Music review: Hear/Say, Tim Melville Gallery

"Town crier" Helen Medlyn launches the concert.

Hear/Say provocative, problematic but spellbinding too

Eve de Castro-Robinson and Alex Taylor's Hear/Say was a lively alternative take on the old-fashioned Variety Concert, launched by Helen Medlyn's bell-wielding town crier, exhorting us to enjoy this "illustrious presentation" in the "salubrious salon" of the Tim Melville Gallery.

In terms of traditional concert music, Sunday's highlight was Andrew Uren ripping through the sonic adventure ground of Chris Watson's bass clarinet solo, Mandible.

Samuel Holloway's intriguing Malleus for three clarinets (Uren, James Fry and Hayden Sinclair) seduced us with waft and ripple, and the occasional sonic bloom breaking through. Its later clustering of lines, thanks to the combination of high pitch, piercing dissonance and hard gallery walls, was not ear-friendly.

There was similar provocation in performance pieces, apart from Eve de Castro-Robinson's ruminative Whorl, softly "drawn" by Amy Jansen on a bass drum.

Nam June Paik's 1962 One for Violin Solo was a ritualistic destruction of an innocent (and inexpensive) violin.

It was dramatic, with Joe Harrop holding the doomed instrument aloft before it met its deafening fate, but somewhat unsettling in this age of Isis.

Amy Jansen and Callum Blackmore offered a fine line in confrontational screaming for Marina Abramovic's AAA-AAA, but could they have ever achieved the same resonance as when the artist performed it herself, with her own partner?

Celeste Oram's realisation of Skywave Symphony by Vera Wyse Munro, supposedly a rediscovered pioneer of homegrown sound art, was problematic. Three transistor radios deputising for an original chorus of 100 were an insubstantial buffer between Alex Taylor's spasmodic violin utterances and Uren's off-stage bass clarinet.

The whole thing, including a quirky "biography" of Munro online, reminded me of Peter Jackson's prankster documentary, Forgotten Silver, but without the film's wit and entertainment value.

Taylor would return, singing Blue Lady at a toy piano, as a moving tribute to the late Graham Brazier.

In the coup of the evening, Taylor took his leave with some extraordinary throat-singing.

Spellbinding in itself, it was more so when violinist Harrop stepped up, weaving the simple lyricism of a Lilburn Canzonetta into the dance of Taylor's bell-like overtones.

What: Hear/Say
Where: Tim Melville Gallery