SCULTHORPE Sun Music I IV Irkanda IV Piano Concerto Small Town Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
2
PETER SCULTHORPE b.1929 1 Sun Music I 10 50 2 Sun Music II 5 00 3 Sun Music III 11 57 4 Sun Music IV 8 31 5 Irkanda IV 11 18 Leonard Dommett violin 6 Piano Concerto (Grave Animato Grave Calmo Animato Risoluto Come notturno (cadenza) Estatico) 22 15 Anthony Fogg piano 7 Small Town 6 07 Total Playing Time 76 02 Melbourne Symphony Orchestra John Hopkins 1-5, 7; Myer Fredman 6 conductors 3
Even as a student, at Melbourne University, Peter Sculthorpe recognised the futility of following European models in a country with quite a different physical, intellectual and spiritual character. So during the 1950s and 1960s, with the initial encouragement of Sir Bernard Heinze and then John Hopkins, he began to search for alternative means of musical expression which better suited Australia s unique social, anthropological and geographic idiosyncrasies. Specifically, he began to compose a series of works which evoked the spirit of the land and the Asia-Pacific region. The four works bearing the title Irkanda (meaning a remote and lonely place ), composed between 1955 and 1961, capture with remarkable clarity the intellectual and geographical isolation of the Australian identity. They use Aboriginal themes and in spirit are aligned with the indigenous chants of the Australian and Asia-Pacific region. The fourth of them, Irkanda IV (1961), often regarded as Sculthorpe s first truly distinctive masterpiece, was originally composed for solo violin, string orchestra and percussion and has subsequently been arranged for other instrumental combinations. It s an emotional work and is described by the composer as a plain and straightforward expression of my feelings upon the death of my father. In a style which would eventually be regarded as typically Sculthorpian, the single slow movement is based on a recurring ritual lamentation which alternates with various related sections of a more spiky character. Few Australian composers have dared to express the profound emotion which characterises this and many of Sculthorpe s other finest pieces, including Small Town. The latter work, featuring one of the most famous oboe solos in Australian music and a quotation from The Last Post, was originally conceived as the third movement of The Fifth Continent, another breakthrough work composed in 1963. As the 1960s proceeded, Sculthorpe went on to complete another series of four orchestral works which would profoundly alter the course of Australian music. The four Sun Musics, composed between 1965 and 1969, presented Australian and international audiences with a unique musical vision of Australia. Their shimmering landscapes, surging musical arguments and Asian influences effectively buried the tradition of English pastoralism which had dominated white Australian music for generations. 4
Instead of pleasant pastoral scenes or the rhetorical strategies of the Austro-Germanic tradition, the four brief Sun Music scores (they range in length from 6 to 13 minutes) depict a kind of existential anguish. It s as if within them, the individual confronts a barren but starkly beautiful landscape, with its horizons shimmering in the heat and the magnificent colours compensating for the absence of human activity. Japanese and Balinese sounds are assimilated into the instrumentation of the Western orchestral tradition, and while the sound-world of the four Sun Music pieces has proved its universality over 40 years of constant performance both here and overseas, its origins and character are distinctly local. Since that triumphant period in the 1960s, Sculthorpe has gone on to complete several further works that have been hailed as masterpieces of Australian music, among them the orchestral tone poems Mangrove, Kakadu and Earth Cry, as well as the Piano Concerto, performed here by former ABC Head of Concert Programming and current Artistic Administrator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Anthony Fogg. As with so much Australian music from the 1960s, all but one of the recordings here were directed by John Hopkins, whom Sculthorpe himself considers to be rivalled by only Sir Bernard Heinze as the most important figure in ABC musical history. Martin Buzacott 5
Recording Producers Rex Wallis 1-4, David Harvey 7 Recording Engineers Haime Gonshor 1-4, George Hunt 7 Mastering Albert Zychowski, Sony DADC Cover and Booklet Design Imagecorp Pty Ltd ABC Classics Robert Patterson, Martin Buzacott, Hilary Shrubb, Natalie Shea, Laura Bell, Claudia Crosariol 2007 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 2011 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Universal Music Group, under exclusive licence. Made in Australia. All rights of the owner of copyright reserved. Any copying, renting, lending, diffusion, public performance or broadcast of this record without the authority of the copyright owner is prohibited. 6
7
476 4235