Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Event Details

Gathered around a famous 13th-century English expression and a substantial new Australian composition, the Astra Choir joins in the unusual combination with piano trio for the third concert of the season, at the Church of All Nations in Carlton.

Maurice Ravel, Piano Trio (1914) piano trio 

Philippe Hersant, Nostalgia. Through Adam’s fall (2008) choir and solo violin

Franz Schubert, Notturno Op.148 (1827) piano trio

Barry Conyngham, Time and Tide… (2014-2015) piano trio and choir first performance

The Seraphim Trio has an important place in Australian chamber music going back to the beginnings of this century, with adventurous repertoire including numerous projects in Australian music. The Astra Choir since its founding in 1958 likewise has a long tradition of premiering new work from many countries. The distinguished Australian composer Barry Conyngham has ‘re-imagined’ for this new combination of forces his Tide and Time – a three-movement work written for the Seraphim Trio with string orchestra in 2014, the composer’s 70th year.

‘Time and tide wait for no man’ is a verbal thought that leads to many possibilities of ‘purely’ musical thinking as well. Such possibilities are reflected in the flow between the instrumental and vocal elements at play in the new work – the inexorable movement of things, and the quest for human expression, transient or ongoing, individual or collective, where no sung words are required.

Time and Tide is joined by other works traversing boundaries between old and new, modal and tonal sound. Ravel’s Piano Trio is a rare monument of this chamber music form, re-thinking the sound qualities of the three unequal instruments and drawing on influences as wide as the composer’s own native Basque country and Malaysian verse. Philippe Hersant creates a hybrid of French and German tradition in his work for solo violin and choir Nostalgia – Through Adam’s Fall, extending from a Lutheran chorale into a prolonged meditative sonic state. Schubert’s single-movement Notturno also stands at a far boundary of musical expression, typical of his late music, described by the composer Dieter Schnebel as “in search of liberated time”.

Featured non-Australian music: Ravel, Philippe Hersant, Schubert

Further information for this event is available online at the event's website or by phone on (03) 9326 5424 or by email to info@astramusic.org.au

Featured Australian Works

Time and tide : for violin, cello, piano and choral ensemble (2015) by Barry Conyngham — World premiere — performed by John McCaughey, Astra Choir and Seraphim Trio

Featured artists

• Performer Seraphim Trio
• Performer Astra Choir
• Conductor John McCaughey