Competition opens with seeds of music and dance

CIMF, Live performance 1 / “Seeds Of Life”. On the Nationwide Arboretum, April 28. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

IT’S 20 years because the 2003, Canberra bushfires swept via the situation of the present-day Nationwide Arboretum and on the time, director of the Canberra Worldwide Music Competition director Roland Peelman advised friends on the competition’s opening live performance this morning, it seemed “very charred”.

Not any longer, with the sensible colouring of Canberra’s autumn leaves making the 10-year-old Arboretum the right location for a multi-stage wander via music and dance to mark each the start of each the competition and Australian Dance Week.

“Seeds of Life”, set in three totally different areas, supplied an optimistic, entertaining opening to the occasion and commenced with a very stunning efficiency by clarinettist, Oliver Shermacher, that proved past doubt that music will be very humorous certainly.

First up, within the Margaret Whitlam Pavilion, was his efficiency of “Una Chica en Nirvana” (a younger lady from Nirvana) by Swiss composer Jürg Wyttenbach, the place the multi-skilled Shermacher combined falsetto singing in Spanish and German together with his clarinet taking part in, at one stage turning his instrument right into a microphone, whereas additionally utilizing varied props to create sound.

The centrepiece of this part was the scrumptious “Stargazers” by Australian composer Alice Probability, now residing in Paris.

Right here we, the viewers, performed the background music by way of an app on our telephones as whereas Shermacher performed like a planet wandering among the many chords and percussive sounds of the celestial our bodies. What would it not have been like if staged by evening on this location?

Within the final part, Shermacher carried out Nikola Resanovic’s “alt.music.ballistix”, to a recorded background dominated by keyboard and percussion. Resanovic has requested listeners to think about a farmer in a distant subject of the Balkans accessing NASDAQ on his machine. Which will clarify why the composition turns right into a jolly klezmer-style Balkan dance earlier than a digital “voice” disconnects Shermacher.

As tiny sprinkles of rain fell, the viewers relocated to the Arboretum’s “Gallery of Gardens”, the place Miroslav Bukovsky performed a muted trumpet to the sound of falling water, after which Flora Carbo on saxophone with Theo Carbo on electrical guitar after which John Mackey on solo sax, responded to the backyard.

The ultimate backyard efficiency featured Djinama Yilaga choir from the south coast, who sang a number of transferring songs within the Dhurga language. Their tuneful track choice completed with a quantity impressed by the 4 winds – the winds whipped up proper on cue.

The finale was a brand new dance work, “Hillscape”, by choreographer Ashlee Bye, of the Australian Dance Celebration, carried out to an unique rating by Canberra composer Dan Walker.

Walker’s rating, dominated by keyboard and percussion, featured stops, begins and pregnant pauses as his music continually modified rhythm to swimsuit the dance for which it was composed.

The three dancers, Bye, Yolanda Lowatta and Patricia Hayes Cavanagh, performed with billowing silks in numerous components of the large amphitheatre. Essentially their actions have been massive – rolling down the hill, climbing again, sometimes assembly in synchronicity, separating once more and ultimately, with the silks billowing once more, ending up down on the flat area.