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Most
traditionally-minded audiences tend to view new commissions and
compositions as queerly as three-dollar bills, or are inclined to
regard "World Premiere" as synonymous with "Last Performance". It's
hard to blame them for that - and especially so, in this day and
age, where society for the most part does not have the time or money
to support artists who insist on producing works of art which are
commercially “useless”.
And yet, this
release of Ross Edwards's (right) symphonic music is part of
a larger three-year plan, by ABC Classics in collaboration with the
Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, to systematically record and produce
twenty albums as part of a documentation project to showcase four
generations of modern Australian composers. This is a laudable
effort, and in truth, one which should give all true-hearted
classical aficionados something to look forward to. Sometimes the
most rewarding experiences do require the deepest commitment and
effort (just ask anyone who's ever traveled afar to attend a Ring
cycle.)
Ross Edwards's
music is one which is largely predicated on a sound-world that is
inimitably his own, and curiously enough, is predicated upon two
distinctive compositional styles. The first has been described as
his "sacred" style. I'd hesitate to make comparisons here with other
composers who have developed (or are still developing) technically
identical styles; yet, as history shows us, many emergent artistic
trends have developed simultaneously in many places, each without
recourse to the other during its parturition.
For Edwards,
this style first came into prominence in Mountain Village in a
Clearing Mist - the title comes from a Chinese poem - and on
first hearing, seems quite a perfectly “logical” extrapolation from
the evolutionary dead-end of atonal music. It is given here by
Richard Mills and the Tasmanian Symphony with a high degree of
lucidity and timbral intensity which is rather captivating: one
becomes vicariously aware of each acoustic punctuation, emphasizing
the experience of the "now" rather than the "whole", and like a
ritualistic tea ceremony, through sip by sip, building the listening
experience into a whole which is greater than the sum of the
individual tonal events.
 Edwards's
works in the second style, the maninya, dominates the rest of
the album. The word comes arbitrarily from the composer's nonsense
poem "Maninya", and over the years has been used to connote certain
characteristics of chant-like quality juxtaposed against dance-like
energy. It draws from the multi-faceted traditions of ethnic music
from countries along the eastern Pacific Rim as well the
Middle-East. It could have as easily become an intellectual
mogrelism, but Edwards has crafted this amalgamation into a unique
voice which he can claim as his own.
The outer
movements of the Guitar Concerto, for instance, are respectively
described as First and Second Maninyas, framing a lyrical central
movement. Despite the composer's own reservations about writing a
work for guitar, this is easily one of the most felicitous works
I've ever heard for the instrument and definitely worth an audition
by guitar enthusiasts. Karin Schaupp's (left) solo turn is
breathtaking, and the sheer electricity which Mills generates from
the orchestra is no less gripping.
Mills also takes the two-movement Enyato I and delivers a
vividly characterized account of two contrasting halves, the first
with richly-endowed tranquility, and the second with an infectious
ostinato-like rhythm. Veni Creator Spiritus is also a
two-section chant-and-dance maninya, ardently performed as well.
But, along with the Guitar Concerto, the highlight of this album for
me is the title work, White Ghost Dancing, a delightfully
quicksilver maninya which sparkles with wit and invention, and is
here given an interpretation as authoritative as any you’d ever hope
to find.
The concept of
creating a contrast between outbreaks of musical energy against
inwardly soulful moments of meditation sounds simple enough, but
Edwards's juxtaposition of such extremes creates a rich idiom from
which his fabulously imaginative oeuvres emerge, as this
album proves. This acoustics of this recording, made in late 2002
and 2003 at the Federation Concert Hall in Hobart, is well up to
standard and gives no grounds for reservation.
Benjamin Chee
has a thing for small orchestras which can punch well above their
weight class.
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365: 12.12.1998 © Chia Han-Leon
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