Bryars’ residency ends with not with a bang, but with quiet and serious reflection.

Adelaide Town Hall
March 5, 2015

The week with Gavin Bryars in Residence for the Adelaide Festival has been remarkable. With brilliant performances of diverse, intense, emotive, fun and clever music, it should have been obvious to expect the unexpected, but again Bryars surprised; his epic finale ending not with a bang, but with quiet and serious reflection.

The thrilling first half featured compositions from Bryars chums Howard Skempton and Arvo Pärt. Conducted by Bryars, the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra brought insightful phrasing and intense emotion to Skempton’s exquisite Lento (1990), with weeping and sighing strings before the brief but superb orchestral tutti, and finally a beguiling calm. Pärt’s If Bach had been a Beekeeper, rescored in 1984 for wind instruments, piano (Jamie Cock) and string orchestra, brought some musical apiculture and whimsy with the oft-used musical cryptogram, the B-A-C-H motif. The impetus for the performance of the grand tintinnabular work, (the style reportedly influenced by Pärt’s mystical experiences with chant music), perhaps reflected the inspiration behind Bryars post-interval offering.

Bryars’ excellently named The Porazzi Fragment (1999), utilised a violet-inked 13-bar theme that is said to be the...