The Hamer Hall audience was treated to gold medal performances last week, when the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) under Principal Conductor, Benjamin Northey, presented Max Richter’s Four Seasons Recomposed and “Hidden Thoughts III” by its 2024 Composer in Residence, Katy Abbott.
Hidden Thoughts III: Stories of Awe was commissioned by the MSO as part of Abbott’s 2024 residency and premiered in this program. In Hidden Thoughts I, Abbott and her longtime collaborator / librettist Maureen Johnson, revealed rarely ventilated thoughts penned by women, while “Hidden Thoughts II” explored the contents of sadly undelivered letters to the asylum seekers detained on Manus Island.
Hidden Thoughts III explores awe-inspiring moments from ordinary life, presenting responses to an anonymous online survey.
It is scored for a narrator (Pamela Rabe), two singers (vocalist Sunny Kim and bass-baritone Andrew O’Connor) and orchestra.
This performance began, appropriately, in an uneventful way. Rabe and Kim were already in place on stage, maestro Northey had also made a low-key entrance, there was a deep inhalation, and a single, pure voice broke through. It was Kim, vocalising the opening scene, “A Dog Can’t Bite When its Jaw is Hanging Open”, which introduced the notion, articulated by the narrator, Rabe, that “breath is at the centre of the story of awe … You can hear the whispers of your soul”. There was a yearning for more (“to do more, see more, love more”), followed by a dramatic vocal sigh (“I’m so tired in my soul”) from the stalls, as Andrew O’ Connor made his way to the stage.
After this powerful introduction, Hidden Thoughts III presents twelve stories depicting different types of awe-inducing experiences. They include daily activities such as walking the dog, “breathtaking” existential moments such as a mother’s passing; awe at “gorgeously impossible” natural wonders; religious awe on entering an ancient Parisian church; the “wild awe” of a crowd; motherly love and a spontaneous act of kindness.
Katy Abbott’s uses colourful orchestration and a wide range of percussive rhythmic effects brilliantly to underscore each vignette’s distinctive emotional tone. Each vocal part had a distinctive character too: Sunny Kim’s part, which seemed to be the musical embodiment of breath, involved mellifluous vocal lines – sometimes serene, sometimes wailing – while the bass-baritone’s role seemed to involve musical narration. The climaxes, where narrator Pamela Rabe spoke with no musical accompaniment, such as the “cynical bastard self’s” emotions when her mother died, were particularly poignant.
Witnessing this performance was a profoundly moving experience. “Hidden Thoughts III” was awe-inspiring in its own right: an exceptional work beautifully rendered by hugely talented performers.
Max Richter’s Four Seasons Recomposed, which filled the second half of the program, was a perfect match for Hidden Thoughts III. Richter, like Abbott, has written around humanitarian issues (the ballet Exiles concerns refugees) and everyday human experience (nine Life Studies from “In a landscape”).
Four Seasons Recomposed, by contrast, is one of several works in which he dives into classical compositions.
Richter is not the only composer to take a leaf from Vivaldi’s score. During the eighteenth century, JS Bach, Michel Corrette and Rousseau all borrowed “Spring”, while in more recent times The Four Seasons has been arranged for a multitude of different ensembles and re-purposed for figure skating, video games, and a Windows application.
In a 2014 interview before a Sydney Opera House concert, Richter said that the decision to recompose The Four Seasons sprang from a childhood love for this music and the “great loss” he felt after it was appropriated for ringtones, muzak and jingles.
Realising that he “couldn’t really hear it as music anymore”, he decided to recompose it. It was “like taking a different route through a [familiar] landscape, trying to find a new way to encounter it and see it for the first time”.
The recomposed Seasons were first performed in 2012, almost three hundred years after the original concerti were published in a collection entitled The Contest of Harmony and Invention.
Vivaldi’s original presents four violin concerti, each with a sonnet depicting scenes typical of the season: birds, a sleeping goatherd and dog and thunderstorms (spring), the cuckoo, North Wind and gnats (summer), harvest festivities and a hunt (autumn), and teeth-chattering cold and icy snow (winter).
Richter has retained the same structure and most of themes as the original. His spring has birdsong, yet there are more birds – the solo violin is joined by a chorus of violins – and their song is looped over a hypnotic pedal played by the lower strings, harp and harpsichord, but comes to an abrupt end, mid-chirp.
What follows is a sublime elaboration on the “sleeping goatherd” theme from the second movement. In Richter’s composition, the solo violin rests on a bed of slow-moving, pulsating harmonies, which create a dynamic energy under the lyrical solo line. That energy intensifies in the third movement, with a Vivaldi-esque rhythmic motif, but with no melodic references to the original version.
Richter uses similar techniques to recompose the other seasons, stretching the selected themes in a more sustained, meditative style.
For this performance, the reduced forces of the MSO (strings, harpsichord and harp) were wrapped in colour, with the stage lighting themed to match the season. Benjamin Northey’s direction was incisive without being intrusive; the ensemble produced a rich, warm, full sound, bringing extraordinary vitality and intensity to the breaking storms in spring and summer and an ethereal shimmering veil of sound during the heat of summer.
Sophie Rowell, director of the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra and formerly MSO Concertmaster, excelled. She played the virtuosic passages with consummate skill, infusing every note with energy and colour and the slow movements were heartbreakingly beautiful. It was a truly stellar and memorable performance.
Photo creditL Laura Manariti
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Sue Kaufmann reviewed the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Four Seasons Recomposed / Hidden Thoughts III, presented at Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall on August 10, 2024.
