In curating this year’s Chamberfest at UKARIA, the internationally-renowned Australian soprano Siobhan Stagg promised “moments of absolute beauty, rapture and revelation.”

On the evidence of two of the weekend’s five concerts, the curator’s intentions were amply fulfilled.

Berlin-based Stagg says, “With the state of the world, I think we need live music more than ever, as a healthy interruption to the algorithmic biases in our daily online lives.” 

For this celebration of the power of song to reflect the human condition, Stagg has assembled a diverse program ranging from Hildegard of Bingen to Schubert and Radiohead, featuring the finest performers, including herself.

Siobhan Stagg. Photo © Claudio Raschella

Concert 2 was titled Dead Poets Society and, as the title suggests, it emphasised storytelling through poetry set to music. In her welcoming remarks, Stagg noted the recent passing of legendary pianist and late-blooming poet Alfred Brendel and read a touching poem of his to set the scene.

British mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston, together with Texas-born, Berlin-based pianist Jonathan Ware, then delivered a selection of Schubert’s best-known and most sublime songs. Charlston’s voice is well-suited to Schubert, as she sings with great delicacy and insight and has power in reserve. Ware’s playing was restrained and nuanced, making for a beautifully balanced and emotion-laden performance and they finished with the high drama of Schubert’s Der Erlkönig.

Throughout the concerts, the song lyrics were shown in surtitles, making for literary as well as musical appreciation.

Quatuor Agate. Photo © Claudio Raschella

The Paris-based string quartet Quatuor Agate then performed Sri Lankan-Canadian composer Dinuk Wijeratne’s delightfully quirky The Disappearance of Lisa Gherardini which was inspired by the theft of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911, an event that added significantly to the painting’s reputation. At one point, the first violinist displays an image of the painting, and a whistle is blown to sound the alarm.

We were then introduced to the captivating Canadian-born, Berlin-based soprano and pianist Rachel Fenlon. Fenlon accompanies herself and combines the roles of singer and pianist brilliantly. She opened her program, aptly entitled Rachel’s Mix: Echoes and Apparitions, with Benjamin Britten’s lovely setting of Yeats’s poem The Salley Gardens. 

Then, in complete contrast, she followed with an amazing performance of George Crumb’s The Night in Silence Under Many a Star from his song cycle Apparition, in which she plays the piano’s keys while standing to stroke and pluck the piano’s strings, all while singing. Apparition is from Walt Whitman’s When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, written on the death of Abraham Lincoln.

She followed with an overwhelming rendition of Hugo Wolf’s Mignon: Kennst du das Land? from his Goethe Lieder, which concludes:

“Do you know the mountain and its cloudy path?
The mule seeks its way through the mist,
Caverns house the dragons’ ancient brood;
The rock falls sheer, the torrent over it!
Do you know it?
It is there, it is there
Our pathway lies! O father, let us go!”

Her sparkling solo piano reduction of Radiohead’s Everything in Its Right Place is presumably the arrangement by the New Zealand-born, Berlin-based, Australian pianist Josh Cohen.

She concluded her mix with more Schubert, his Der Leiermann from Winterreise (she has recorded the entire Winterreise cycle), offering the audience what she described as a sample of her oeuvre – Fenlon is a dynamic performer with a soprano voice to match any.

Stagg then concluded Concert 2 with an exquisite performance of Debussy’s gorgeous song cycle Ariettes oubliées, (Forgotten songs), based on poetry by Paul Verlaine, for which she was accompanied by Quatuor Agate in Joan Bachs’s arrangement for string quartet.

The second song, Il pleure dans mon Coeur, is as follows:

Tears fall in my heart
As rain falls on the town
What is this languor
Pervading my heart?

The string quartet version works beautifully, complementing Stagg’s golden voice.

Rachel Fenlon. Photo © Claudio Raschella

Concert 5, Full Flight – One Destination, opened with Rachel Fenlon’s performance of six of Alban Berg’s Sieben frühe Lieder (Seven Early Songs), setting texts by several poets. Her voice can be gossamer light or dark and stormy and again she was enchanting. 

Quatuor Agate then gave a fine performance of Korngold’s String Quartet No. 2 in E flat, with its light-hearted take on the Viennese waltz, written shortly before the composer’s emigration to Hollywood. 

Helen Charlston’s performance of four of the five Rückert Lieder, Mahler’s settings of Romantic poems by the early 19th-century poet Friedrich Rückert, again demonstrated her magnificent voice and her ability to convey emotional depth. Her Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (I am lost to the world) was breathtaking.

For Stagg’s performance of Richard Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs), a mini-orchestra assembled, comprising the members of Quatuor Agate together with several members of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra including its principal wind players. 

Photo © Claudio Raschella

Conducted by Leonard Weiss, the mini-orchestra could not have the richness of a full orchestra, but James Ledger’s arrangement of the orchestral music worked well. Stagg’s performance of this Strauss masterwork was magisterial, bringing out all the emotion in the four poems that muse on life and death.

The final work in the Chamberfest series was Hab mir’s gelobt, the trio from Act III of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, in an arrangement commissioned from James Ledger for this concert, with the three wonderful voices singing in unison: Stagg as the Marschallin, Charlston as Octavian and Fenlon as Sophie von Faninal. And what a magnificent trio of voices for the performance of this piece, with the orchestra nicely supporting the three singers in the grandest of finales. 

The audience’s extended standing ovation duly acknowledged the brilliance of this Chamberfest series, which will be remembered as a highlight in South Australia’s music life. UKARIA must be congratulated for engaging the inspired Stagg as its Chamberfest curator and she will surely be invited to take on such roles again.