5 July 2004
A triumph for modern music
It's been quite a month, musically. I'm hard at work now on a new piece for solo harp, which is destined for the Harp Society of NSW's composition competition (if I get it finished in time) which seems to be coming together quite well. It's been a bit of a strange road getting to where it is now though - I had a couple of complementary themes which I started work on about a year and a half ago which I thought might work well for harp, but which on experimentation didn't gel at all. So I sort of let it all lie & started work on a short piano piece (another Egg essentially), which got itself into a position where it sort of started to join up with my pre-existing themes. At that point I suddenly realised that it wasn't very pianistic at all and indeed would work much better on the harp! Strange how these things progress by themselves when you're out of practice... Anyway, I'm hoping to be able to post an electronic rendering of the piece on the scores page soon.
Concertwise, there have been two very good ones. I mentioned in my last journal that I'd signed on for a series of SSO concerts. The Shostakovich/Kancheli concert turned out to be a complete revelation. Giya Kancheli's Styx in particular was just astounding (as a measure of how many people it affected, apparently they brought 400 copies of the recording into the country and every copy in Sydney seemed to have been sold by the end of the second concert. The assistant at the CD counter said she was amazed at how many people said they'd come for the Shostakovich & been completely blown away by the Kancheli - a triumph for modern music!) and I'm eagerly awaiting my CD copy (on order :-) The Steven Isserlis concert which followed hard on the heels of the Kancheli (the next week) included Carl Vine's new Cello Concerto, which seems to be worth further listening. Unfortunately it dosn't seem to be available on CD yet, so I guess we'll just have to wait until it is.
My golden boy of the moment though is Finnish composer, pianist & conductor Olli Mustonen. I was given a CD of his work for my birthday last year, but hadn't listened to it until this weekend. Now I 'm totally addicted. Really gorgeous string writing & well worth many visits (even in the same weekend). It's on the Ondine label if you're interested.
That's probably about it for the moment. I'm also working on a couple of other projects - a website (techie stuff only - no design) and some other inconsequential bits & pieces - and updating my recordings database - after a couple of double-up purchases at last year's 2MBS-FM Book and Record Bazaar (this year on the 16th-18th July), I'm determined to go into this year's sale armed with a complete list of every work I own on CD or LP. So everything has to be catalogued in the next two weeks. There - just confirmed for those of you who didn't already know that I am completely and utterly barking mad.
