Ethereal sounds of an Indian Easter
Gethsemane, The Song Company and Synergy Percussion, City Recital Hall, March 31
Reviewed by Peter McCallum, SMH April 2nd, 2010
Each year at this time for several years, the Song Company has presented a music, theatre and dance project exploring the great wealth of Easter music in new and reflective contexts.
Gethsemane, devised and written by the composer Gerard Brophy, alternated musical settings of biblical texts with his evocative prose narratives describing life in Calcutta; one hesitates to call them cameos since the decorative implications of the word scarcely encompass the poverty they captured.
Ranging over a day, and with the same alertness to small detail one finds in Brophy’s scores, they tell of children picking over rubbish, of the deprivations of the seething mass of homeless, and of total abandonment at the moment of death.
Instead of the open, free-form space used in previous projects, the more formal City Recital Hall suited the music, with its combination of voice, saxophone, Synergy Percussion and discreet electronic sounds. But the small stage inhibited the movement slightly, particularly the dance which was less developed than in previous Easter offerings.
Brophy’s music has transformed recently from the complex, carefully crafted modernist scores with which he made his name in the 1980s. The style here was radically simpler and restrained, exploring textures reminiscent of chant and early polyphonic styles highlighted by spare percussion sounds, particularly gongs and bells, that evoked oriental timelessness.
Beneath all this was an ambient backwash of electronic sound, sometimes pointing to the ethereal and eternal, elsewhere hinting at ceaseless hubbub and traffic. The most successful passages were those evocative of early polyphony, involving simple interweaving and imitation of the lines around plain minor modes, with harmonies of pristine fourths.
Christina Leonard’s smooth saxophone solos evoked Eastern woodwind instrumental traditions, the vocal style referenced Renaissance liturgical techniques, and the tambourine and bells hinted at something more particularly Indian.
With the Song Company’s peerless vocal control, the singing was of hauntingly strange beauty. The stillness and austerity did not sustain interest evenly throughout but the work as a whole was a testament to the Song Company’s and Brophy’s highly original creative enterprise.
