Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Event Details

This concert by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chorus begins in a Latvian dawn with Vasks’s Mate Saule (Mother Sun), ‘the sun rising like dough in a bowl,’ before moving over the Baltic Sea to a magical Swedish evening. In 1953 the Swedish poet Per Lagerqvist wrote an exquisite collection called Aftonland (Evening Land): the MSO Chorus and Stockholm’s St Jacob’s Chamber Choir have commissioned settings of some of these poems from Australian composer Calvin Bowman.

Evening turns to night and to Russia and the Vespers, the first half of Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil; from here we travel into the greater darkness of Stalin’s purges. Thierry Machuel’s setting of Osip Mandelstam's poems is haunting and visceral; here is a poet who felt the full force of Stalin’s cruelty, and, charged with 'counter-revolutionary activities', died in a transit camp in 1938.

Performers: Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chorus Jonathan Grieves-Smith chorus master Anthony Mackey bass Sharon Draper cello

Featured non-Australian music: Vasks 'Mate saule' (Aust premiere); Rachmaninov 'All-Night Vigil: Vespers'; Machuel 'Jiv' (Aust premiere)

Further information for this event is available online at the event's website or by phone on 0396 261 111

Featured Australian Works

Featured artists

• Performer Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chorus
• Conductor Jonathan Grieves-Smith