Cerebral Palsy and Music

You wouldn't think that someone suffering from a high level of cerebral palsy would be able to play a music instrument would you? Nor would you think they could play with a professional band but the Australian Piano Quartet and Jessica Irwin have proved that it can happen and that the result can be stunning.

Rebecca Chan plays

Congratulations to Rebecca Chan and the APQ for showing us how limiting  our preconceptions can be. The APQ have a residency at the University of Technology Sydney and for this project they worked with the folk who build software which helps the less-abled manage life.

Rebecca Chan wrote the piece Whispering Pectoriloquy in collaboration with the team which enabled Jessica Irwin to play synthsiser. Chan is a trained as a doctor and said she imagined synapses firing while writing the piece. I have a similar background (though I am a biological doctor not a medical one) and I thought the description very apt.

Jessica's Irwin's eye movements were shown on a screen so we could watch what she was doing, but even if we had not been able to visualise her work we would have been able to hear how good it was. The piece got a standing ovation at the Sydney Opera House Utzon room yesterday and it was well deserved. I am looking forward to hearing more of Chan's compositions.

Look Jessica Irwin up on her website - she is a phenomenon!

Australia Piano Quartet at the Utzon Room

Australia Piano Quartet

There is a small concert room at the Sydney Opera House called the Utzon Room. It is well named as it is one of the nicest spaces in the opera house. It is small so the concerts are intimate and you listen to music while looking out over Sydney Harbour.

Last Tuesday the Australia Piano Quartet played their last concert of the year in the Utzon Room. The quartet comprises  (Rebecca Chan (violin), Thomas Rann (cello), Evgeny Ukhanov (piano) and James Wannan (viola).

They are vibrant, young and virtuosic and their program included Mozart, Saint-Saens and the new commissioned work In Search of Asylum by Pozniak. Rebecca Chan explained how the challenging Pozniak piece put the musicians into the mind-space of the asylum seeker and a spokeswoman from the Asylum Seeker Resource Center spoke about how they are trying to help those arriving on Australian shores.

The view is spectacular  even without the huge cruiser that was tugged past the window. Once the musicians started playing however, all eyes were on them.

Before the concert began

Cruise ship is tugged out of the harbour

Australia Piano Quartet

Rebecca Chan, violin

Last night the Australia Piano Quartet played at the university of Technology Sydney in collaboration with journalism students who presented their work on asylum seekers. The students were engaging and how refreshing it was to hear asylum seeker issues
presented in an informed manner.

The Quartet played Bordersongs, a new work by Pozniak between student presentations. It was impressive and complemented the spoken texts well. Then we heard Strauss' Piano Quartet in C minor written when Strauss was 19 years old.

Australia Piano Quartet
(promo photo (Eamonn McLoughlin)

The concert made me think that we could do worse than to give the running of the nation over to young idealistic Australians. It would make a very nice change from the current mob.