G’day! This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” in honor of composer Colin Brumby, who died on January 3rd at the age of 84, we’ll travel once again to the Land Down Under for an hour of music from Australia.
Brumby was born in Melbourne in 1933. Like his internationally more recognized colleague, Peter Sculthorpe, he attended the Melbourne Conservatorium. He studied abroad in Spain and London, before joining the staff of the music faculty at the University of Queensland. There, he directed the Queensland Opera Company for a few years. He received his doctorate from the University of Melbourne, and then returned to the Continent for further studies in Rome. In 1981, Brumby received an Advance Australia Award for his services to music. He has written orchestral pieces, music for the stage, choral, chamber and instrumental works.
If you love the concertos of Sergei Rachmaninoff, you owe it to yourself to hear Brumby’s Piano Concerto No. 1, from 1984. The work is written in the grand romantic style for a former classmate of some 30 years earlier, the pianist Wendy Pomroy. The piece certainly is a throwback to an earlier age and an unremitting delight.
Naturally, we’ll also hear some of Sculthorpe’s music. Sculthorpe, born in Tasmania in 1929, also attended the Melbourne Conservatorium. Following a period of post-graduate struggles, he won a scholarship to study with Egon Wellesz at Oxford University. Unfortunately, he had to abandon the pursuit of his doctorate when his father became gravely ill. In 1963, Sculthorpe became a lecturer at the University of Sydney, where he remained, more or less, until his death in 2014.
He attained the status of one of Australia’s most-honored composers. Much of his music is concerned with Australia and its South Seas environs. The focus of many of his pieces over the decades reveals an admiration for, and affinity with, Australia’s indigenous cultures. Major philosophical concerns include conservation and the preservation of the environment.
We’ll listen to “Earth Cry,” an evocative piece from 1986. Scored for didgeridoo and orchestra, the work is a plea for balance, suggestive of the Aborigine mindset of living in accordance with natural law and the needs of the land.
The hour will open with music by Alfred Hill. Hill was born in Melbourne in 1870, but spent much of his early life in New Zealand. He studied abroad, at the Leipzig Conservatory, and played second violin in the Gewandhaus Orchestra, under then-Kapellmeister Carl Reinecke. He also performed in concerts conducted by Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Grieg and Max Bruch.
Throughout the course of his career, Hill founded and/or pushed for important institutions in both Australia and New Zealand, including one devoted to Maori studies. He composed more than 500 works, among them 12 symphonies, 8 operas, numerous concerti, a mass, 17 string quartets, two cantatas on Maori subjects, and 72 piano pieces. We’ll hear one of his brief though atmospheric tone pictures, titled “The Moon’s Golden Horn.”
Slip another shrimp on the barbie, crack open a Foster’s, and join me for “Left Out Back,” neglected music from Australia, this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
