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Adelaide Festival: Stalin's Piano

Event

Adelaide Festival: Stalin's Piano

  • Date: Wednesday, 14 March 2018, 7:30pm
  • Venue: Grainger Studio — 91 Hindley Street, Adelaide, SA
  • Series: This event is part of the Adelaide Festival 2018 series
  • Tickets: Adult: $49 | Friends: $42 | Concession: $38 | Under 30: $25 (Transaction fees apply) — Tickets can be purchased online or by phone on 131246

Event Details

A choral setting of Julia Gillard’s ‘misogyny speech’ replete with her every cadence and rhetorical rhythm, went viral a few years ago. The former PM’s musical amanuensis was composer Robert Davidson whose obsession with what he calls “voice portraiture” reaches its zenith in this fabulous and virtuosic multimedia work.

The undisputed hit of the 2017 Canberra International Music Festival, Davidson harnesses the voices and visual footage of 19 artists and politicians (Brecht, Goebbels, JFK, Percy Grainger, Judith Wright, David Malouf, Whitlam and, yes, DJ Trump among them), capturing the music of their often iconic speeches, and crystallising it in a score played live with astonishing brilliance by Sonya Lifschitz. The text is sometimes followed to the syllable, at other times looped and mashed up to create wild flights of what could be mistaken for Cuban jazz riffs.

The title refers to courageous Russian pianist Maria Yudina, an outspoken champion of artistic freedom whose recording of a Mozart concerto was ironically on Stalin’s turntable when he died. Ukrainian born Lifschitz, for whom the music was conceived, approaches her formidable task with equal fearlessness.

Further information for this event is available online at the event's website or by phone on (08) 8216 4444 or by email to info@adelaidefestival.com.au

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