Music / Bowral Autumn Music Festival, March 25-28. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

THE Bowral Autumn Music Festival is fast emerging as one of the more sophisticated music events of our immediate region.

Directed by Myee Clohessy from the Acacia Quartet, it takes place in the heritage Saint Jude’s Church in Bowral and its adjacent church hall, both of which serve well acoustically for performances.

Last year’s festival was cancelled because of covid, so several of the inclusions were reprogrammed. The organisers, though relieved to be permitted 100 audience members, found it necessary to double-program the recitals to ensure full coverage.

I caught two concerts and an organ interlude by Allan Beavis while returning from Opera on the Harbour in Sydney, and immediately picked up on the tone of joyous relief pervading the event at being back into live performances.

Underscoring the festival was a note of sadness, as news had come through days before of the death of soprano Taryn Fiebig, who was to have performed in one of the central concerts but had withdrawn because of a recurrence of her fatal illness several weeks ago.

First up for me was a spectacular solo concert in the church hall on marimba, vibraphone and waterphone by percussionist Claire Edwardes, who couldn’t keep the smile off her face at being back in front of an audience.

After astonishing all by playing Bach on her five-octave marimba, Edwardes introduced  composer Ella Macens, from whom she had commissioned a work for vibraphone called “Falling Embers” inspired by the bushfires, cancelled because of covid but performed online though never, as Macens explained, “in the flesh before an audience”.

Edwardes also performed her work for solo marimba, “Verve”, composed for her by Macens in 2016.

This was a cleverly varied concert which included “Ether Lines”, improvised by Edwardes on the weird wind phone, which she described as sounding a bit “like a whale call”, created by American musician Richard Waters.

The concert included “Nostalgia” for solo vibraphone by Canadian composer Vincent Ho, a dramatic, cheeky composition by Andrew Ford called “Hook” – as in “Peter Pan” – and two playful studies by Elena Kats-Chernin, dedicated to Edwardes’ daughters Violet and Poppy.

Next, the audience moved to the church, where The Acacia Quartet performed with English lyric soprano Amy Moore, who had stepped in to replace Fiebig, learning a suite of new pieces at short notice.

While the instrumental showpiece was the “String Quartet In E Flat Major” by Fanny Mendelssohn, the true centrepiece of the concert was the quiet song, “How Slow The Wind”, composed following the death of a close friend by Osvaldo Golijov. Moore’s subtle, gentle performance effectively conjured up the wind and the feathers of the Emily Dickinson poem on which the song was based.

This concert also featured “Mopoke” and “I Thought I Heard a Magpie Call” by early Australian composer Alfred Hill, reflecting a European perception of the Australian bush, and five songs arranged for soprano and string quartet by Ann Carr-Boyd from compositions by pioneering Australian composer Peggy-Glanville Hicks.

This recital ended with Iain Grandage’s quirky musical take on “The Owl and the Pussycat”.

The festival included performances by organist Simon Nieminski, oboist Mikaela Sukkar, young organist/harpist artist Amy Pudney, organist Clara He, and pianist Leanne Jin and was bookended with an education day and a concluding festival Evensong service.