Coriole

9th Annual Coriole Music Festival 5-6 May 2007

I wasn't necessarily going to go. I didn't last year: I had a knee replacement instead. Also, the festival last year was directed by Someone Else (not Chris Burrell, former conductor of SCUNA) and there didn't seem to be any singing. As far as I'm concerned, there has to be singing!

We're on the Coriole mailing list and received an ad for the 2007 festival which indicated that:

  1. Chris was back,
  2. there was singing, and
  3. there was a performance of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas.

Well! In honour of the amazing performance of Dido and Aeneas that took place in the Albert Hall under the baton of Donald Hollier in 1971, with many SCUNAites in the chorus, I couldn't bear to miss that. I've never been to Dido and Aeneas; I've only been in it.

Dac decided it was really a bit expensive for him to come to Coriole only to sit in the car. Actually he used to come to Ken Healey's pre-concert talks and really enjoy them, but it was true he found it hard to stay awake during the concerts, so he'd snuggle up in the car and read books and listen out for the final applause, then he'd hasten up to the marquee and bags us a good table for the next meal.

I was able to forgive him his unwillingness to shell out for plane fares and car hire and accommodation in these circumstances. The festival itself costs a mere $260 for three talks, three concerts and three meals, all of which are excellent - it's getting there from here that is expensive.

Me old mate Dazza Colquhoun (of the 300bps acoustic coupler - a man with a lot to answer for) decided he'd like to go this year. Annabel would have liked to go too, and for a moment after Canberra's freak February hailstorms it looked as if the clashing CCC concert would be cancelled, but unfortunately for us another venue was found and Annabel had to stay put.

Daryl and I split the work and the cost of booking everything and were very well organised by the time May rolled around. I was in my customary panic about leaving home, of course, and it was a bit worse than usual because I hadn't been out of Canberra since January 2006. Nevertheless I managed to buy a small suitcase (my normal suitcase is vast and I didn't think I'd be able to lift it by myself) and decide what to take, and at the utter crack of dawn on Saturday 5 May I caught a plane from Canberra to Adelaide.

I had an hour and a half to wait for Daryl to fly in from Sydney, and people had been telling me "Oh, it's a nice new airport". I couldn't see how the age of the airport would make much difference to me, and I was right. Once I picked up my bag, I was unable to go back into the interesting part of the airport. This situation was however explained and elucidated to me by a phenomenon - Adelaide airport has volunteer ambassadors, who stand around near entrances watching for people who look worried, so that they can help them. What a wonderful service! My ambassador sent me to the sole cafe I could still get to, and advised me where to sit afterwards so that Daryl couldn't slip by unnoticed. I was dutifully sitting there waiting, when the ambassador came back to tell me Daryl's plane was running 5 minutes early. I was impressed!

Daryl was duly caught at the bottom of the escalator and dragged off to the hire car desk. I was thrilled when he agreed to drive: he's from Adelaide and knows his way, but also not driving is just such a welcome break for me. I was able to look at the scenery! We visited Daryl's sister-in-law for a cuppa, met his niece, then we visited his friends Cathy C and Andy P for lunch, then we hit the road for McLaren Vale and checked into our suite of rooms at the motel. The first concert was at 5pm.

"This year's festival deals with influences - and contrasts - in music across the English-speaking world."

Unfortunately, because Ken was ill, there were no pre-concert talks this time. They were missed. Ken's talks are most inspiring: they alert you as to what to listen for, make sense of the most abstruse music imaginable, and fill you with enthusiasm.

In the first concert, we heard nearly all the festival performers:

Syntony, the excellent chamber vocal group, opened the concert with a rousing performance of Britten's Five Flower Songs. I remember Chris trying to get SCUNA to sing these songs in 1968 and we just couldn't manage the timing. It's tricky, of course, but how frustrating it must have been for Chris that we had to drop the songs. The same thing happened in 1969 with one of the Distler Mörike Lieder (the round Suschens Vogel). A bit of corporal punishment wouldn't have gone amiss: Chris could have adopted a Lully-like staff, and prodded the choir when they stuffed up!

