A 50th Birthday Tribute to John Elmsly at the University Music Theatre

By WILLIAM DART

The major offering of this concert was, inevitably, John Elmsly's 1982 Ritual Auras. It's a bristling delight, with a wild, unbridled soundscape.

Richard Liu stormed on the piano, Uwe Grodd's flute yelped terrifyingly and percussionist Jeff Thomson zoomed from bongoes to xylophone. The storm-clouds parted from time to time, allowing gentler sounds to make their point and eventually claim victory.

Elmsly's Dialogue 2 dates from 1988 and is cooler in temperature, evoking the crisp early morning air of a Lilburn constitutional. Or is this just an illusory calm before the fury of its final section?

Peter Scholes (clarinet) and David Guerin (piano), who premiered the work, revisited it with obvious affection, as had Guerin earlier in the composer's Five Miniatures, the second of which achieved the miracle of simultaneous languor and freshness.

Of the four electro-acoustic tributes, Lissa Meridan's Sweeping Dawn was an Elmsly remix, Matthew Suttor's Equus combined sound and image in a provocative, morphing video, while the other two brought performers on stage.

Juliet Palmer's Pipiwharauoa/Dawn, taken from her score for Douglas Wright's Inland, cast Vanessa Tam's stalwart violin as a solitary voice in a warbling field of birdsong, until more sinister bagpipes asserted their authority. The landscape was also present in John Rimmer's Other Flutes, which pitted the limpid beauty of Maori koauau and Japanese shakuhachi against Elmsly's own baroque flute.

On the acoustic side, Glenese Blake sang, very movingly, Gillian Whitehead's Postcards from Harwood, six haiku settings in which the eternal issues of landscape and environment are woven into the ebb and flow of life itself. Pianist Richard Liu was a model of understated virtuosity.

Finally, composer Eve de Castro-Robertson had James Tibbles play her "little noisy single manual meantone Italian" - a description not of a smalltime Mafioso crim, but of a harpsichord. This was a wacky, rattly potpourri in which a Bach invention kept scuttling into springtime rites and Eurovision oddities, until it closed the concert with the "tune of the day", and the second inevitability of the evening, an affectionate sing-along.