Beyond The Shallows

The Age

Saturday March 8, 2008

Michael Shmith

Fasten your life jackets, it's going to be a swell year. Michael Shmith finds The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in buoyant mood.

LOOKING THROUGH THE subscription brochure for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's 2008 season, one might be forgiven for imagining the players have exchanged their instruments for shells (are times that bad?).

There, on the cover, is concertmaster Wilma Smith, lost in tranquillity, a shell to her shell-like, listening to the voice of the sea. On page two is chief conductor and artistic director, Oleg Caetani, with the same object balanced in his left hand - and, so on and so forth, pass-the-shell is the game throughout. The separate guide to the season has on its cover double-bass player Damien Eckersley listening to something that is a lot more portable than his instrument; the accompanying headline: "You've got to hear this!"

The clue to all this shellduggery can be found deep within: in November, Caetani conducts the MSO in the Australian premiere of an epic vocal work by the Rumanian composer Georges Enescu, Vox Maris - the Voice of the Sea. This title, generously appropriated, has been applied to the entire season. But this does not mean a tsunami of works with salt in their scores but, rather, the more subtle use of a theme that, like the sea itself, has its own predictable tidal patterns but also its hidden depths and undercurrents.

As Caetani writes in his introductory message: "Any town on a bay has a special relationship with the sea and therefore has a particular spirit and character. These are the cities in which you find a rare mix of cultures, and Melbourne is one of them."

Many composers have been inspired by the sea - perhaps one day Brett Dean will write a Port Phillip Concerto for String Orchestra and Dredge - and the various symphonies, concertos, tone poems and vocal works that form the MSO season (see panel) are but drops in an ocean of inspiration and creativity. "We're not guilty of programming by numbers," says the MSO's director of artistic planning, Huw Humphreys, who points out there is no Vaughan Williams Sea Symphony or Beethoven Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage overture. "Indeed, some links with the sea have emerged only since we created the season," he says.

In the past, the MSO has devoted seasons (in part) to specific composers, such as Mahler, but nothing along more abstract thematic lines: in fact, Humphreys says, this is a first for an Australian symphony orchestra. He was thinking of another theme - fire - but decided to stay in the water.

"I'm a great believer in thematic programming," he says. "It means a season of distinction and also creating an identity." This particular theme, he is quick to say, is not new; for example, three years ago, the London Proms took the sea as one of its reference points. As it has turned out, everyone at the MSO is looking forward to this fantastic voyage, especially, Humphreys says, the marketing department. Next year, he says, is also thematic, but along different and perhaps more diffuse lines.

The starting point, he says, came from the operatic centrepiece of the season, three concert performances of Wagner's Der fliegende Hollander (The Flying Dutchman), with John Wegner in the title role, Lisa Gasteen as Senta, Stuart Skelton as Erik and Bjarni Kristinsson as Daland. Conducted by Caetani, these performances will also be recorded for release on the orchestra's label, MSO Live. Not only is this opera practically immersed in the sea, with maritime references galore, its inspiration came directly from it - via a prolonged 31/2-week storm-tossed voyage from Riga to London undertaken in 1839 by the young Wagner, his wife, Minna, and their bulky Newfoundland dog, Robber. Not atypically, the composer was fleeing his creditors and, as the vessel sought refuge in the Norwegian fiords, his agile mind was already at work. "The legend of the Flying Dutchman, which the sailors verified, took on a distinctive, strange colouring that only my sea adventures could have given it," Wagner wrote.

A good beginning for a sea season, but only the beginning. "We went deeper," says Humphreys, "There are also pieces we found that take different, not as obvious, angles." For example, Metropolis, the orchestra's contemporary season-within-a-season at the Malthouse, will feature the Australian premiere of Drowned Out, by the English composer Mark-Anthony Turnage. This was inspired by William Golding's novel Pincher Martin, about the mental decline of a man who believes himself to be shipwrecked on a desert island. Metropolis also contains the first Australian performance of a work by another English composer, Thomas Ades, Tevot, the premiere of which was given a year ago by the Berlin Philharmonic, with Simon Rattle. Subtleties abound within the Hebrew word tevot : it can mean "bars" in music, but also "words." Its two biblical references are to Noah's ark and for the reed basket made by Moses' mother to float him on the Nile. As one musical commentator has written, "These tevot are both places of safety . . . They are also both structures that, made of natural materials, remain firm in fluid surroundings."

More straightforwardly seaworthy repertoire includes Debussy's La Mer, which receives just one performance, and Handel's complete Water Music - written in 1717 to be played on the king's barge on the Thames which, as it should be declared for thematic continuity, flows into the sea. This is part of an all-Handel program under the French conductor Bernard Labadie. Mind you, there's no pleasing everybody. Humphreys has had to appease one subscriber who said indignantly, "Handel should only be performed in December", by assuring him Messiah was still happening. Elgar's great orchestral song cycle, Sea Pictures, is being performed in June by the Dutch mezzo-soprano Christianne Stotijn, in a concert preceded by the Four Sea Interludes from Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes.

Meanwhile, for those thalassophobes who so fear the sea they can't bear the slightest susurration let alone grain of sand, there is welcome news that the season is not entirely awash with briny: the sea may cover two-thirds of the planet, but things are more proportionate in the MSO's year. Some of the what you might term landlocked items include Verdi's Requiem and Mahler's 10th symphony, completed by Deryck Cooke. Another program, of Delius, Tchaikovsky and Brahms, is determinedly dry, so to speak, even though it is conducted by Christopher Seaman.

Indeed, just as sea-free have been this week's concerts, conducted by Caetani with soloist the great Australian-born guitarist John Williams: Peter Sculthorpe's Nourlangie, Takemitsu's To the Edge of Dream and Mahler's Symphony No. 1. If you're quick, the final concert is tonight at Hamer Hall. It's on the south bank of the Yarra which, of course, flows into the sea.

The sea in season

Key works in the MSO season.

March - Mussorgsky: Dawn on the Moscow River - Introduction to Khovanshchina.

April - Chausson: Poeme de l'amour et de la mer

Debussy: Nocturnes

Holst: The Planets

Turnage: Drowned Out

May - Takemitsu: Towards the Sea III

Ades: Tevot

Takemitsu: I Hear the Water Dreaming

June - Britten: Four Sea Interludes, from Peter Grimes

Elgar: Sea Pictures

Bridge: The Sea

July - Sibelius: The Oceanides

August - Wagner: Der fliegende Hollander (The Flying Dutchman)

Weber: Overture Oberon

October - Handel: Water Music (complete)

November - Enescu: Vox Maris (The Voice of the Sea)

Debussy: La mer

December - Mendelssohn: Overture: The Hebrides (Fingal's Cave)

Ravel: Une barque sur l'ocean (A Ship on the Ocean).

mso.com.au

© 2008 The Age

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