Opening night hits all the right notes
AFTER two long years, the Australian Festival of Chamber Music made a triumphant return on Friday night in front of a capacity crowd at the Townsville Civic Centre.
New festival director Jack Liebeck promised the festival would be enlightening and thought provoking, and the opening night certainly lived up to that promise.
The concert’s theme of
New Beginnings was expressed by the opening work, Darius Milhaud’s 1923 ballet La Création du Monde. The music draws heavily on jazz idioms, and it would be easy to think one of Gershwin’s preludes is quoted in the third movement, though this work is actually slightly earlier.
A solemn Andante from Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante K364 led into some whimsy from Cole Porter, before the first of the festival’s “guilty pleasures” – an irreverent and cheeky concept Liebeck added to the program. The performance of Inchworm by soprano Lorre Betts-dean brought smiles all around.
The highlight of the evening came after interval, when the esteemed Goldner String Quartet played Latvian composer P teris Vasks’s String Quartet no. 3. Unknown to many, the work combines joyful sounds of Latvian folk music with quiet disembodied motifs and Friday evening’s performance will have earned the piece many new admirers. Anyone sceptical of what contemporary fine music has to offer must listen to this work, especially in the reliable hands of the Goldners.
Presenter Damien Beaumont, who had expertly guided us through the evening, unleashed his inner actor as narrator in a rendition of Saint-saëns’s Carnival of the Animals, in which many of the performers we had heard throughout the evening came together for the finale.
The only regret of the evening was the postponement of the world premiere of Deborah Cheetham’s Welcome to Country, Nginda Ngarrini Bi Ngya, due to illness. But the gasp of disappointment from the audience was tempered by the knowledge it would be saved for the opening of next year’s festival, which, if this opening night concert of the 2022 festival is any guide, will certainly be a joy to look forward to.