Loading...

Port Fairy Spring Music Festival

Concert Hall Victoria Street 31, Melbourne, Australia 8 Followers
Follow

Latest videos

Recent blog

In the vibrant and dynamic world of Post-Modern music making, composers and performers are increasingly finding new ways to honour the traditions of Western Art Music through re-invention. Contemporary composers and performers alike stand on the shoulders of the giants who preceded us, re-framing the past to inform our present world.

But, unlike Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, who is blown backwards into the future by the storm called progress, and feels incapable of changing the detritus of history, I see great promise in utilizing the works of the past to create works for the here and now.

Meow Meow introduced me to the Benjamin via a Laurie Anderson song The Dream Before, a song she will be sure to perform at the Friday night Divas concert. However, it is the work that she performs at the Saturday Night Gala that is the epitome of the re-invention so prevalent in today’s contemporary music making. In taking the form of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and reframing it utilizing only the songs of the great German romantic tradition, Reinbert de Leeuw is giving us a path forward, beyond pure modernism, into a world where progress is reaching both backwards and forwards, simultaneously acknowledging both history, and the future. Like it was for Bartok with his folk melodies, or Stravinsky with his neo-classicism, the prism through which those works are viewed is utterly contemporary, however the material allows a certain approachability through familiarity. It is this accessibility and ability to encapsulate the emotional as well as the intellectual that draws me to these post-modern paradigms.

All of this makes re-invention sound like it’s something new. Nothing could be further from the truth. The very building blocks of the western musical tradition are concerned with invention, adaption and development, so our Festival contains not only Bach’s Goldberg Variations with a newly composed violin obbligato by Joe Chindamo, it also contains Themes and variations from composers as stylistically disparate as Ligeti and Brahms. It also contains miraculous reworkings of Australian folk songs from Bush Gothic – reworkings which, like Wunderschön, reveal an inner dramatic core of yearning that speaks directly to our fragility in this world.

Iain Grandage 2016

Be the first to comment

Latest photos

About Port Fairy Spring Music Festival


The Port Fairy Spring Music Festival was created in 1990 by the late British/ Australian composer Michael Easton ARAM and the pianist Len Vorster and has been staged as an annual regional music festival since then. The current Festival Director is Iain Grandage, the distinguished Australian composer and performer.

The festival presents classical and contemporary ensemble music in fresh and collaborative programming. It combines the talents of highly regarded established artists with the very best of Australia’s new and emerging young performers and composers.

The program also features drama, orchestral and choral music, jazz, opera, dance and free open air performance in a program of 24 performances over three days. Concerts are generally an hour long and designed especially for the Festival.

School performances, masterclasses, pre-concert talks, artist ‘talks and conversations’ and art exhibitions all enhance the appreciation and involvement of Festival patrons and the community.

The ambience and intimacy of Port Fairy together with acoustically excellent venues helps to engage, educate and entertain all members of the Festival community, and to attract visitors from throughout the state, interstate and overseas.

Contact

Victoria Street 31, Melbourne, Australia [email protected]