Anyway, Syntony could count and did.

Next was the Coriole Festival Baroque Ensemble (specially formed) which treated us to a range of basically 17th century pieces. They were an excellent group, and some of their tempi were positively terrifying. Syntony returned with some earlier music, leading into interval with the White Lamentations (16th century).

Interval is for me always a bit of a worry at Coriole. There's only one way in and out, and (probably because I book early and get seats down the front) it can take me the whole interval to trudge out of the barrel room behind 200 other people, whereupon I have to turn around and trudge back in. I was therefore enraptured when Daryl leapt like a gazelle through the crowds and returned with a cup of tea before I'd even made my way to the end of our row! This became the pattern at interval: I stayed in the barrel room drinking tea (something I can never do enough of these days; I used to have palpitations whenever I added caffeine to the nicotine) while Daryl, who knew everyone, chatted to them and deputised friends to mind us seats at the next meal.

Back to Concert 1. After interval, Michael Leighton Jones, accompanied by Phoebe Briggs, sang Douglas Lilburn's song cycle Elegy - "a vision of the titanic indifference of nature". Lilburn was a New Zealand composer who died in 2001 and I believe Michael Leighton Jones (also a New Zealander) said he composed the song cycle for him. It was well-sung and grim; following on from the lamentations, it took up the other festival theme:

"This year, many works deal with the tragedy of war or the death of young men."

I can't tell you much about the final item because the extremely early start was catching up with me, but it was the Grainger Quartet (founded in October 2006 with three former members of the Australian String Quartet and the former cellist of the Tankstream Quartet) and they are amazing and wonderful players. They gave us the Quartet No. 2 in C major Op. 36 of Benjamin Britten, which was a continuation (according to the notes) of the anti-war theme, and also a tribute to Purcell. Earlier, the Coriole Festival Baroque Ensemble had played the original Chacony that the Britten's final movement is based on.

We then scurried off to the Marquee for dinner. It was a full house on the Saturday night, but the system worked: Daryl had found us good company, the good company had bagsed us seats, and it was a fun evening.

Returning to the motel, we dithered about breakfast and decided to take a chance of finding something to eat in McLaren Vale, although I remembered having no luck in this regard in the past. This time we were able to have tea and a muffin at some Tea Rooms at what used to be a pottery, so that was fine.

Concert 2 was at 11am and the final performer of the festival was introduced: Sally-Anne Russell, mezzo soprano. Sally-Anne has a beautiful voice: rich, flexible, dramatic. Her presence is also warm and dramatic. The audience was beside itself by the end of her bracket - with Tommie Andersson - of Jacobean lute songs . As a former soprano and mother of a soprano, I retained a touch of scepticism - Full Fathom Five was richer and less strange than I would have liked - but that turned out to be a final and short-lived reservation.

Next came the world premiere of the contemporary composer Roger Smalley's Suite for two violins, written especially for the performers, Natsuko Yoshimoto and James Cuddeford. This is where I cease to be able to comment. The playing was splendid but the modernity of the piece took it way beyond my comprehension.

Percy Grainger compositions followed, on viola and then with the whole Grainger Quartet. This is accessible music but I'm not fond of it. I didn't wriggle as much as Daryl, though. "Why does anyone bother with Grainger?" Musicians I greatly respect have bothered with Grainger so there must be something to 'im. Perhaps we-the-audience would experience his music as fresh and innovative if everyone hadn't played Country Gardens every five minutes throughout the 20th century (not Grainger's fault)!

After that we had Dorian le Gallienne's Four divine poems of John Donne which took the concert in a different direction and paved the way for the grief, despair and mourning of the second half. I'd heard these songs sung by fellow SCUNAite F. John Collis, but hadn't heard them sung by a woman before. Sally-Anne Russell, accompanied by Phoebe Briggs, was fantastic. Hair-raising.

After interval, Michael Leighton Jones, accompanied by Phoebe Briggs, performed the Butterworth song cycle Songs from a Shropshire Lad and I wept throughout. [You can read the words here.] When such poems, set to such music, exist in the world, why do we still have war?

