Chamber
CD and Other Review

Review: Joe Twist: Dancing With Somebody

A miniature EP by Joe Twist: three works about ‘dance’; only 23 minutes. As in most of Twist’s music, allusions to popular culture are abundant. Dancing With Somebody – a string quartet – celebrates the persona (with some musical quotations) of pop diva Whitney Houston. Twist sets rhythmic buoyancy against a dark struggle. A subversive structure plays out: patterns are set up, then disturbed (though not repeated!), all aided by first-rate playing from the Sydney-based Acacia Quartet. In I Dance Myself to Sleep, Twist looks to female characters from films such as Superman and Star Wars. Am I listening to contemporary music for the concert hall or cheap bar music? (I ask that with admiration: Twist squeezes a familiar genre into something weirdly beautiful). Pianist Sally Whitwell is a gorgeous co-conspirator in Twist’s ironic game. The crystalline sound of quartet and piano jars with the overly-sampled Gorilla, a film score. A couple on a weekend away meet an alluring woman and a ritualistic dance takes place. I imagined some sort of sacramental physical theatre but this has too much sampled music masquerading as live instruments. The fade-out at the end was too obvious for what was (so far) an exciting…

November 10, 2015
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Bellingen Music Festival 2014

Bellingen is probably the perfect place in the world to have a classical music festival. It’s a bit inland of Coffs Harbour, just a bit off the highway. When you finally escape endless kilometres of green farmland, you see an urban-renewed pasteurisation factory, built partly of brick (now it’s an art gallery). Drive along a little further. The main street is perhaps one hundred years old; the pharmacy is marked “Apothecary”. There are two concert halls, one a disused church, the other built for use by veterans of the war. The first war. It is just about the best setting I’ve ever heard of for classical music. The festival was full of chamber music. The Acacia Quartet opened the festival, playing repertoire from their recent tour, Lyle Chan’s new String Quartet. It’s a musical memoir of his grim time fifteen years ago illegally producing drugs to help fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic.  A number of his friends died in the fight. Synergy Percussion took the second half of the opening concert, with Xenakis’ epic work Pléïades (1979). It’s an energetic work – you might even say violent – and almost impossible to play. Bellingen is probably one of the few places…

September 29, 2014