★★★½☆ Art, nudity and music make this multi-sensory event come alive.

Yellow House, Sydney
August  5, 2016

It was hard to know where to look, what with a stark naked composer disporting himself, a significant artist sketching him on a wall, and a string quartet sawing away. To cap it off, Clementine Robertson was lying on a plinth the height of an upright piano, dressed in white, with whitened skin and white face mask, while four vials dripped (hopefully) fake blood on her.

This, of course, is not the usual context in which a string quartet plies its trade, and the point was to hint at the daring and decadence of a Belle Époque salon, the Yellow House’s long and arty history in Kings Cross aiding the cause. So where most composers opt to bare their souls rather than their bodies, in Butt Naked Salon Andrew Batt-Rawden (publisher of Limelight) did both, posing nude for Wendy Sharpe. The Australian Art Quartet, meanwhile, opened with his 27, a short autobiographical piece about being that age, in which harmonies soured and tonal colour was in constant flux.

In this version of the AAQ...