Ngeringa celebrates music, landscape and youth
Music
South Australian arts “angel” Ulrike Klein has had a big week.
Last Thursday, the new Scott Hicks documentary, Highly Strung, based largely on Klein’s vision for the Adelaide-based Australian String Quartet, opened the Adelaide Film Festival.
Then on Sunday, her brand new concert hall – in the shadows of the Mt Barker Summit – hosted an epic four-hour celebration of local chamber music.
The new Ngeringa Cultural Centre, which replaces the previous modest, low building – is quite an upgrade. The domed hall, topped with a self-supporting ceiling braced with a spiral timber pattern, has the musicians playing in front of high windows, with the audience able to gaze beyond the performers across a garden, paddocks and trees, and away to the twin peaks of the Summit.
The foyers are replete with spectacular Aboriginal art works. An adjoining bar and kitchen served guests with wine, wood-oven pizza, coffee and cake in the two breaks in the musical program put together by Chamber Music Adelaide.
Ngeringa has commonly sold out its concert series, and this appealing new set-up looks set to cement that trend, despite the extra capacity.
Sunday’s program featured six different ensembles or duos presenting a program ranging from the very traditional (Telemann’s Paris Quartet and Mozart’s Kegelstatt Trio), to local compositions by Raymond Chapman Smith and Quentin Grant, 20th-century “classics” by Pärt and Messiaen, and even a premiere (of sorts) of classical guitar works by a young Brazilian composer.
The Telemann opened the day, with Ensemble Galante giving elegant voice to the six-movement piece, using traditional Baroque instruments. The “analogue” warmth of the instruments, gut strings and all, really came to the fore in the moving final “Modéré” movement.
Mezzo-soprano Cheryl Pickering and guitarist Aleksandr Tsiboulski took the concert into a completely different direction – and continent – with Serbian composer Dusan Bogdanovic’s extraordinary settings of six Native American Songs – “Like a String of Jade Jewels”.
Pickering’s supreme power and control delivered a beautiful version of Villa-Lobos’s “Bachianas Brasileiras No 5”, while Tsiboulski offered two lovely Etudes by young Brazilian composer Chrystian Dozza (whose works, Tsiboulski told InDaily, have only ever been played publicly by the composer).
Youth played a key role in several other highlights of the program.
Jordan Paterson, aged 14, showed why he is taking his lessons at the Elder Conservatorium, providing virtuosic performances of modern composer Ian Clark’s lyrical “Hypnosis”, and whimsical “The Great Train Race”, in which he coaxed his flute into creating the puffing and whistling of steam engines. In between, he sat down at the piano and offered some very decent Lizst.
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Another virtuoso, pianist Ashley Hribar, took the afternoon into high dramatic territory, with a couple of wonderful local compositions – first was an extract from Chapman Smith’s grand, romantic “Vorgesange”, then he was joined by cellist Rachel Johnston for Grant’s “Nocturne in C Sharp Minor” in all its restrained, spare beauty.
Fittingly, the next event at Ngeringa Cultural Centre will be tomorrow night’s second Adelaide Film Festival screening of Highly Strung, which has already sold out.
Upcoming concerts include another presentation of chamber music this Sunday, featuring strings players from the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, and performances by Slava and Leonard Grigoryan and the Adelaide Chamber Singers.
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