Metropolis New Music Festival
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Metropolis New Music Festival

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“It does involve real cities and our city and city life and all of those things,” he says. “But we leave the palette wide open for all the artists and performers in this series to suggest their own ideas and their responses to the theme, and they’ve all come up with a fascinating array of responses to what a city is. Real cities, imagined cities, ancient cities, dystopian cities.”

There is no set criterion for what makes a city, but cities are often identified for excellence in a particular cultural field. Melbourne is widely regarded as a music city, which is a notion that McGuire and the Recital Centre team wanted to explore.

“We were talking about the title of Melbourne Music City and we said, ‘Does a city become musical because you’ve called it a musical city? Or is it a musical city just because it is a musical city?’ And I think Melbourne’s very much in the latter. Music just pulses through its veins and it has done forever and it’s been blessed with lots of great venues and lots of great artists.

“One thing we wanted to do in this was look at expanding out from contemporary classical music into the music that in many ways defines Melbourne – the singer/songwriters, sort of the urban tribes of Melbourne. For that reason we looked to artists like Jess Ribeiro and Cam Butler and Paddy Mann [AKA Grand Salvo] to give their view of life in the city and their creative response to that.”

Butler and Ribeiro will both appear as part of the Metropolis free concert series. This includes a total of six separate performances, encompassing Butler’s post-classical guitar music and Ribeiro’s hazy folk rock, as well as contemporary jazz from Hue Blanes and Stephen Newton, conceptual art music from Atticus Bastow, and the malleable chamber music of The Letter String Quartet.

“We wanted to really embrace the notion of a festival where you can wander from one gig to another, from one performer to another, from one space to another and maybe have some sort of accidental experience or some connectivity,” McGuire says. “Often we do one performance a night here, or two performances, and we’re opening that up so that you can have two or three different performances in the evening in very different spaces with a very different vibe. We hope that all our audiences are going to take away something new and unexpected.”

That seems like an inevitable outcome of Immersion, a free concert happening on opening night. Led by Melburnian composer Nick Tsiavos, it’s touted as a “three hour vigil of ancient chant and modern instrumentation.”

“Nick is a musician who creates big spaces with his music. It’s often very contemplative, very rich in texture. This is a three hour measure of music and it’s a space to come in and out of if you like. The combination of Nick, Deb Kayser, who’s a phenomenal vocalist, Adam Simmons and the other collaborators is going to be a very special opening night event.”

As for the major portion of the programme, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra with conductor Robert Spanowill present Heavenly Cities, City Life andCity Scapes – all three of which were designed especially for the Metropolis New Music Festival.

“MSO initiated Metropolis about 20 years ago now, so it’s been a really rich and long contribution to contemporary music in this city. Robert Spano, for many years he was with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. He’s what I call a 21st century conductor. He’s not one of the old school maestros – he’s someone who thinks about community, who thinks about composition, who thinks about always reinvigorating the artform. So he’s a perfect collaborator for this one.

“These programs they’ve put together [feature works from] a lot of really interesting composers who we don’t hear a lot of in this country. People like Unsuk Chin; Michael Daugherty is another one, he’s based in LA; and Jennifer Higdon, another American composer. There’s some Steve Reich there, which is always fabulous; the world premiere by Barry Cunningham, who’s a Melburnian from way back; and two works that have come out of the Cybec [21st Century Composers] program, by Alex Turley and Michael Bakrnčev. It’s always great to hear new voices, new works up against older more established voices, to put them in that continuum of orchestral composition.”

Elsewhere there’ll be performances from Michael Kieran Harvey, Forest Collective, and Elision, the latter of which will feature McGuire as a performer. Pianists Aura Go and Tomoe Kawabata will close the festivalwith a performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen, a piece written after the French composer spent eight months imprisoned during World War II. Right across the board, Metropolis New Music Festivalasks audiences to visit with an open mind.

“It is a new music festival – there’s not music here that people will have heard before. And it’s really just opening ears and opening minds to all sorts of possibilities.”

BY AUGUSTUS WELBY