★★★★☆ A fascinating and artistically absorbing musico-political event.

Queensland Performing Arts Centre
July 29, 2015

We Australians don’t think that we have lyrical legislators or pleasingly polyphonic politicians. So the idea of musical settings of a sample of our parliamentarians’ speeches seemed such an unlikely paradox that hearing Topology and Australian Voices present Unrepresentative Swill – our Senators, à la Paul Keating, not the repertoire of the concert – was, frankly, impossible to resist at the Queensland Music Festival.

The venue was the Concert Hall of QPAC in Brisbane: we, the audience, sat in the choir stalls and the performers (violin, viola, double-bass, saxophones and piano together with the 24 young choristers, with their conductor, Gordon Hamilton) had their backs to where the audience would normally have been: a symbol, perhaps, of politicians who, so often, ignore or spurn their constituents?

There were 15 pieces (plus a hilariously mocking encore, Unrepresentative Swill): 11 of them by Robert Davidson (the bassist and director of Topology); one by the group’s sax player (John Babbage); one by Dominic Hefferan (a bass in the choir); and two by Hamilton. Some were for unaccompanied chorus, others just for instruments, all (or nearly all) had recordings of the speeches played...