WHY are the Resonants so self-effacing? 

This choir has been performing in Canberra for more than 20 years, and under its musical director Helen Swan, was recently seen singing with great subtlety and delicacy in Canberra Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Gustave Holst’s “The Planets.”

In a fairly unpublicised performance on Saturday night at University House with guest conductor Mary Tatchell stepping in when Swan was unexpectedly hospitalised, two  original Canberra works were premiered in a program where the brilliant articulation of the choir served the underlying theme of poetry.

In the first, “Versatility,” (that’s a pun) eminent Canberra poet Timoshenko Aslanides combined his first love, composition (he studied under Peter Sculthorpe at Sydney University many years ago) with his chosen career of “full-time professional poet” in what amounted to a musical and spoken-word defence of the art of poetry.

He was aided by the collected chorales of JS Bach, though Aslanides put it the other way round, saying “my words will clothe Bach’s music for today.”

Taking English poet John Dryden’s definition of music as “inarticulate poetry,” Aslanides counters “poetry is articulate music.”

In a highly studied, articulate defence of the art form, he creates a protagonist, “The Poet”, sung by tenor Bruce Warrington, with the choir acting as commentators, antagonists and interrogators.

This is not poetry of the vernacular, although Aslanides sees himself as a defender of clear English. The poet sets himself a breathtakingly high standard when he promises, “my poems will be not just good, but great.”

Much of “Versatility” is an ironical attack on his bêtes noires–arts bureaucracy, government-funded poetry, (suitable for use as toilet paper) lazy poets, poetry about recent trends and transitory events, (the McPoet and McPoems) “carbohydrate prose” and peer-group assessment for arts grants.

To him, true poets should be concerned with the “kindling of flame and intoxication of senses,” but so busy was he arguing, that we saw none of that.

The Poet/Aslanides acknowledges his debt to the late Judith Wright, but his poetry is more formal than Wright’s, conjuring up the satirical works of Alexander Pope and A.D. Hope.

Highly literate and suited to an educated audience, the work employs the age-old devices of assonance and alliteration, high-language words such as “perforce,” classical references to the “Old Comedy” of Aristophanes and cleverly-worded taunts such as: “You don’t conceal conceit from your conceit.”

Throughout the verbal combat, the Resonants’ beautifully modulated presentation of the Bach chorales, sung to words by Aslanides, tended to verify Dryden’s assertion.

When last I interviewed Liam Waterford, he was assisting Judith Clingan on an original children’s opera.

Now he is a fully-fledged music teacher and composer. Assisted by a 2009 ADFAS (Australian Decorative & Fine Arts Society Canberra) Youth Arts Award, he has produced a romantic and slightly melancholy choral suite, “On the air are born,” based on poems by Australian poet Christopher Brennan.

ADFAS, a hardworking and largely unsung group, should be mightily pleased with this particular award. These pieces, and especially the opening piece, “Sweet silence after bells!” will almost certainly make it into the standard Australian repertoire for choirs.

Waterford’s gentle music was beautifully articulated by the choir.

This was both a provocative and an enchanting and evening of music and poetry, with additional choral works in the program ranging from an Appalachian fiddle song   to songs based on a poem by Kipling and traditional Japanese verse.

The Resonants should blow their own trumpet more stridently.