Omega Ensemble in Sydney

When I saw that the Omega Ensemble had put Wagner's Tristan and Isolde Vorspiel and Lebenstod at the beginning of their concert program last week I wondered if the programmer had had a mental lapse. How do you follow such music? Abrahmsen has a rich creamy voice and as she sang the Liebestod I wished it had been at the end of the evening instead of the beginning. (She sang Strauss's Four Last Songs as a finale.)

Maria Rospopova plays

Fortunately the composer of the second piece, Andrew Ford of the ABC music show, was on hand to introduce his own piece Contradance which followed the Liebestod.

The first thing he said was 'Well, how do you follow that? Perhaps by me keeping talking so there is a sufficient gap."
That is exactly what he did and by the time we heard Contradance we were in the right mood. Contradance was so different to what went before that there was no clash, but still I was pleased he had taken the time to create a gap.

Thirteen musicians performed on the evening but I was fascinated by the pianist Maria Raspopova. She is tall and sits very straight at the piano with her long legs tucked underneath. She added wonderfully to the sound of the group and was a pleasure to watch.

It was a successful evening, even if I would have wished for Isolde at the end instead of the beginning!

It you stand on a pedestal ...

Captain Cook .  St Kilda Park, Melbourne.

If you stand on a pedestal, sooner or later this is what will happen to you.

You'd look cranky too.

Melbourne Airport to the city

There are two ways to get to Melbourne airport from the city. You can take the speedy private Skybus for $18 or you can take public transport which is half the price: the #901 bus from the airport to Broadmeadows, then the train to the city.

Before I went to Melbourne I had read on Tripadvisor that Broadmeadows is a bit dangerous and taking the Skybus the the city is preferable so on my way there that is what I did. By the time I left however, I had a valid public transport myki card and getting to the airport would be included in my seven day pass.

I asked my AirBandB hostess about Broadmeadows being a bit dicey and she laughed aloud.

" Oh that's advice for country Nanas coming to town!" she chortled. " And besides, you have been staying on Gray Street St Kilda which is the ice capital of Melbourne!"

So I decided on the cheaper alternative and set off with bag, purse and small backpack via Broadmeadows.

The small backpack (purchased in Melbourne) was one item more than I normally carry and I left it behind me when I changed seats on the train.  Luckily for me one of the good citizens of Broadmeadow noticed me leave it behind and called to me not to forget it. 

So much for travel advice about dangerous suburbs.

Jessica Pratt sings Lucia in Melbourne

Before the show

Level 1 stairwell

Her Majesty's Theatre in Melbourne is worth visiting even if you are not going  to a show. It's a lovely old (1886) building which has retained it's charm, with original high backed chairs for waiting guests and fresh flowers in front of segmented mirrors.

It was a wonderful venue to see the Victorian Opera production of Lucia di Lammermoor by  Gaetano Donizetti with Jessica Pratt performing the lead role.

As I waited for the curtain to rise I wondered if I had chosen a seat too far forward as my fifth row seat seemed very near the stage. My seat neighbour assured me that front seats were good seats as sound didn't carry particularly well in this hall.

She was right and it was a real treat to see Jessica Pratt, sing her signature role Lucia from such a good vantage point.

(Dame Nellie Melba, another famous Lucia, refused to sing in this venue which she declared 'dead', until it was modified in 1911.)

Jessica Pratt as Lucia
(Victorian Opera website)

Jessica has a very beautiful voice that is perfectly pitched. In addition she is an excellent actor and looked every bit the happy nineteen year old when she first pranced onto the stage.

The score includes a glass harmonica in the mad scene which is  usually left out nowadays as it is considered 'too quiet',  but in Melbourne it was included (played by Philippa Safely) and added enormously to the opera. Lucia sang and was echoed and answered by this ethereal sounding harmonica. It made it easy to put yourself in Lucia's shoes and feel what she felt.

It was a wonderful performance played brilliantly.  Congratulations Jessica Pratt.

Melbourne: concrete and gardens

Melbourne- you feel as if you are in concrete jungle, but cross the road and suddenly you are in an oasis winding along the Yarra river.

