Lunch and Gallery at Tarrawarra: Triumph of Modernism

We went to Tarrawarra for lunch before visiting their major exhibition, curated by Edmund Capon, of an extraordinary collection of 60 works most collected by Eva and Marc Besen and now donated.

The restaurant and gallery have a fine setting, architecturally coherent with its landscape

 Photo- Tarrawarra website
 The Lunch menu was imaginative and tempting. The charcuterie entrée was very good and the salmon main well presented and enjoyable. Service from the young waitress was efficient, friendly, and contributed to our enjoyment. The party having a pre-arranged wine tasting with their substantial meal near us was quiet (too engrossed to have loud conversation?) so nothing impinged on near perfect ambience.

The exhibition provided a unique opportunity to see a century of best Australian artists together, and told a good story of happenings in our society. John Brack as a returned soldier had the opportunity to study art through the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme.  He had an interesting perspective on the post war housing boom

Subdivision

Brett Whitely had a satellite's eye-view of  civilization, the work including an attached branch and other items to make a 3D image

  Australia

 An outstanding exhibition. The one regret for us is that if there was a catalogue it had sold out long before our visit.

Sibelius 150, Melbourne Symphony, and Percussion

We couldn't get to Helsinki for the celebrations for my favourite composer, and anyway since his birthday was 8 December that might not be the ideal time for a visit to Finland. However when the MSO advertised a matinée concert with Valse Triste and 7th Symphony -his last, we decided it was time for a midwinter celebration of his work even though I perceive these to be a couple of his more sombre expressions.

After interval the world première of a percussion work was a surprise bonus. The interval was used for lining up front a variety of instruments including marimba, drum and cymbal kit, and some remarkable inventions and innovations: wine glasses with water for string bow accompaniment, a shallow cylinder filled with water and surrounded by brass spikes of graduate sizes to be struck and echo in water, and the arm band tubular bells described below.

This quick phone snap shows the set up in progress with the percussionist, Claire Edwards for whom the composer Iain Grandage wrote the work, obscured by the score. The MSO website quotes Claire  to describe how she sees the work, Percussion Concerto Dances with Devils. It is worth an extensive quote .

 Photo-MSO
From http://www.mso.com.au/news/2015/07/  
 "I was intrigued by Iain’s original inspiration for the concerto: four gothic stories about colonial females in history, and their relationship with the spirits and beasts of the old world...In the first movement, The Chosen Vessel, I am a young woman, dreading the return of a swagman to my isolated hut and finally falling victim to him. The movement features the gorgeous rosewood marimba and is dominated by triplet rhythms reminiscent of horse hooves...In the second movement, The Conquering Bush, I am a young woman who chooses death by drowning – a very dark story indeed. It features a series of metal instruments being transformed in pitch and timbre by water. This calls for two tubular bells which are physically attached to my arms – I need to pull them in and out of buckets filled with water to bend the pitch...In the third movement, The Drover’s Wife (a scherzo), I am the embodiment of Henry Lawson’s famous character...The final movement, Lola Montez, is my favourite. This is a tarantella inspired by Lola Montez, whose famed Spider Dance was the talk of the goldfields when she toured Australia in the 1850s. It’s a zippy little number, which combines impressive mallet percussion licks with lots of upbeat drum and tambourine rhythms..."
 It certainly needed the breather supplied at the end with a conversation between Claire, Iain, and conductor Benjamin Northey.

This remarkable work was made more so by Claire's swift barefoot movements between instruments, her dance-like address to the instruments, and the whirling blur of drum sticks, all of which made the work an audio-visual experience that may not translate completely to another performer or to a sound only disc.  The audience gave a standing ovation.

After this the Bolero was almost an anticlimax, but was a fitting conclusion that need no encore. 

I can only find one press note of the concert and the reviewer, while lyrical about the classic works' performances hardly seemed register what happened between interval and Bolero, making a one sentence comment after summarizing the work: "Edwardes' virtuosity combined with Grandage's clever writing made for a particularly enjoyable aural feast". SMH review July 19

Winter reise

We flew 7^o North to latitude 30 for a four day coldness respite, with a stop-over in Sydney.  The good hostelry Sheraton not only gave a large discount on high season rate, but upgraded us to a suite overlooking the Park as well.  Sydney must have been right off the tourist track this week, because we calculate our room cost less than 30 % of the quoted mid-Spring rate.  The night lit view of Hyde Park was rivalled only by the dawn view. Breakfast was as magnificent as always.

We had a modest motel near the Harbour at Coffs Harbour, 5 minutes by car from the airport, and immediately set out to explore the ocean scenery.  

