ANAM Swansong?

From the recent ANAM year-end celebration concert, watch the ANAM Orchestra perform the world premiere of Andrew Ford's Symphony, here. Symphony was composed with ANAM's line-up of musicians in mind and for ANAM Artistic Director Brett Dean to conduct. Read the program note here.

And Richard Tognetti introduces and conducts the ANAM Orchestra in Beethoven's Fifth, here.

John Storgårds Q&A

ACO: The music on this program will be unfamiliar to most people. What can they expect?

John Storgårds: This surely is a program of broadly unfamiliar pieces (or even composers, except Lutoslawski and of course Sibelius), but absolutely something to come and listen to. The audience can expect a nice bouquet of wonderfully colourful, communicating and exciting music of (more or less) our times.

Some audiences might approach a program of contemporary music a little nervously. What would you say to them to allay their fears? Why is it important that they hear this music?

The only important thing is to relax and open your ears. There is nothing to be afraid of in this program, also if many of the composers´ names might be totally unfamiliar and hard to pronounce… all the compositions are full of life and beauty in their own ways. And I do think there is always an important point in giving yourself a chance to listen to something you haven’t heard before, as the world is overfull of familiar music and too many boring ways of approaching it, both as a listener and sometimes performer.

What links these works together?

There is a sense of almost hypnotically rhythmical ‘flow’ in both the minimalistic piece by Juozapaitis and in the bigger Hämeenniemi work, with its improvisational elements and influences from India. Interspace by the Japanese composer Ichiyanagi is in this program concept exactly what the title of it says, as I think in a beautiful way, and the great Lutoslawski work simply has everything in itself, in an absolutely gripping and most communicative way. The little Sibelius piece at the end functions actually already as a nice traditional encore.

Eero Hämmenniemi’s Chamber Concerto instructs the soloist (and at one point the whole orchestra) to improvise. Is this confronting for a classically-trained musician? How do you approach pieces like this?

First of all I think classically-trained musicians – as any possible musicians – should definitely have a natural ability to improvise, with or without ‘composed’ rules. Something goes totally wrong in such classical education which takes this kind of music making away from you, and sadly this is still often exactly what happens in too many kinds of ‘serious classical education’. If you look at the history of classical music, improvisation has always been a major part of it all, except for some sequences of the 19th and 20th centuries. My Finnish close colleague Eero Hämeenniemi gives certain rules and scales to elaborate with for the improvisational parts of his Chamber Concerto, as does also Lutoslawski in Preludes and Fugue in a slightly more controlled way! Actually Hämeenniemi advises (in the score) that finally the answer to all questions of “am I allowed to?” is “Yes, you are.”

What inspired you to become a conductor? How is the experience of conducting different to being a violin soloist?

I feel myself as a fullblood-musician, and that’s what I want to stay for the future too. Conducting is nowadays a big bit of it all, but this definitely also goes for playing, especially as a chamber musician. Being a soloist is not that important, but I enjoy it as long as it feels possible to do it on top level. I never planned to become a conductor, it really just happened little by little, and when it did, I also went through serious studies in that field, not wanting to become one of all these great instrumentalists who are conducting as bad amateurs, no matter how interesting they are musically. Now I feel that I’m still developing both as a violinist and as a conductor, on proper grounds, and, above all, being a musician.

There are 30 professional orchestras in Finland (pop. 5.3 million), in Australia (pop. 20 million) there are nine. What can Australia learn from Finland about creating a more vibrant musical culture?

I don’t know enough of the differences between Finnish and Australian music education to really answer this. I do think that Finland really has achieved a lot of wonderful and high level things in the music field, as a result of effective education systems and also in some great individuals. But I’m as worried about the future there as anywhere, because of the increasing stupidity and overall wrong priority thinking among top politicians and media of today. Rebelliousness among artists, musicians, writers, intellectuals and any independently thinking people is as much needed today as ever!

IN THE (NEW MUSIC) GHETTO

The Australian’s music critic Matthew Westwood writes about new music and the many opportunities that audience will have to hear it in the next few weeks. Few art forms are as divisive as contemporary music – as evidenced by the letters that we get after a performance. It’s true that not all new music is easy to love. But then, plenty of other contemporary art works are just as difficult. It’s always struck me as odd that plenty of people flock to see difficult movies, read challenging novels or visit art galleries but seem to be afraid that listening to a new piece of music is going to be such an intensely disturbing experience that they’ll never be the same again. Maybe that’s a good thing though. Why bother to experience something if it’s not going to affect you in some way?

Westwood points out that the ‘most visible purveyors of classical music’ are programming new music mini-festivals. But I wonder if this is of any value to new music. The MSO’s Metropolis Series and the Sydney Symphony’s 20th century music festival [‘A Celebration of the Colour of Time’] with David Robertson – as excellent as the programming is – continue to ‘ghettoise’ new music. By placing it in a separate series, often in a different venue, they send a message to their mainstage audience which says ‘you probably won’t like this so we won’t inflict it upon you.’ Instead of giving their audiences to opportunity to discover something new, they continue to feed them the same diet of warhorses, and then market their contemporary concerts to the same small group of listeners. A group which will continue to stay small until orchestras commit to growing it by exposing their entire audience to the best of what’s new.

Matthew Hindson’s new work – like several of the new Australian pieces that the SSO commissioned for 2008 – has been safely tucked away in their Meet the Music series, a set of concerts aimed at secondary school students. Happily, kids seem to be much more open to new sounds than adults so these works will fall on appreciative ears.

And what about new music from countries other than Australia? If you want an immersion in the latest music from around the world you can check out the MSO’s Metropolis series or (subtle plug) come to our Audacious tour in July.

Robert Murray