The season-long focus on music of Australian composer Matthew Hindson from the Göttingen Symphony Orchestra continues with The Rave and the Nightingale, which saw the orchestra joined by the Gauss Quartet on 14 and 16 February, and Hindson’s celebrated flute concerto House Music, which will be performed on 28 March by Meret Louisa Vogel, conducted by Nicholas Milton.
The Rave and the Nightingale is a collision of Franz Schubert’s musical imagination with the frenetic dance music culture of the 1990s, filtering his late G Major quartet through a contemporary idiom – a hallmark of Hindson’s style, whose orchestral music frequently draws on the energies of pop, rock, and electronica. The orchestra previously performed The Rave and the Nightingale with the Gauss Quartet in 2022, and in 2020 with the GSO Streichquarttet. The work has been performed upwards of 40 times since its premiere in 2001, with dates in Australia, the UK, Germany, Switzerland and Japan. It was also staged in 2007 by San Francisco Ballet and Orchestra, to choreography by Matjash Mrojewski.
The title of House Music evokes the irrepressible energies of the popular genre and a journey through the many familiar domestic spaces of the 25-minute piece. The first movement is a frantic exploration of kitchen, garage, and workshop, beginning with a cadenza for flute that is comprehensive in its exploration of standard and extended techniques – “everything but the kitchen sink”, as Hindson puts it. The second is sensual and decadent, imagining a spacious foyer with luxurious fountains and inviting swimming pool. ‘Lounge’ follows with more relaxation, this time surrounded by 1960s red vinyl with Muzak on the stereo. This temporary repose is interrupted by a demanding group of children, who whisk the audience through the Nursery and Games Room in an ebullient closing movement that also makes a deft nod to the composer’s love of video games.
House Music premiered with Marina Piccinini and the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 2006 at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, conducted by Roberto Minczuk. It was recorded in 2015 by Alexa Still with the Oberlin Orchestra and Raphael Jimenez. Other soloists to take up the piece have included Julien Beaudiment (with the Royal Bangkok Symphony Orchestra), Sofia Gantois (Orchestre Philharmonique de Liège), Virginia Taylor (Canberra Symphony Orchestra and Willoughby Symphony Orchestra) and Eliza Shephard (Melbourne Symphony Orchestra)
Hindson’s Göttingen residency began in October 2024 with the European premiere of In Memoriam: Concerto for Amplified Cello and Orchestra (2000) from Valentino Worlitzsch, principal cello of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, conducted by Milton; on 29 November they performed Hindson’s 4-minute percussion-heavy fanfare for orchestra, Boom-Box.
The spotlight on his music concludes on 4 April with the German premiere of Maralinga for violin and string orchestra, with Tassilo Probst as soloist conducted by Nicolò Umberto Foron, as part of a programme focusing on war. The 11-minute work, both visceral and elegiacally lyrical by turns, takes its title from the site of secret nuclear tests conducted by the British government in the 1950s and 1960s, in which Australian military personnel and the Aboriginal population were used as unwitting guinea pigs, with terrible consequences. Previous champions of the work include Lara St John (for whom both it and the original violin and piano version were written), and Amalia Hall (who recorded it for BIS Records with the United Strings of Europe).