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Canberra International Music Festival / Concert 14, “Night and Dreams”, Fitters’ Workshop, May 5. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA. IF you thought music festival director Roland Peelman was drawing a long bow when he included Arnold Schönberg and HK Gruber in his “Idea of Vienna” themed festival, think again. For not only was Schönberg’s youthful, dream-ridden opus “Transfigured Night” premiered in his home city of Vienna, but it was written in 1889, the same year that Vienna psychiatrist Sigmund Freud wrote “The Interpretation of Dreams”. The work looks to an experience in the composer’s love life that could easily be the subject of nightmares. ....
On a farewell album to his beloved son, Steve Earle reprises ten of J.T.’s songs. Barry Gibb and a host of Nashville stars offer “beautiful” country takes on the Bee Gees’s greatest tracks. And Schoenberg’s 1 J.T. Justin Townes (“J.T.”) Earle, who died of an overdose in August aged 38, was a talented singer-songwriter cut from “the same mould” as his more famous father, Steve Earle, said Neil Spencer in The Observer. J.T. had the “same mix of Americana influences, the same wearied twang to his vocals, the same inspired way with a lyric” – and, alas, the same personal demons. On this farewell album to his beloved son, Steve Earle reprises ten of J.T.’s songs, and the results are made all the more moving by the fact that he “delivers the songs straight, only occasionally letting a sense of loss intrude”. ....
FRIENDS gather of an evening to witness the once-in-nine-yearly flowering of an exotic cactus. While they’re waiting for this miraculous night bloom, they keep themselves entertained in time-honoured tradition of telling heroic tales and reciting epic poems. The last recitation is the Gurresange – a grand tragedy of illicit love and jealous fury and the transcendental powers of nature to resurrect the human spirit. It goes something like this. Back in 14th century Denmark, King Waldemar loves the beautiful maiden Tove and they meet for secret passionate trysts at the castle of Gurre. Queen Helwig poisons Tove in a jealous rage (the original ballad has her locked in a sauna, which seems a uniquely Scandinavian revenge) and Tove’s funeral is recounted in vivid verse by a wood dove. The grieving Waldemar curses God and is condemned to forever fly through the night skies, while Tove is splendidly transfigured through the glories of nature and, to top it all off, the poet ....
Last modified on Fri 8 Jan 2021 03.18 EST More than one piece of headily romantic music was inspired by Richard Dehmelâs 1896 poem Verklärte Nacht, or Transfigured Night. The most familiar remains Schoenbergâs string masterpiece, first conceived as a sextet in 1899, reworked for string orchestra nearly two decades later and rarely very far from its composerâs mind for the rest of his life. This, in its orchestral version, is the pivotal piece on this recording, and it finds Edward Gardner drawing playing of sumptuous intensity but also ravishing delicacy from the strings of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, recorded in the studio days before the first lockdown. ....