 It is whale migration season; our hosts reminded us that one leviathan had been fatally marooned the previous week, and said several had been spotted that day. We anxiously scanned seawards and saw several large plumes, and who knows whether what lay beneath was animal or submerged rock.

We climbed Muttonbird Island (joined to land by a causeway) but the name birds were on holiday.  On returning via the marina we did however see two large green turtles sporting among the yachts, a school of fish- one or two of eating size, copious clusters of large cungevoi (are they protected from fishermen here?), and some pelicans.
  












The following day included a visit to the impressive and extensive Botanical Gardens, principally indigenous and several stands of rare regional trees.

Attractive unlabelled flora

The highlight of our stay was a trip to Dorrigo (Gondwana) National Park- beautiful ancient sub-tropical rain forest and waterfalls with an easy 6.6 km circuit walk. Spectacular strangler figs, fungi, ferns and birds seen (usually turkeys or wren-like tiny birds) and unseen but heard.

Driving past dairy farms on the way back we noticed one herd sharing their paddock with a flock of emus (never respecters of fences) so that rounded out our fauna experience.

 Later on the same day we took a walk from  the Harbour up Coffs Creek, partially along an extensive mangrove boardwalk.

 
  
  

   
Our last evening meal was at the Shearwater restaurant, sitting near Coffs Creek and unobtrusive. Worth going out of the way for.                           

Jack Maggs

In 1997 a signed copy of Peter Carey's book arrived in our home and was read by one of us. I always meant to get around to reading it too, and when it was my turn to make nominations to the book group that forms much of my reading this was the selected fiction nomination, so I have at last encountered the Dickens re-imagined story of what an ancient contemporary New York times review called "Great Extrapolations" . This is Carey's  take on the eponymous convict Abel Magwitch.

 Of course Carey is too skilled an author to write a sequel to that book: instead of directly choosing some personal experience for inspiration, he picked an inspiring story that obviously influenced him and made it his own with sketch of Victorian London that Dickens could be proud of, seemingly as fresh as a mobile phone video. Carey has his own set bizarre characters, and even inserts a Dickens alter ego into the plot, picking up several of the master's less admirable characterisics- an author of serials whose principal purpose is to make money, dabbling in mesmerism, too fond of young girls, but unlike Dickens his prose is pedestrian...

Maggs is not Magwitch, and the very dislikeable Henry Phipps is not Pip, but Carey gives them depth and authenticity.   The story, even though it didn't win a prize, shows why Carey has two Man Booker awards.

P.S.: My colleagues all enjoyed the book. Remarkably, two had the same first edition acquired and now read in similar circumstances to me. At post-discussion dinner the nominator chooses the wine. I found a most respectable Heschke shiraz grenache mouvedre blend to accompany a shared chateaubriand and worthily complement a great literary experience.

Love and Information

Daily Review

 The title of this play gives a much need clue to what it is about. I have selected only serious shots from available images but there was a lot of fun in this theatre  too.
The prospectus incited curiosity with its description: "eight chamelionic actors will embody more than 100 roles, through a series of tantalising vignettes. Like a single beam of light refracted, each scene exposes a different facet of the human condition." Well, that is a very fair description of what the veteran playwright of 4 decades Caryl Churchill set up, and the talented crew of actors and sound and light geniuses put us through in 95 minutes of mostly helter skelter run through life (but with an empathic portrayal of encounter with death and mourning), leaving us to ponder, like doing a cryptic crossword at high speed, to find where the connections are to be made. Again from the prospectus,  "..exhaustively mirrors our age of the splintered attention span. (New York Times). " 
One scene I loved was the anthropological museum where the stuffed animals were carried in, and then the human stone age specimens were also put on their plinths and had play as if also part of the taxidermy as those visiting the exhibition carried on with their own agendas.


Herald-Sun
I also liked Lee Bremer's (Australian Stage) take on it : "So there is no linear narrative. No story, as such, but perhaps many micro stories, all involving questions of love and information, more of the latter than the former, I think... The whole thing really is big, jangly, often frenetic, sometimes moody, frequently funny...  prodding us to think about the nature of information...we devour it, we send it, we are it. Literally, we are information, it's there in our DNA. Information can change the way we see a situation or think of a person. Sometimes we don't want to know certain information, or wonder if we would have been better off not knowing it. Some information we keep to ourselves as secrets; and is this better or worse for them (or us)... The stage was stark and white with movable white blocks for props and backlit doorways around the stage through which the actors entered and exited again to make their hasty costume changes. Sometimes all the cast were on stage together, sometimes just an intimate two engaging in no more than an intimate two or three words. Settings were varied – domestic home; the office; a roadworks site; the gym; a psyche consultation room; a garden; a cemetery... "


theage.com.au


Herald Sun