Music by Carl Vine, Anne Boyd, and Thomas Adès will appear at the 2024 Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville, Queensland at the end of July.
On 31 July the Goldner String Quartet and Piers Lane perform Carl Vine’s piano quintet Fantasia (2013). The 16-minute work is cast in one movement, and its title reflects its fluid and flexible structure – it contains little repetition or recapitulation. Vine’s cache of mostly unrelated themes unfold organically through the work; its central section is slower than the rest, before a presto finale ensues.
The Goldners previously gave the Australian premiere of Fantasia at the Huntington Festival in 2014 with Bernadette Harvey, who recorded the work in 2019 with the Jupiter Quartet. In March 2024 the Goldners performed Vine’s String Quartet No.5 at the Adelaide Festival as part of their valedictory season, and return to it at the Melbourne Recital Centre on 31 October; in 2012 they recorded his string quartets for ABC Classics.
Piers Lane has also been a longstanding champion of Vine’s music, given the world and UK premieres of his Piano Concerto No.2 (the former with the Sydney Symphony and Hugh Wolff in 2012) as well as the world premiere of Implacable Gifts with Kathryn Stott, Vine’s concerto for two pianos, in 2018.
On 1 August Lane turns to the music of Anne Boyd with flautist Anna Rabinowicz, performing her celebrated piece for flute and piano Goldfish through Summer Rain. The 4-minute work for takes its title from Don'o Kim’s A Summer Hue – a poet with whom Boyd collaborated on several works. The piece has been a staple of the flute repertoire since its composition in 1979. It is influenced by the traditional music of Vietnam, drawing on its rhythmic fluidity and textural transparency, whose lightness is aided by a piano accompaniment written entirely in the treble clef. It is one of several works for flute and piano (Boyd is a former flautist herself) that draw on modes based on music from across southeast Asia, including Bali Moods No.1 and Red Sun, Chill Wind.
On 3 August clarinettist Julian Bliss is also joined by Alexandra Raikhlina, Umberto Clerici, Katie Yap and Benjamin Roskams to perform the third movement of Thomas Adès’ basset clarinet quintet Alchymia (2021). ‘Lachrymae’, the slow movement of the four-part 20-minute work, takes its title from a 1600 lute song by Dowland reworked for viol consort. Dowland’s lute songs were previously the starting point for two 1992 works for piano by Adès: the muffled melancholy of Still Sorrowing (based on ‘Semper Dowland, semper dolens’) and Darknesse Visible, a shimmering, tremulous ‘explosion’ of ‘In Darknesse Let Mee Dwell’. Alchymia receives its Australian premiere (in full) from Omega Ensemble and David Rowden in Sydney on 27 July.