At the Turning Point

About the program:

We open with Australian composer, Katy Abbott’s Fanfare for the Melancholy. As an act of about-face subversion, the work challenges the idea that a fanfare be regarded only as a call to action. In this case, the fanfare is “an acknowledgement of melancholy”, writes Abbott, “though not as a negative feeling, but as the heralding of yearning and all things bittersweet.”

Likewise, when it comes to shunning expectation, no figure has been more widely celebrated and condemned alike than Russian composer, conductor and pianist, Igor Stravinsky. Known for contradicting nearly every rule about what music can and should be, Stravinsky is lauded for his candid and thrilling musical accounts of humanity’s extraordinary peaks and troughs, including those explored in this concert’s Octet, the work that brought Stravinsky into the penultimate Neoclassical phase of his career.

Nielsen’s Little Suite for Strings Op.1. represents a further turning point within the life cycle of an artist’s creative work. Initially conceived as a string quartet, Nielsen’s teacher, Niels Gade suggested the work would be more effective for a larger ensemble given the density of Nielsen’s writing. Here, we experience the full sound of Nielsen’s second version.

The concert concludes with Copland’s Appalachian Spring, a key work in the development of the American pioneer myth and the quintessential “American sound”. Performed in its original instrumentation, Appalachian Spring is dense in wide-open, disjunct intervals, an approach that to this day thrives as the emotive inspiration for countless cinematic soundtracks.