View from Hamer Hall

Gardens across the road from Hamer Hall

Chamber Music in Melbourne

Rebecca Chan  is a remarkable musician whom I had heard as part of the Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) which she was a member of for five years and then as the violin part of the Australia Piano Quartet which I think is one of the best young classical groups in Australia.

When I knew I would be in Melbourne last weekend I looked to see what classical concerts were on and discovered that Chan would be playing as part of the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra virtuosi series in Moonie Ponds which is on a direct train line not far from inner Melbourne.

Moonie Ponds was Dame Edna Everidge's home town and on Friday it did her proud. The music was fabulous, but I found it hard to concentrate in the first half because my neighbour shared her hand cream with her mother just before the lights dimmed and the coconut scent became very overpowering as the cream warmed on their hands. After interval I took a seat towards the back, unfortunately too near a couple of women who didn't realise their comments could be heard over the music.

The only thing to do after frustration like that is to hear some more music as soon as possible and luckily for me the ACO was performing a program called 'Cinemusica' on Sunday afternoon. The ACO always seems to be able to stretch our imaginations and yesterday they were performing with Synergy Percussion, a group billed as being Australia's oldest and foremost contemporary music ensembles. It was a well curated program played with panache .... and no one near me applied hand cream or talked during the performance. I knew to appreciate it.

Paragliders in the sunset

St Kilda Beach Park

There was a cold wind blowing on the St Kilda Beach this evening, a wind that is obviously a fixture as the trees in the park all lean towards the east, away from the beach.
The beach was lovely despite the wind, with paragliders making the most of the conditions, skimming along the water in the setting sun.

Big little purse in Melbourne

Melbourne is more relaxed than Sydney and it has a network of interesting inner city laneways  lined with shops who take the art of window display seriously so it is a nicer place to shop. 

Queue at tearooms in Melbourne laneway

Melbourians also seem to be more conservative that Sydneysider. I was surprised to see well dressed 14 year old girls waited patiently in the long queue to 'that' tea shop, the one with the green flock wallpaper and cakes with real European flair. I'm not sure where 14 year old girls would queue in Sydney?
European? Yes, Melbourne definately feels more European. More solid, less stressed, more, well, cultured.

Big little purse in Bourke Street

St Kilda interior

Red finger-sofa with cushions and cat.

St Kilda, Melbourne's seaside suburb, is an eclectic mix of people and styles typified I think by the bright red finger sofa in my abode here. The sofa owner tells me that while it looks like fun it is  really very uncomfortable.
A local art gallery has said they will pick it up ....but as yet, here it sits.

Aix in Melbourne

I have been very surprised to find that many Melbourne baristas don't know what coffee beans they are using. I am one of that percentage of the population who cannot digest robusta coffee, so I always ask whether the Cafe uses 100% arabica beans or a mixture of arabica and robusta.

Arabica beans are generally higher quality but they are also more expensive so cheaper c
coffee is often padded out with robusta beans. In St Kilda yesterday many of those making coffee looked at me as if I was talking double Dutch.

Aix in Melbourne

Aix menu

In the city this morning two Cafes  said they used 'a blend' but had no information about the beans but then I found one that immediately said "100% arabica - I can show you the packet!" - so that was where I stopped. It was a tiny place called Aix in a Melbourne laneway and it specialised in bagettes and crepes. Although the cafe was only a couple of meters wide with seating for 10-12 people at most, there were 5 staff and they did a brisk trade. They were a friendly crew. I think I have found 'my' Melbourne Cafe.

Il piccolo posto

Addendum on 9 April: I found an excellent coffee in St Kilda today. There is a cafe tucked away behind the St Kilda tram stop called Il Piccolo Posto which has tables out in the sun, friendly hosts and 100% arabica coffee.

Ai Wei Wei and Andy Warhol Exhibition

A good guide at an art exhibition can make the difference between an ordinary experience and a wonderful tour of discovery. I was lucky enough to strike a wonderful guide today at the NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) who conducted a large group around the Ai Wei Wei /Andy Warhol exhibition. The tour was meant to last an hour but ended up lasting almost two hours and was fascinating from start to finish.

