Haunting cinematic wildernesses at New Music Festival conclusion.

Metropolis New Music Festival 2015
Melbourne Recital Centre, Elizabeth Murdoch Hall
May 16, 2015

Breaking with the geographical theme of previous years, the most recent Metropolis New Music Festival offered a fresh artistic focus: the world of film. For the third time in two weeks, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of German conductor André de Ridder, graced the luminous Elizabeth Murdoch Hall stage on Saturday night with a programme of music inspired by cinema.

The festival has seen an extensive array of new music, much of it Australian and world premieres of works by local and international composers, performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and various chamber ensembles and soloists. Saturday night’s concert was brilliantly curated, and just as eclectic, offering works for subsections of the MSO, as well as its full compliment.

To begin the evening, the MSO Strings took to the stage for a performance of a suite from Radiohead frontman Jonny Greenwood’s visceral soundtrack to There Will Be Blood. The score embodied the characters and forbidding landscapes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 feature, presenting variegated sound-worlds coloured by the use of an Ondes Martenot, a product of Greenwood’s fascination with the music of Olivier Messiaen. The MSO’s string section was in fine form, engaging with both the brutal and beautiful demands of Greenwood’s stylistically diverse score.

In the opening movement, Open Spaces, the low strings produced fat, sonorous fifths, filling the hall with solid sound, while the violas and violins answered with a suave wash of harmonies, suggesting the shimmering, enveloping heat of the Californian oil fields of Anderson’s film. Slaps and busy, angular gestures characterised Future Markets, while heavenly, slowly shifting chords featured in the music for the character of HW. Henry Plainview opened with impossibly soft clusters – a special product of the MSO string’s working perfectly together in the gorgeous MRC acoustic. Truly individual timbres were on offer in Proven Lands and Oil, including savage, percussive strumming and eerie, polyphonic glissandi reminiscent of Krzysztof Penderecki.

Next on the program was the dramatic Chaconne for violin and orchestra by John Corigliano, with Australian soloist Sophie Rowell. The Chaconne draws from the score of Canadian François Girard’s film, The Red Violin, which follows the three hundred-year history of a violin and its various owners. Corigliano employs a gradually evolving language to mirror the developing history and geography of the film, set against a repeated pattern of chords.

Rowell gave a dedicated performance that was commendable for its energy and passion. She exhibited smooth, elastic phrasing in the work’s lyrical moments, and managed some fiercely challenging passagework, particularly in the cadenza, with confidence and a lithe touch. While it was perfectly suited to the Greenwood, the space made the orchestra uncomfortably powerful at times (perhaps also due in part to some oppressively thick orchestration), meaning the soloist was eclipsed during the more powerful climaxes.

Following interval, the MSO string section was back for a performance of Penderecki’s haunting, swarming Polymorphia, which served as a frightening musical backdrop in Stanley Kubrick’s thriller, The Shining. Like its better-known predecessor, the Threnody ‘to the victims of Hiroshima’, Polymorphia is an essay in gradually evolving tone colours for large string orchestra. Preferring gesture to true melody, Penderecki calls on the ensemble to tap, slap, scrub and slide over their instruments, creating shifting clusters and masses of captivating sound. The MSO strings provided a fair reading of this prismatic work, though it came across less convincing than the Greenwood.

The final work for the festival was French modernist Edgard Varèse’s austere masterpiece, Déserts (Deserts). Varèse’s language is a fascinating exploration of atonal harmonies and extreme variations in frequency and dynamic. The aural result of Déserts is just like the title: hostile, menacing and wild. The performance was accompanied by a projection of Bill Viola’s 1994 film of the same name, based off Varèse’s musical score.

The film’s depiction of a man in uncomfortably slow motion was engaging, providing a thought-provoking compliment to the isolated, ‘interior’ wildernesses suggested by the taped elements of Varèse’s composition. Other sections of the film, such as crude footage of deserts and wastelands, were less convincing, and ultimately detracted from the MSO’s commendable reading of the challenging score.