Matters escalated when Michael Leighton Jones, with the Grainger quartet, performed Barber's Dover Beach. I found this an utterly chilling work. From the programme: "The underlying theme is the crisis of faith in mid-Victorian England; the Victorian reader may have expected that love would be a solution, but the poem ends with a despairing prophecy about the failure of culture." [Words and analysis on Wikipedia.]

Quartet Op. 11, Barber's sole string quartet, contains the extremely famous Adagio (which as the programme informs us is used in the films Elephant Man, Lorenzo's Oil, and Platoon, and was played at the funerals of Roosevelt, JFK and Princess Diana). The building of tension was almost unbearable, but at least when played in context, the Adagio is framed and in that way contained.

It would have been a rather sombre lunch except for the cheery company: Daryl chatted happily with composer Tristram Cary, and I chatted happily with Daryl's friends Robyn and Dick L about old choral intervarsity festivals. Lovely meal again, and by the time we'd had a cuppa afterwards, sitting on the terrace in the sun and chatting to Sally-Anne Russell and her friend who's the piano tuner at Sydney Con, it was time for the final concert.

I thoroughly enjoyed the concert performance of Dido and Aeneas. Syntony and the soloists did some basic staging, with coats and stoles and movement, which added to the mood. Sally-Anne Russell's voice was absolutely perfect for Dido and particularly for the Lament. The only other performance I've liked much is Dame Janet Baker's, and I think this was better. It was rich and full and dramatic and like unto a 19th century operatic aria - but really, that's how it is. That's how the tessitura lies, that's what those high Gs do.

Sally-Anne Russell's diction was spot-on, too, throughout the opera. I heard two of our dinner companions later speaking critically of Dido's obdurate declaration: "It is enough, whate'er you now decree, that you had once a thought of leaving me". I don't think they'd have picked up that level of detail in too many other performances!

A very impressive singer indeed.

Afterwards I had the chance to talk to Chris B for a minute. I asked him if he remembered Canberra Opera's Dido in 1971, and he didn't. Perhaps he'd already left town - or the country - by then. So I told him about Tricky managing to sell 17 tickets at work on the strength of doing a dance. I think I also told him about the nudity and the Afghan hound. Later I wondered if that had sounded like criticism of the performance I'd just heard. It wasn't meant to!

Dido was an exhilarating finale to the musical part of the Festival, and everyone staggered forth for another meal. Eventually it was time to say goodbye. I can't say we were among the early departures - things were definitely thinning out by the time we tottered forth and drove back to Adelaide, to our suite of rooms in Hindley Street. We got to sleep at midnight after accomplishing online check-in for our flights for the next day. Daryl was leaving at the crack of dawn in order to be in time for work. I awoke to the clash of garbage collection, to find that he was already up and gone and I hadn't heard a peep.

I had time for breakfast with Brenda A, who then drove me to the airport. I would have had a good hour in the Qantas Club if I hadn't packed the temporary membership Daryl gave me into my suitcase, which I had already checked in. So I sat around and read my book on my palm pilot, then I was crammed onto the plane. No spare seats: a flight to Perth had had to turn around because someone's appendix burst, and half a dozen people no longer had any cause to go to Perth because it was too late for their appointments.

Then I had some time in Melbourne, but not really long enough to miss the Qantas Club opportunity, and finally (4.30pm-ish) I was back in Canberra, and very glad I'd decided to leave my car at the airport, because I was able to slump into it and go home. The first thing I said to Dac was "Did you forget to put the bins out?" This was wicked, because he'd not only put them out, he'd already brought them in.

I should have driven off and come home again, to make a better entrance!

The upshot of the trip was that I was unbelievably tired, and promptly got sick. At some stage, I sat down and added up what it had cost and was just a bit shocked.

Nevertheless.

Nevertheless, I'm glad I went, and I hope to go again next year. It was lovely to see Chris (who always looks just the same as he did in 1968) and it was wonderful to hear the music. Chris says he likes running the festival because he can get good people to perform all his favourite music. It certainly seems to be a winning formula!

- Val
24 May 2007

Page created 20 December 2007; last updated 26 December 2007