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Canberra Today 22°/24° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Our formidable music festival ends

THE nation’s capital has seen festivals come and go, but the Canberra International Music Festival, now in its 18th year, looks set to stay.

From small beginnings in embassies and national institutions and always passionately supported by the local community, it has grown under directors Nicole Canham and Christopher Latham into a formidable musical event that puts Canberra on the map.

That evolution has been attributable in large part to the input of $630,000 from 2006-8 by music patron Barbara Blackman.

Latham has put his own eccentric mark on the event, combining the erudition and architectural know-how of the Australian Institute of Architects with fine music through the “Amazing Spaces” venture and thus giving the festival a unique flavour.

The concert “Bachiana Brasileiras” was a case in point, where UC architecture lecturer David Flannery drew comparisons between Canberra and Brasilia.

In the Australian War Memorial, music was matched to abstract qualities of valour, while in Old Parliament House, Burley Griffin’s designs were projected on to the to the ceiling to the sounds of Jonathan Mills’ Griffin-inspired work “Ethereal Eye”. The courtyard of the National Film and Sound Archive became a sound studio for the skills of ubiquitous percussionists Michael Askill, Gary France and DRUMatiX.

These were undoubtedly the stars of the festival and visible/audible almost daily. It was no surprise, then, that DRUMatiX was one of three groups (the others were the ANU Chamber Choir and the ANU Chamber Orchestra) honoured with ACTEW’s Outstanding Performer awards.

Many other individuals who shone, as Latham persuaded invited guests to put their shoulders to the wheel in unexpected spots. British conductor Andrew Mogrelia seemed as comfortable conducting the cello ensemble in the Brazilian concert as the more rarefied contemporary works in “Credo, Credo” at the Albert Hall.

The Song Company’s Roland Peelman, chameleon-like, switched easily from Kats-Chernin and Wesley Smith to the intellectual challenging music of Mills, who, as Latham reminded us, is now the busy director of the Edinburgh Festival, but happily sat down to perform the section of his work.

Mills and Latham between them injected a super-intellectual touch into the proceedings that may have daunted some patrons.

In the annual Barbara Blackman Lecture, Mills invited us to view Walter and Marion Mahony Griffin not as a pair of wacky alternative lifestylers, but as idealists dedicated to a spiritually mediated way of seeing the world who became part of the sad continuum that sees “Uberpragmatism” plague Australian society and politics.

All the concerts I attended were packed out. My only worry is that, in marked contrast to the cool crowd attending Bell Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” on the weekend, music festival-goers, loyal and loving as they may be, are decidedly falling into “the sere, the yellow leaf” stage of life.

As Latham’s and his festival planners face the Canberra Centenary, it may be time to turn attention to future generations of music listeners.

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Ian Meikle, editor

Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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