Highly esteemed educator and international concert performer, Coady Green is a committed champion of Australian works and new compositions, tonight supporting the diversity of emerging queer composers and musical artists with a performance of powerful solo piano repertoire from past and present.
In North Fitzroy, a stately Temperance Hall that had once upon a time gained a new life as the Hungarian Consulate Office, now has been creatively refurbished in a splendid private home, with a fascinating atmosphere of both historical originality and easy to live in creative and artistic comfort. A strongly toned Kawai grand piano was most fitting for the emotive music performed in a spacious concert room, a hall with high walls and taking the width of the whole house!
Coady Green has a big heart, and shows an astute academic knowledge when describing the essential structures and personal understanding of the music. He introduced all works and their composers with much love and affirmation – works new or rarely performed, all demanding advanced technical virtuosity and total immersion in intense performance and listening.
The three pieces chosen from Franz Liszt’s 10-piece piano cycle, Harmonies poétiques et religieuses deeply moved us with their intensity and fervour. The first, Misere, d’après Palestrina, evoked the plainchant ‘”Lord Have Mercy” shrouded in tumultuous arpeggios and rich, dark, low chords, with fine silver bells ringing in high tremolo patterns. Emotion, vibrancy and resonant echoes were felt immediately. Green had described the second piece, Pensée des Morts, as a picture of transcendence rather than death. The pathway of the soul was felt in his slow, sad single notes that lingered in space, contrasting with the depths of colourful orchestral solemn darkness later felt in the bass. Green had described Liszt’s references to Beethoven’s opening “Moonlight”’ Sonata theme, as a symbol of celestial transcendency perhaps, bringing moments of light. In Funerailles we heard the funeral bells pealing across the skies, following the souls of the damned roaming across the skies, powerful fortissimo chromatic scales surging up and down the piano, agitation felt in single notes repeated in quickfire succession broken by forceful, gripping silences. Green indeed understands and communicated the depth of the souls of Liszt and his contemporaries.
How wonderful to have composers in the audience to present their work. Green is currently on a large project recording all the works by composer Linda Kouvaras, and we welcomed her personal introduction to a set of pieces from her “Ormond Collection”, works inspired from her residency at the College. City Views offered three different musical landscapes, formed initially with rolling octaves in the bass, and right-hand parts outlining architectural shapes in virtuosic, fluid scales and jazz-influenced cluster chords. Tower was more rhapsodic, this famous landmark “seeing” the student world from 360 degrees – their reflective moments of intense thought and study, their moments of changing moods and passions, anger and protest, dreams and energies – a piece that developed from Green’s sensitivity to changing spiritual textures and dynamics to a larger orchestral chordal flow with a very fine ending. In Chapel was most sensitively played, with lyrical themes fragmented in heavenly high notes, resonating from pedalled colourings, spacious, slow and reflective passages ending with surprisingly affirmative God-like chordal power. Yearning closed the impressions of the students’ journey, the initial soft rising scale patterns, which had explored new steps, developed with robust activity towards a jubilant sense of final achievement.
Meta Cohen has been commissioned to compose a large number of vocal and chamber works, and was present to hear the world premiere performance of The Warning Never Heard. Its four “sections” – One Day, You Will Know, The Truths, She Has Spoken – were performed in rhapsodic form as one. Cohen described the piece as “exploring the burden of foresight and the horror of not being listened to, and the feelings of believing something but being unable to communicate it”. Through powerful tonal chords and broad melodies above rippling left hand accompaniment, étude like scale passages and marked repeated and determined rhythms, contrasting moods from angst to visionary, this was not easy listening at times. The audience responded positively to this new composition, which was executed with sensitivity and marked by robust, rhapsodic and contemporary qualities — all within the context of “a world where truth remains uncertain”.
This concert was initiated by Melbourne composer Bryn Renard to raise funds for new commissions from queer composers in 2026. They were present to hear their work My Voice in Shattered Shapes (composed for Green) most carefully and sensitively played, with thoughtfulness in repeated sonorities, intriguing harmonies and bell-like echo points gently spaced between silences that held resonating aftermaths. Developing freedom and experimentation on high notes, powerfully pedalled darker regions and atonality, brought a gentle rhythmic shape to repeated clusters and faded to a close.
Green brought this substantial musical workout to a further passionate and virtuosic finale with Two Etudes from Rubinstein’s 6 Etudes, Op. 23. Rarely performed music with powerfully strong melodies and highly decorative accompaniment, the showy and lusty cascades of these romantic works require a stamina, humility and technique well admired by this audience. It was indeed an evening of musical heart and soul.
Photo supplied.
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Julie McErlain reviewed Coady Green’s Solo Recital Commission Fundraiser, held at 272 Rae St, North Fitzroy on February 29, 2026
