Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

13 Oct 2008 Ecstatic Dances - Soundstream and OzAsia Festival by Aleksandr Tsiboulski

Six performers from Soundstream Contemporary Music Ensemble gave a mesmerising performance of Australian works in front of some one hundred people at the Dunstan Playhouse as part of Adelaide's OzAsia Festival. Apart from the top-class playing, this event, masterminded by pianist Gabriella Smart, was also a fine example of how intelligent programming and presentation can keep the listener engaged through a program of introspective contemporary works.

6 Oct 2009 Gubaidulina and Schoenberg frame Adelaide’s Soundstream festival by Aleksandr Tsiboulski

It was short at only four days and five concerts, but with her second new music festival in Adelaide, artistic director and pianist Gabriella Smart has shown a promising ability to draw together top-notch performers, program interesting works, and draw respectably sized audiences to the shows. The best things on the bill were the opening concert’s performance of Gubaidulina’s cantata-cum-cello concerto Sonnengesang (1997), the final concert’s performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912) with singer Greta Bradman, and a superb concert on the final morning featuring terrific instrumentalists playing five intriguing works, of which Polish-born Hanna Kulenty’s cello and piano piece A Fourth Circle (1994) particularly stood out.

16 Oct 2017 Phillip Houghton (1954-2017) by Aleksandr Tsiboulski

Phillip Houghton was a highly original Australian guitarist, composer and teacher. His compositions for solo guitar and ensembles used pictorial gestures in a powerfully intuitive way, exploiting the full spectrum of the guitar’s sound palette. Notably, a number of these works were championed by the guitarist John Williams, who was an important source of encouragement and support for Houghton’s work, and whose advocacy increased its reach beyond Australia.  In the latter decades, Houghton took his intimate knowledge of the instrument, powerful musicality and perceptive grasp of technique into teaching work with a large number of early-career guitar students. He was one of the great, defining figures of the Australian guitar scene, and his passing leaves it greatly diminished.

What follows below is a personal reflection written in the days after his passing...