When Tim Munro said on Tuesday night that for his last concert as creative partner with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) – he is going home to Australia – he had programmed a night of Australian music, he drew some chuckles from the full house at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. It is true, Australia is not the first place you think of when you think of contemporary chamber music. But this program was no joke.
Munro said Cheetham was provoked to write [“Permit me”] by the kinship she felt between the COVID restrictions imposed in Melbourne – permits, curfews – and the permits and curfews that Australia had imposed on her indigenous elders.
The first three pieces each called for a solo performance on a different stringed instrument, in effect stacking a string trio, one instrument at a time: violin, then viola, then cello.
Andrea Jarrett played “Alone” (1976) by Peter Sculthorpe (1929-2014), a kind of duet for violin and, of all things, the violinist’s own whistling lips. Munro said that Sculthorpe “created a new musical language for Australia, exploring the vast expanse of its desert,” all 1 million square miles of it. The long, slow, single notes played on a single string evoked that vast emptiness – talk about being alone – as the whistling brought the signature accompaniment of the traveler alone in the dark. Sculthorpe and Jarrett kept the tune moving with pinky string plucks and slides. A symphony violinist whistling to her own violin! It was an intensely intimate six minutes of music.
Just like “Alone” is a piece for solo violin only if you leave out the whistling, “Mount Surprise” (2020) by Hollis Taylor and Jon Rose (they and the other composers on the program are still living) is a piece for solo viola only if you leave out the birds. Alejandro Valdepenas of SLSO performed on viola against a recording of pied butcherbird calls in collage. Munro called the pied butcherbird the virtuoso of not only Australian songbirds but all of the songbirds of the world. The violist did have a thankless job. I would hate to say he was competing with a chorus of show-off songbirds, but inevitably their playing together invited comparisons, and truly those birds can blow. I heard Rakoto Frah, I heard Ornette Coleman, of course I heard Charlie Parker.
The solo cello piece – “Permit Me” (2022) by Deborah Cheetham – is a genuinely solo composition, performed by Yin Xiong of SLSO with no whistling, with no birds. In Munro’s telling, this composition has by far the most troubling content of any piece on the program, but it was the most melodious of the tunes. Munro said Cheetham was provoked to write it by the kinship she felt between the COVID restrictions imposed in Melbourne – permits, curfews – and the permits and curfews that Australia had imposed on her indigenous elders. Musically, however, “Permit Me” is a sonorous tone poem – that is, until Yin Xiong started to wail, pluck, and walk up bass lines. It’s not an angry defiance of restriction so much as a confident escape.
So, what do you do after stacking up a string trio a la carte, with violin, then viola, then cello? Add a double bass, right? No! You bring them all out together and add Peter Henderson on Hammond organ!
Henderson played Hammond organ through a Leslie speaker, which, as Munro described, lends a pitch-shifting Doppler effect that is central to “More beautiful discourse” (2020) by Thomas Meadowcroft. It opened with a violin swell by Jarrett and Hammond organ chording by Henderson that together sparkled like a harp. From there it was 19 minutes of slowly shifting edging by all three string players as the Hammond organ offered texture, space and weirdness. What drama the piece offered came in frenetic bowing at the changes as the form, or formlessness, started to repeat. Nineteen minutes is a long time to spend on the edge of anything, and a piece that, in a sense, goes nowhere might not seem to be such a great thing. But something beautiful that doesn’t really go anywhere sounded pretty good on a night when a very creative partner was going away from us.
Farewell, Tim Munro. Thank you for all the music.
Chris King covers classical music for The St. Louis American.