Many of Ai Wei Wei's works comment on the surveillance state while others are simply works of a compassionate man:

 A triptych in Lego shows Ai Wei Wei clasping an ancient vase, then dropping it. It shatters. The work is a comment on the culture that oppresses its people.

Triptych in Lego explained by our wonderful guide

Chairman Mao

Two larger portraits of Chairman Mao are painted as if seen through Venetian blinds signifying a State that watches, even in personal spaces.

 A surveillance camera made from marble is made from marble from the same quarry as the marble for Mao's mausoleum.

Surveillance camera in marble

Andy Warhol also produced many multicoloured Mao images, but Warhol was living in America not China and his work comes across as somewhat vacuous when compared with that produced by Ai Wei Wei.

Ai Wei Wei's compassion for others shows in his work. The artwork 'Blossom' is a huge field of porcelain (a clay used for the Emporers utensils) flowers which remembers the many people who cannot flower under repressive regimes and an assemblage work showing himself and his guards during his last period in prison was made because he thought his guards were as much prisoners as he was. The rules they had to follow stipulated that they had to stand at all times while they observed him in silence.

'Blossom' 2015

Video: NGV International.https://t.co/do7k9ut7we

An eleven year old with a lion's mane

Eleven year old Kurtis is the subject of a portrait I have been working on for the last month or so. It is a large canvas, 700 x 1000cm, and one of only two that I stretched myself while I was at art school in Dunedin (NZ) and had access to a workshop.

As usual the painting has gone through many iterations as I fight to create the image I see in my mind's eye. It is not finished yet but it is slowly emerging.  I have to hide it away it in the laundry whenever I need to do other work as I can't resist changing it ... and changing it ... each time I walk past the easel.

charcoal sketch

painting drying in the sun

as at end of March

Sand angel

Sand Angel

This Easter weekend
I learned how
to make
a sand- angel.



Here's how:

May you find many eggs ...

Yes, rabbits do lay Easter eggs

The charm of very early morning

This morning at 6am I woke to a full moon streaming through the window. Outside, the dawn was just breaking and I took photos looking up and down my suburban street.

Full moon and street lights

Dawn breaks and the last star shines

Spider time

The calendar says it is autumn and spiders know it too because despite the summer-like heat they are dancing their autumn dance. 

we can see you

The garden is full of leaves hanging in mid air between branches, off washing lines and fences, each one curled, with a spider inside the curl patiently waiting for a prey who don't see its gossamer web. They are spun quickly and a path that was clear one minute is an obstacle race the next.  

patiently waiting

Not only leaf spiders but every other type seems to be active as well, scuttling up walls, spinning webs along the ceiling, hiding in every nook and cranny. 

Where were they in summer when we needed them to catch the evening mosquitoes?

Pierre-Laurent Aimard in Sydney

Pierre-Laurent Aimard is a special sort of pianist, one of those musicians who translate music with their whole body, a phenomenon you sometimes see with string players who stand to play but seldom with pianists, even the most active and virtuosic. Aimard played  Olivier Messiaen's Vingt Regardes sur l'Enfant-Jésus (Twenty Contemplations of the Christ Child) last night at the Angel Place concert hall.

It was an extraordinary concert that got a standing ovation, not so common for solo pianists.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays colours

Firstly to the music: I had heard the excellent pre-concert talk by David Garrett, who spoke about Messiaen's religiosity, his detailed knowledge of Roman Catholic music (he was Church organist for years) and his use of this knowledge in the music he wrote. I prepared to hear something I could relate to church music but if there were references to church liturgy and music (and I am sure there were many) I missed them completely. 

David Garrett - pre-concert talk

Instead I heard very modernist piano music, mostly discordant, very colourful, sometimes melodic and despite the title of the piece, only occasionally what I would call contemplative. I found it unexpected, riveting, mesmerising.

