HERE, a joyous collage of sound, vision and poetry

Here

May 30, 2022, Annandale Creative Arts Centre

It still feels strange going out at night to a live concert. I certainly haven’t ‘moved on’ from COVID. Despite gingerly venturing forth to watch theatre and even perform myself, I am still living with the social disfunction and tragedy that the virus unfolded. 

I know that artists will express this phenomena for years to come but I’m wary about a flood of work about pain and solitary alienation. 

However, in a ‘concert of lost lockdown intimacies’ Here brings music from the heart, a joyous collage of sound, vision and poetry. While it creatively explores that very time the world descended into chaos, when being alone and isolating from each other was the one thing we all had had in common, it gives a sense of hope in the astonishing beauty that only art and artistry can deliver.

And so I mask up, and find myself a chair to the side and dive into the eleven pieces performed live by an ensemble of piano, recorder, harp, saxophone and spoken voice – for one live night only. Together they send out the ripples of the singular and distinct experience of being on one’s own and yet connected. 

Composer Paul Castles used the lockdown to collaborate with artists to look for new ways to practice their craft and connect with each other. It’s heartening to read about their international collaborations and work that takes Australia to the world and brings it back again – another strangely positive COVID outcome, that saw many artists connect online.  (A recent discussion by Castles on classikON gives more about the background to the project can be found here: https://www.classikon.com/here-a-meditation-on-identity-locality-and-reconnection/)

The concert takes place in the historic, character-filled church that is Annandale Creative Arts Centre. Choosing this space is a brilliant move for Here. This heritage-listed building was built in 1891 and the outside façade is elaborate in the Victorian Romanesque architectural style. But inside, the space is minimal and acoustically generous with high wooden vaulted ceilings.  Throughout the hour, the instruments speak and call to each other in dialogues layered in peace and distillation.

A screen backdrop throws up pieces by visual artist Charlotte Fetherston created in response to the music and text – a minimalist with a fascination for drawing and exploring the line in pencil and mixed media. What is described as ‘integrated poetry’ joins in with fragments of language and colour. (It’s worth jumping online to read the poetry in the link below to reveal the powerful text.)

Castles describes himself as ‘a composer whose music reconjures how stories are told through live, experiential, and digital performance.’  Four pieces by Castles underpin the evening.

The Road Between the Desert and the Ocean puts Sydney based saxophonist Andrew Smith’s tenor sax and the vibrant American born and Australia-based harpist Emily Granger’s harp together in an intimate dialogue. The End of the Earth brings the entire ensemble onto the stage, with poetry about the colours of Sydney. Psychopomp has a frantic mix of soprano, tenor and alto recorder performed by one of Australia’s leading recorder players, Alicia Crossley, at times playing two at once. 

Inhaltations by Australian composer Alice Chance, is a rich evocative almost lamentation performed by Crossley on bass recorder, combining both recordings and live play. This underlines the magic of a live performer, and our inability to press rewind or replay. Matched to Fetherston’s abstraction of a staircase, the sharp and audible intake of breath by Crossley makes the end of the piece incredibly poignant. 

Tristan Coelho is a Sydney-based composer who writes music largely inspired by nature or our digital, data-driven world. Coelho’s solo harp piece In Transit, softheartedly played by Granger, reveals a true respect for ‘heaven’s instrument’ by this pianist/composer.

Anthony Moles’ Kharis is the one frantic moment of the concert – with a Bauhaus inspired drawing reflecting a menacing soprano saxophone and perhaps the frustration of lockdown. 

The spoken word that interjects through the concert completes the collage, read by Chinese (Teochew and Hakka) Malaysian Australian poet Nicole Lee. South African poet, opera and musical lyricist Mkhululi Mabija’s poetry opens with a welcome to a road, that ‘a million footsteps have walked down before.’ Lee then reads her own poetry – conversations in colours, and revelatory fragments of life in Bottlebrush, The End of the Earth, and Rust and Blue. Her work is contrasted with the intense emotive writings of love and relationships, in Mr Dunkelstunden by American writer Sybil Kempson. 

The final Castles’ piece, No Feeling is the Farthest, is a fitting conclusion to the evening, bringing joy and reflection, and perhaps a statement of survival. The light at the end of a long dark tunnel. 

For more information and full program notes visit the website here