Gilchrist makes musical statement
Mentioned in Despatches:
The Quaternion:
We have, in Hamilton, four remarkable annual arts schedules which have become traditions. They are largely music focused, and I am not taking the lead of the NZ Listener which has decided to define industrial pop as Music, and music with depth and quality as Classical.
This quaternion music is as remarkable for its longevity as it is for its satisfying entertainment, and true, some do call it Classical as well.
The first schedule – at 5pm on the third Saturday of the month from February to November, in St Peter’s Cathedral, sees Vox Baroque under the musical direction of Dr Rachael GriffithsHughes, performing a Baroque cantata in place of the sermon at a service of vespers. Some of our most significant Music has come from the church.
These occasions will confirm that, memorably.
Next, the Mayor’s Monthly Matinee, held at lunchtime on the second Friday of the month at the Museum is a display venue for some of Hamilton’s finest musicians, and one has a free hour of top quality Music to invigorate the senses and satisfy the soul.
Then there is the Waikato Museum series of Sunday and Thursday lunchtime concerts which have been filling their acoustically sensitive venue for the last couple of years, and the now famous Wednesday Lunchtime Concerts during the academic year at the Gallagher Centre, and run under the aegis of the University of Waikato Music Department’s Conservatorium of Music.
These are stunning events, and many of the artists who have featured in the past are now on the international stage. antidote to the power of the Gilchrist voice and harp, and had me writing in my notes MY dreams are revived and alive as you engaged this audience in the intimacy of the Meteor Theatre. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem,
became a charmed tapestry through which you were to weave such music, such poetry, and such song as would demonstrate with quite stunning creative understanding and technical virtuosity, the extraordinary qualities of one of the world’s oldest instruments.
Millay’s surreal line, ‘‘the harp with a woman’s head, Nobody would take,’’ was given an even more powerful gloss as we realised that you were the head of this genuinely Celtic harp which everyone would take more of, and which had all of us in thrall. And d’you know what?
What made the evening unique, was that it was all about the music, not the performer.
You became the passionate medium, to the ultimate benefit of the music. Perhaps it is no accident that Maeve, translated from the Gaelic, comes out as one who generates great joy, or even She who intoxicates… For this evening, we thank you.
I do not have the Gaelic, but Le do thoil ar ais.
Thank you Sam Edwards
‘adequate images’ are increasingly rare, and it was a real delight to listen to Dr Slaughter, herself a recognised award winning author and one who has found, and developed, stylistic links between
Katherine Mansfield’s and her own work.
Imagery is her forte. Writing the richest prose is a result of the way in which she fills her work with the finest images, and when she read, early in the talk, from her own first short story, the stylistic Mansfield connection was clear.
What is remarkable, however, is that this was not simple imitation.
It was Slaughter’s work in its own right, telling, evocative, and providing the direct access to the