Eclectic mix with Latin spice manages to overshadow Philip Glass premiere.

QSO Studio, South Bank, Brisbane
May 15, 2015

The Queensland Symphony Orchestra’s new music mini-festival kicked off in style with an intriguing and eclectic mix of a programme featuring a few oldies but also a heralded Philip Glass/Aphex Twin world premiere and a less trumpeted Aussie premiere from Lyle Chan. And in the end, it was the Chan that came out ahead. Not that these variegated bills are a beauty contest, but it’s hard not to find yourself rooting for the winners and equally marking down the losers.

I’m going to begin with my number one of the evening – a modest work by Mexican composer Mario Lavista (born 1943) going by the cryptic name Clepsidra. Using the metaphor of Roman water clocks to reflect on the passing of time as well as celebrating the discovery of a river, the work is a colourful, clever, original score full of ticking violins, tolling horns and glacial, vibrato-less string effects topped off with a magical celesta part. Impressionistic, beautifully scored and reminding me at times in its orchestrational fastidiousness of Paul Dukas (but passed through a prism of late 20th-century movies...