The Canberra Symphony Orchestra (CSO)’s 2023 mainstage concert season begins next week with Fire & Shadow at Llewellyn Hall: two ballet suites bookending an Australian work.
This year’s theme is Chroma, a kaleidoscope of colour and music, centred on composers with a close connection and a special affinity with colour. The opening program, Jessica Cottis, chief conductor and artistic director, said, “explores the interplay of musical darkness and light”, from Stravinsky’s “colourful and adventurous” Le baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss) to Beethoven’s sunlit Creatures of Prometheus: “an image of the divine fire of the arts”.
- Canberra Symphony launches kaleidoscopic 2023 season (1 September 2022)
Le baiser de la fée (1928, revised 1950) is a neoclassical ballet based on Hans Christian Andersen’s “Ice Maiden”. The CSO will perform the Divertimento, a concert suite based on the music.
“A gem from Stravinsky’s Neoclassical period, The Fairy’s Kiss embodies the mischievous deceit of the spirits of folklore,” the CSO states. “This ethereal, shimmering soundscape mirrors the movement and vitality of the ballet dancers for whom it was commissioned.”
The “shadow” at the heart of the concert is Iain Grandage’s Dances with Devils (2015), which guest conductor Dane Lam describes as a “barn-stormer of a percussion concerto”. It was composed for virtuoso percussionist Claire Edwardes OAM, who will perform the piece with the CSO.
“Iain’s percussion concerto is dear to my heart for its thematic material, but also because it was created to showcase my strengths on stage,” Ms Edwardes said. “It takes the audience on an emotional and visceral musical journey, and ends with a bang!”
The piece was inspired by Australian Gothic literature from the nineteenth century, “where old world spectres disguise colonial fears of the Australian landscape, born of ignorance and disconnection”, the CSO notes. “It’s a work of powerful opposites, an urgent, driving interplay between light and darkness, colour and rhythm.”
The concert finishes with Beethoven’s only ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus (1801), an allegory about the Titan who taught art and science to humanity.
“I’ll relish delving into one of Beethoven’s lesser-known masterworks,” Mr Lam said.
Dane Lam is Music Director Designate of the Hawai’i Symphony Orchestra and Principal Conductor and Artistic Director of China’s Xi’an Symphony Orchestra. Fire & Shadow will be performed at the Llewellyn Hall, ANU School of Music, on Wednesday 22 and Thursday 23 September 7.30pm. Tickets: adult $60–$109; concession $53–$96; under 35 $35; student rush $17. For more information, visit https://cso.org.au/fire-shadow/.
