February Music
After the January silence concerts have stated up again. We went to the Summer World Music Concert at Melba Hall on the 13th of February. The two groups appeared in the opposite order to that shown on the website, possibly to make it easier to setup the Chinese orchestra. We spoke with a group of Choir members at the station afterwards who explained that participation in these groups is done as a Summer course by the Conservatorium: the Choir meets twice a week for a 2 hour rehearsal over 6 weeks. They achieve astonishing results for such a small amount of work.
Before getting in to the Hall I checked out some material on the wall. This poster was only interesting ..
The Chinese Orchestra was directed by Wang Zheng-Ting who began by saying the students had only been together for 6 weeks. They were very good with most of the works featuring a subset of folk playing solo instruments. I would be fairly certain they all had some experience playing these or similar instruments, not least because they appeared to sight read the music, It was very interesting and pleasant to the ear.
The Choir was directed by Nino Tsitsishvili. She began by explaining her yellow and blue dress were the colours of Ukraine and later explained that she was Georgian (2 Georgians and a wine bottle gives 3-part polyphony). The music covered a lot of territory, and languages, beginning in Ukraine, then Canada, China, Corsica (a Kyrie eleison); Maori, Zulu and Georgia. I have no idea how the choir learnt those sounds in their 6 weeks! Excellent stuff.
Part of the adventure was Frances' first trip through the Metro Tunnel. We were lucky with our timing on the way out, getting straight on to a train at ANZAC so got to the Hall in not much more than 20 minutes rather than the 45 minutes it took on the tram. We had a 7 minute wait at Parkville on the way home, just missing a train (due to diverting to look at some decorative work in the station).
Comments
Post a Comment