
vocabulary of 6inging, Barkl , (who
now . studies at the University of
New E ngland) has planned a score
principally dealing with sounds
that are heavy in weight, Jaw in
register and congested in texturc.
His own descriptive phrases
refer to "coarse utterances, heavy
_gestures and thick: textures"
(though there is no need, as it hap-
pens, for a chest voice to be
coarse).
The work is a companion piece
to his Voce di Testa (Head Voice),
which was heard at an ea.rlier Sum-
mer school in this series and which
inclined to higher, more rarefied
sounds. Voce di Petto, the new
score, conforms to its title most
evidently in its writing for wind.
The vapour of upper string tone
that persists after the final chords
for full orchestra is readily ex-
plicable in acoustic terms; but the
truth is that the parts for the vio-
lins are allowed to provide some
relief from deeper or heavier utter-
ances throughout the piece (which
may be a kind of musical wisdom,
even if it occasionally seems to
contradict the title).
Voce di Petto moves strenuously
through its viscous, swarthy tex-
tures; and that is perhaps its
principal virtue. It does genuinely
move. It is purposeful and sus-
tained, impressive in its impetus. a
dark, extended scherzo of in
vigorating character.
The capriccio of Kim Jones (a
great-grandson of Alfred Hill, if I
read the program note correctly), in
contrast, is full of light and air in
its textures as well as being furn-
ished with clearly marked points of
repose in the form of chO'fale-like
phrases for wind.
Although the composer declares
his use of 12-note serial techniq ues
in this piece, his serialism is
The
evidently adjusted to provide a
sense of movement from one tonal
centre to another. I hope Mr Jones
will not allow himself to be bullied
out of his mildness while he is try-
ing to discover how to write music
more distinctively his own.
The Fantasies/Variations of th'e
Melbourne composer Ne};l Clifton
is less ingratiating, much more
densely scored but almost equally
conventional in its own way; and
the Echoes for Orchestra of Ian
Shanahan is well-named in that
(apart from its formal use of echo)
it is at times a piece of talented
mimicry of the methods of one of
the composer's former teachers,
Peter Sculthorpe.
Mark Isaacs's Moving Pictures
is an enjoyably dashing piece full
of assertive and well-calculated de-
tail and with a grandly arching,
quasi-Bergian theme striding
through the surrounding busyness
from time to time. The evening's
conductor, Wilfred Lehmann,
rightly saluted in his introductory
remarks Isaacs's ability as solo
pianist in his own work to provide
a genuinely improvised . cadenza;
but the longer his improvisations
went on the more they sounded
like the rhetoric and commotion of
half a dozen standard romantic
concertos.
The choice of Concertino as a
title for Anthony Ritchie's com-
position for piano and strings is
apt in more ways than one. It pos-
sesses many of the characteristics
of simi larly named minor English
pieces of the period between : the
world -wars, including ' a slight but
genuine lyrical charm and . Some
deanly rinsed memories of nco-
classical Stravinsky.