Which brings me to the player, who undoubtedly had much to do with how his audience received the music.  Aimard had been a friend of Messiaen and was a piano student of  Messiaen's wife Yvonne Loriod, herself a virtuoso pianist so he knows the world of Messiaen better than most. As I mentioned above, the music seemed to take over Aimerd physical presence as he played . In the quiet beginnings of this two hour marathon it was only the mouth you noticed, a clenching and un-clenching that made him look as if he was chewing gum. As the concert progressed and the twenty contemplations became raucous this involuntary response enveloped more of Aimard's body. It was as if electrical waves were being transmitted by the piano strings. At times he rose off the stool, sitting a few inches above it with twisted body looking like a contortionist trick. At other times he seemed about to swallow the piano whole, such was his concentration and determination. It was impossible not to be swept away by his playing and the music.

The music was played with brilliance but I still wondered why I found it so very disarming. Was it the religious significance Messiaen gave it that added something I couldn't define?

This evening I have been reading the notes from the concert booklet and discover that the piece was written for Loriod in a period when their love could not be acknowledged. His next major piece was inspired by Tristan and Isolde. Suddenly I feel the pieces clicking into place!

Sugar plums

Sugar plums
(61 x 30.5 cm)

I went looking for some paintable fruit last week and found sugar plums.  I love Pflaumentorte (German plum cake) which is made with sugar plums but it is expensive to make in Australia because the plums are less popular and are offered in small prepacked quantities. Enough for a painting, but not enough for Pflaumentorte.

Sugar plums are purplish with a whitish sheen which makes them interesting to paint. I painted a narrow canvas then couldn't resist painting a larger version as well.I am not sure if the whitish sheen got more pronounced over time or whether I got better at painting it by the second canvas; perhaps both.

Sugar plums II
(60 x 50cm)

Bottles and pears

Bottles and pears

My January exhibition was time consuming to manage and left me little painting time. Once it was finished I had a real urge to paint. The exhibition space influenced the sizes of the canvases I chose as I saw the paintings hanging in the cafe as I bought them: long and square canvases with a 61cm (24") edge.

What fits on long canvases? Well, bottles for one thing; the green (wine) and pink (bubbly) bottles from the exhibition opening party which happened to be still standing on the bench.

I added green pears and wine glasses but it took me a long time and many trials to make the painting interesting.

Progress: bottles and pears

Liquid in the glasses (detail)

Finally, as I was about to paint the whole canvas over, I sat my filled wine glass beside the bottles and noticed the interesting pattern made by the liquid in the glass.

I added some wine  to the second glass and had fun capturing the patterns in paint.

In the meantime the pears had turned a lovely golden shade of yellow, much too beautiful to discard (ie eat) without trying to paint them anew. 

I put them in a bowl and immediately started on a second painting.
 

Bottles and pears 2
(30.5 x 61 cm)

 This second painting was finished in no time and I like it better than the first. 

I don't know whether it was easy to paint because of the time I had already invested in the first painting or whether the autumnal colour combination made it more inspiring and therefore easier to paint.

Recent pictures on the wall

Selby and Friends in Sydney

Haveron, Valve and Selby
(from their brochure)

Music in an intimate atmosphere is what Selby and Friends seem to achieve regardless of whether (like the City Recital Hall in Sydney's Angel Place) the venue is  a little too large to be called intimate.

On Thursday night pianist Kathryn Selby played at Angel Place with two gifted string players, violinist Andrew Halveron and cellist Timo-Veikko Valve, a combination so successful that my concert buddy immediately went looking for a brochure so she could book more concerts in the series.

Valve introduced the second piece, Busoni's Variations on a Finnish Folk Song, by saying it captured Finnish melancholia so well and I prepared for a mournful dirge. Instead Valve seated himself at his cello and played a firecracker of a piece - yes perhaps melancholic, but also exceedingly energetic. A  riveting piece played by a fantastic cellist.

The Schubert Fantasy that Halveron chose to play us after the Busoni was an inspired choice. Very different to Busoni, very Schubert.

Kathryn Selby is an enviable pianist and chooses equally passionate partners to play with. This was a  dream team.