The Festival’s music director, Paul Dean, explains why the chemistry in this town makes for success.
Selecting the pieces to be played at the annual Music Festival isn’t like choosing music you’ll hear regularly on the radio. “It’s not about the Four Seasons or Eine Kleine Nachtmusik or things you hear all the time,” says Paul Dean, the program’s artistic director and the clarinetist of Southern Cross Soloists who stage the annual event. “There are a thousand other Vivaldi pieces which are just as fantastic. It’s more exciting to play something the audience has never heard before.”
So expect the unusual at this year’s event, to be held from Friday 14 to Sunday 16 August at the A&I Hall. According to Paul it will have a ‘significantly English flavour’ with music by Benjamin Britten, regarded as one of the greatest 20th century composers; Edward Elgar; an Australian premiere of Gustav Holst’s Quintet for Piano and Wind; as well as works by Phillip Cannon, Samuel Coleridge Taylor and Benjamin Frankel.
There will also be two world premiere performances from Australian composers Andrew Schultz and Paul Stanhope, and four works by Stuart Greenbaum, the Southern Cross Soloists’ ‘Composer in Focus for 2009’. “These works are not confronting,” says Paul. “They’re just plain beautiful.”
In preparing for a successful music festival Paul Dean starts with finding world class performers who want to come. Then there’s the Bangalow location which, in his mind, provides the ‘perfect chemistry’ for this event.
The advantage of a regional venue over a city location, he says, is that: “Once you have your audience in for day one, you have them for the whole event, and they are utterly focused. I’ve played at a lot of festivals in Australia and there’s not a more dedicated audience, even though I do challenge them. The festival takes people on a journey. It puts history and music into perspective. Music has the ability to affect you like nothing else can. It attacks people in a personal way. You can’t see it or feel it, but you can’t run away from it.”
Is the size of the hall a limitation? “Well my bank manager would love it to hold an extra 100 people, but with its acoustics, and the hospitality of the local people, and people like Michael Malloy on the ground, there are no weak links.”
Since starting the festival here in 2002, he and his team have discovered that “all the musicians and visitors can be accommodated within 20 minutes of the venue, excellent restaurants are close by, and there are people on the ground here to support the event.”
New to the festival this year will be The Song Company, a vocal ensemble of six full-time professional singers, who have commissioned and performed more than 300 works from 50 Australian composers in the last 20 years. “Their concert at St Kevin’s Church, including the music of Britten, Purcell, Hassler, Byrd and Vecchi, will be pretty amazing,” says Paul.
Paul guesses that a highlight of this year’s program will be the appearance of German conductor, Werner Andreas Albert, who regularly conducts all six Symphony Australia orchestras, and is Germany’s most recorded artist. “We can’t actually pay him more than five percent of his regular fee to lead the Masterpiece clarinet performance on Sunday morning (including Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto and Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony), but it will be a great joy for both of us.”
Repeat performers include the Flinders Quartet, harpist Marshall McGuire (“he’ll be a big star”) and Brisbane pianist now based in London, Jayson Gillham.
For the Southern Cross Soloists, “the highlight of the year is this festival. It’s the warmth and attentiveness of this audience and their openness. They give themselves over to the music.” Of the subscription audience of 300, Dean says 50 percent come from Brisbane, with under 20 percent living locally.
Tickets are available at Barebones (Tel 6687 1393) or via www.southernxsoloists.com
Christobel Munson
The Concert for Bangalow
This year’s Thursday night concert for the Bangalow Music Festival will again highlight the rich array of talent that festival goers will enjoy over the following three days. Playing this year in The Concert for Bangalow will be Festival Director Paul Dean, pianist maestro Jayson Gillham, Marshall McGuire on harp, the Ensemble Della-Mar from the Cape Byron Steiner School and Bangalow’s own Scarlett Affection plus some other surprises. The Concert, prior to the three-day Festival, will be held on Thursday 13 August at the A&I Hall. Tickets are a steal at $20 from Barebones Artspace. An event not to be missed. Michael Malloy