Closing the Adelaide Guitar Festival for this year was another sensational concert, with the eponymous title, Grigoryan, Muthspiel, Schaupp, featuring the Australian String Quartet with three great guitarists, the Festival's Artistic Director, Slava Grigoryan, Wolfgang Muthspiel, and Karin Schaupp.
To open the evening, though, the 2016 Adelaide Guitar Festival Orchestra presented a number of diverse works. This is a group of 80 young people from all over Australia who came together especially for this concert, the youngest being only nine years of age. The future of the guitar in Australia is in safe hands.
The orchestra was conducted by a familiar and very welcome face in Queensland's Dr. Paul Svobada, with Sydney's Richard Charlton taking over to conduct two of his own compositions, and a piece that he had arranged. These two are highly respected guitarists, composers, and teachers, so this initiative is a wonderful opportunity for these budding musicians.
Svoboda was first, to conduct his arrangement of a piece by Coldplay, Viva la vida. He has to be the most enthusiast, and exuberant, and physically active conductor in the world, bouncing up and down, smiling widely, and clearly having an extremely enjoyable time. His attitude to music is highly infectious and audiences have looked forward to seeing more of him, ever since he brought his own Aurora String Ensemble to the 2014 Festival.Richard Charlton then took over to conduct his own work, Captain's Clocks, with its metronomic rhythm and sea voyage motifs, featuring two fine soloists, Alexandra Herreen, and Yanni Livadiotis, and another of the group, Liam Ellis, narrating the introduction. This made reference to the need for an accurate chronometer on board sailing ships to enable them to navigate.
Then, to everybody's delight, and continuing the themes of time and travel, came his arrangement of Ron Grainger's theme for the iconic Doctor Who television series, the best known of all of the time travellers, in its original version from 1963. That, of course, showed how many 'Whovians' were in the audience, by the applause at the end. To close his bracket, and staying with an oceanic travel theme, he turned to the fourth movement from his Great Barrier Suite, The Voyage of the Green Sea Turtle, with soloists, Caleb Lavery-Brook, and Yanni Livadiotis.
Svobada returned to close the first half with two of his own pieces, Aurora, with a solo by Caleb Lavery-Brook, and the extremely lively Allegria, in which Svobada also played triangle and conga drum, dancing around joyfully as he conducted this
The Australian String Quartet, fortunately for us, is based here in Adelaide at the Elder Conservatorium of Music at the University of Adelaide, and had found time in their busy schedule to be a part of this Festival. The members of the Quartet are: violin I, Dale Barltrop, violin II, Francesca Hiew, viola, Stephen King, and 'cello, Sharon Draper.
Karin Schaupp was the first to work with them, a slight change to the order of performances in the second half. In this work the guitar replaces the first violin for a fascinating rearrangement of Josef Haydn's Quartet in E major, Op. 2 No. 2, Hob.III:8, which became his Quartet for guitar and strings in D major, Op. 2, No. 2.this combination of instruments works extremely well, and listening to both works makes for a very interesting comparison, showing Haydn's skill in reinterpreting his own music. Schaupp and the other three combined superbly in an elegant performance that would be difficult to better.
We then jumped forward from the 18th to the 21st Century for the last two items in the concert. With the full Quartet in place, Slava Grigoryan performed Ralph Towner's Migration. Grigoryan and Towner are far from strangers, having played in the trio MGT with Wolfgang Muthspiel, and that close musical relationship was evident in his understanding of this piece. The Quartet was acutely aware of his interpretation and created a marvellously tight performance, locking in on every nuance.
The final work of the evening featured Wolfgang Muthspiel and the Quartet, with his own jazz influenced composition, Flexible Sky, another complex piece to tax any performer. As the composer, Muthspiel has the advantage of knowing how the score is to be interpreted and an intimate relationship with the music, which showed in the confidence show in the playing of the Quartet and himself. That doesn't, though, make playing the work any easier, and so we were lucky to have a Quartet of such immense talent to appear with this remarkable guitarist.
The only complaints that you will ever hear about the Adelaide Guitar Festival is that it only lasts for four days, it is impossible to get to every single event, and we have to wait two years for the next one. Those sorts of complaints are, I have no doubt, music to the ears of all involved, with great credit given to the Artistic Director, Slava Grigoryan, for making this a world class event.
