Astra Choir + instrumental ensemble: Friedel, Yu, John, Ligeti, Becker, Bach & Kuhnau
Sun 10 December @ 17:00 - 18:00
$10 – $35...THE LIFE BETWEEN...
Central to this concert is the premiere by Michael Kieran Harvey of the final work by composer Martin Friedel. His death in late 2022 brought to an end 32 years of contributions to Astra concerts embracing many domains of thought and art, science and poetry, nature and politics in choral and instrumental expressions.
The ten short pieces that make up his final piano work for Michael Kieran Harvey draw their title from a sentence of the Tibetan Buddhist Siddha Milarepa (1040-1123):
Regard as one, this life, the next life, and the life in between
When composers write music 'after' other music, interesting pathways similarly open up in the space between present and past. Among the interactions of this concert:
Australian composer Julian Yu places choir between two fantastically ornamented pianos in his re-moulding (1990) of Bach's famous opening Prelude to the Well-Tempered Klavier. In another transformative adventure, Yu converts the wind bagatelles by centenary composer György Ligeti into a choral experience that includes the implanting of a Mandarin poem from his own Chinese heritage. These Bagatelles in turn had their source in an elemental solo-piano cycle, which Ligeti concluded with a fugue written 'after' a chromatic fantasy by Frescobaldi.
J.S. Bach himself created a new sonic cladding of instrumental sound around a motet by his immediate Leipzig predecessor Johann Kuhnau. He also substitutes new words that are only too current in 2023: The just one perishes and no-one takes it to heart...the righteous are snatched away in the face of the calamity. “The Bagatelles" in turn had their source in an elemental solo-piano cycle with accumulating numbers of notes, from 1 to 12. This concludes with a fugue written ‘after’ a chromatic ricercare of Girolamo Frescobaldi.