Classical and contemporary music is hoisting the flag high at this year’s impressive New Music Indaba. Music critic Paul Boekkooi looks at the sounds on
offer
Festivals are there to allow experimentation, or as Charles Ives would have it,
“some serious stretching of the ears”. They are showcases for new and unusual
talent, and a timely refuge for the music lover who has had an overdose of predictable and conventional music throughout the year. In other words: Grahamstown is the place where everyone can be adventurous.
The Standard Bank National Arts Festival has long ago done away with the “little
boxes” type of mentality. It’s exposing what’s inside, giving everyone the chance to experience something new.
This year there’s no South African orchestra to perform its swansong. To avoid
giving a stage to a dying ensemble, a young, vibrant chamber orchestra has been
invited from overseas: the Nieuw Sinfonietta Amsterdam will be heard in two concerts.
The orchestra is a progressive, democratic group of 22 string players, who will
be conducted by Patrick Davin from Belgium. Two soloists will perform with them:
Israeli-born pianist Shai Wosner, and the Dutch violinist and associate concert-
master of the NSA, Peter Brunt.
On July 6 at the Monument Theatre the Nieuw Sinfonietta Amsterdam will play:
Sonata for Strings in G major (Rossini), Piano Concerto in A major, K 414 (Mozart), Five Pieces, Opus 5 (Webern) and the Serenade for Strings in E major,
Opus 22 (Dvorak). The following evening the group will perform a different programme at the same venue: Divertimento in F major, K 138 (Mozart), Lyric Andante (Reger), Rondo in A major (Schubert), Sinfonia no 10 in B minor (Mendelssohn) and Holberg Suite (Grieg).
Over the past few years the festival has invited to great acclaim some of the
most famous British string quartets. It continues this tradition by bringing the
legendary Fitzwilliam String Quartet in its 21st century incarnation, with Jonathan Sparey (1st violin), Lucy Russell (2nd violin), Alan George (viola) and
Nicola Baxter (cello).
Their first programme, on June 29 in the Rhodes Chapel, is under the New Music
Indaba umbrella. String Quartets nos 11 & 15 by Shostakovich, Arguments from
Quartet no 2 (Ives), the world premiere of the string quartet in memory of William Burton by the South African composer and Indaba director, Michael Blake,
and the Canon in Memoriam Igor Stravinsky by Schnittke will reach our ears.
Talking about premieres: the Shostakovich Quartet no 15 and both the Ives and
Schnittke will be heard for the first time in South Africa.
In their second programme the Fitzwilliam four will focus on more conventional
music, with pieces by Purcell, Mozart, Haydn, Puccini and Verdi.
More chamber music will be served up by violinist Peter Carter and two fellow
South Africans now living in London: the husband-and-wife team of Hanlie (piano)
and Eric Martens (cello). They’ve formed the Da Vinci Trio for this tour and
will present an after-dinner concert of works by Schubert, Dvorak and Shostakovich, followed up with a pre-luncheon aperitif of Mozart and Schubert.
Baroque music will feature in the Ensemble Refugium’s programme, which will include works by Bach, Von Biber, Frescobaldi, Kapsberger, Rossi, Telemann and
Uccellini. A contemporary air will be given to this line-up with the inclusion
of a composition by the ensemble’s baroque cellist, Hans Huyssen. His fellow
musicians are Stefan Temmingh (recorders), Aninka Harms (baroque violin) and Uwe
Grosser (lute and chitarrone). The group shares its time between Cape Town and
Munich.
The dominantly instrumental fare in the main festival is reinforced by several
stimulating choral programmes around it. Among these you’ll find An Evening with
Verdi, but for the real vocal gems you’ll have to be seen at the Indaba, which
this year carries the theme Spaces and Odysseys.
After last year’s homage paid to John Cage during the New Music Indaba’s launch
(not the greatest of successes since it was very exclusive and other worldly),
this year’s Indaba promises to be a different kettle of fish, since the one- composer obsession has been replaced by a more widespread field of possibilities
and explorations.
This time the composer-in-residence is Johannesburg-born Stanley Glasser, who
turned 75 in February. The versatile Glasser made his name as a music critic in
Cape Town before leaving for London in 1963 and was the head of the music department of the Goldsmith College of the University of London.
Only after his retirement did he begin to consider himself a “professional composer,” although he had already experimented with traditional South African
music in the late 1940s decades before other mainly Western-educated South
African composers started to look at their own grassroots for inspiration.
Glasser regards himself as “some-what of a chameleon with regard to influences”:
he has drawn on African and Western folk music, jazz, pop and the gamut of Western classical music. His presence in Grahamstown will give listeners a retrospective of his varied output, and he will guide young composers through
daily workshops and master classes.
Glasser’s works will form the core of some of the most ambitious programmes at
this Indaba. One that catches the eye immediately is The Chameleon and the Lizard, which refers to a choral composition by Glasser. This programme will
combine three choral groups as the Indaba Festival Singers, the Andrew Tracey
Augmented Steel Band and the Eastern Cape Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Australian-born Lesley Larkum, the first woman conductor to appear
in Grahamstown.
Another work by Glasser on this programme will be Khaba! A number of compositions by Benjamin Tyamzashe, Percy Grainger, Phelelani Mnomiya, Makhaya
Mjana, Arne Mellnas and Ntsikana Gaba will also feature in this showcase of exuberant music from the southern hemisphere.
Other highlights include the solo piano performances of the United States’s David Arden and Johannesburg’s Jill Richards, who will play music from South
Africa’s “Big Five”: Hubert du Plessis, Stanley Glasser, Stefans Grove, John
Joubert and Arnold van Wyk.
Pianist Christopher Duigan will present a Twentieth-Century Ramble with works by Michael Blake, Grainger, Prokofiev, Scriabin and Shostakovich. In another programme, entitled Pianos for Africa, Duigan, Richards, Blake, Carlo Mombelli
and the Forty Fingers Quartet will play some of the most fascinating and mostly
multiple-hands repertory from the 20th century.
Also be on the lookout for Clocks and Clouds, a musical portrait of Hungarian
composer Gyorgi Ligeti, and World Caf Night, a programme in which the boundaries between serious music and cabaret start to fade.
This is just a small part of the Indaba’s content, given to test the potential
of your gustatory nerves. There is much more, like free concerts, a performance
of Erik Satie’s Vexations (all six hours of it), composition and electronic music workshops, conversations about music during the winter school with the
Fitzwilliam String Quartet, Stanley Glasser and others, and a panel’s retrospective look at The Week That Was at the end of the Indaba.
For more information, the festival booking kit is available at select branches
of Standard Bank or call the festival hotline: 0861 202 000