Review: FORCES OF NATURE: A FRENCH ENCOUNTER at Elder Hall, University Of Adelaide

Reviewed by Ewart Shaw, Saturday 21st May 2022.

Forces of Nature:A French Encounter brought glorious music to Elder Hall in a fascinating and imaginative program. Ben Dollman speculated in his program notes on what would have happened if Baudin had claimed the state of South Australia for France, and not Flinders for Great Britain. This review might have begun 'I went last night to the Salle des Concerts on Boulevard du Nord, close to the intersection of Grand Boulevard Napoleon which leads to Place des Victoires, dominated by the larger than life-size bronze of our first emperor.'

The establishment of the Adelaide Baroque Orchestra has given Adelaide audiences an opportunity to experience the tones and textures of authentic instruments and, more importantly, masterworks of the European tradition. This concert certainly lived up to their mission, and also featured a new work by an Australian composer. While it is often the case that the stage for a concert might have a floral display or two, the stage was lavishly furnished with Australian native plants and greenery, a veritable shrubbery. Those plants later played a significant role in the performance.

For reasons not unconnected, I surmise, to the fact that Louis loved to dance, French composers developed the Opera Ballet, in which the music for dance had equal standing with the vocal music.

The concert began with a selection of pieces from Alcyone, by Marin Marais (1656-1728). The forces of nature in this work included a series of storms at sea for which the orchestral ensemble was expanded to include a wind machine and a thunder sheet, which made their appearance in the Ouverture. They appeared again in La Tempete. The standout for me was Marche pour les matelots et matelotes, a gorgeously rhythmic piece, worth tracking down on Youtube. This was followed by one movement from the ballet Les Elemens, by Jean Fery Rebel. Rebel chose to represent the Chaos from which the world was formed with an opening chord, still as remarkable today as it was when first heard. Every note of the D minor scale is heard fortissimo before the instruments roll and pitch like waves. Over this forceful playing, the recorder of Brenton O'Donnell sailed gracefully like a bird, like the spirit of God over the waters establishing order. It was exquisite.

The concert was the occasion of the premiere performance of The French Violin by Australian composer Padma Newsome, in an arrangement he made for the ABO forces and the particular timbres of the instruments of that time. It was a response to the fires that ravaged his home community at Mallacoota in 2019. The composer had removed to safety, carrying with him his own instrument and a French violin, a Didier Nicolas of the 1820s. This had been given to him by his friends, the Martin family, who lost their home in the conflagration.

Newsome's fascination with French Baroque dance is shared with his dancer/choreographer wife, Susannah Keebler, and he quoted, as an influence, the Orchesographie of Toinot Arbeau the first great historian of social dance in the 16th century. It began with Newsome, described as an alto in the musicians list, singing wordless melismas with soprano Kate Macfarlane, and followed through with translucent musicality, as a series of brief movements along the line of a French Baroque suite of dances. One final movement was a beautiful lament for solo 'cello in the capable hands of Tom Marlin.

The second half of the concert made it clear why the stage was so bedecked with Australian botany. The French word 'Pastiche' and the Italian 'Pasticcio' refer to something cooked up with a variety of ingredients, in this case, dances and airs from a variety of French composers, predominantly Rameau, but also Leclair, Marais, Lully, and Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre. Kate McFarlane, in green, took the stage and delivered with an articulate intensity some of the masterworks of the French repertoire in a context of the natural world and grief. She moved gracefully, sometimes caressing the leaves and, at one point, collapsed in resignation.

For me, it was a thrill to hear this music, some of it familiar and some pointing me towards Youtube for further exploration. It's also a matter of great personal pleasure to have witnessed the earliest manifestations of the French Baroque in Adelaide. Philippe Beaussant was a foundation lecturer at Flinders University who went on to join forces with William Christie and Les Arts Florissants. Etiennette Fennell sang with the Armidian players, and Dene Barnett, in the philosophy department, was the author of a major text on the rhetoric of Baroque gesture. This culminated in the 1972 Adelaide Festival production of Pigmalion by Rameau on a specially erected platform in the Bonython Hall. Set and costumes were recreated from the original designs. It was performed, under candlelight, and I was one of the small costumed semi-chorus.

By way of prelude to this concert, the previous evening, the Elder Conservatorium Wind Orchestra delivered a program of music by Bach and composers influenced by Baroque themes and styles.

There was a rather bijou suite of dances by the Venezuelan composer Reynaldo Hahn, a darling of the fin de siecle French salon, Blithe Bells, Percy Grainger's arrangement of Sheep may safely graze, two Bach organ works transcribed for wind orchestra, and a new work. This piece, Intrada 1631, by Stephen Montague, is an arrangement of a hymn tune by Juan Perez Bocanegra, a Franciscan monk in South America who wrote hymns in Quechua. Brian Griffiths had said the work was very popular with wind orchestras. The oboes and clarinets left the stage and joined the audience. I was sitting by the door on the back row and member of the front of house staff had placed a music stand beside me, incidentally, giving the game away. The piece began with big drumming from the four corners and then, as it headed to a climax, the orchestra members in the audience stood up, produced triangles and unleashed a tintinnabular storm. I'm really pleased I wasn't caught in the middle of that.

PS: NKOTB New Kids of the Baroque. Musique Vivante is a quartet of highly experienced local musicians: Agnes Weinstein, Baroque violin, Andrew Gardner, Baroque flute, Graham Strahle, viola da gamba, and Anne Whelan, harpsichord. Their concert at All Souls Anglican Church, St. Peters, on May 29th, was charming but, for me, the big discovery was the stained glass. The church possesses three Tiffany windows, salvaged from St Paul's Church, Pulteney Street, and some magnificent glass from the William Morris workshops, designed by the great pre-Raphaelite artist, Sir Edward Burne-Jones.