Sam Hunt ready to charm, charge and chant

By WILLIAM DART


The Auckland Chamber Orchestra winds up this year's season with three concertos and two soloists, one of whom is a little off the expected track.

Waiheke-based poet and raconteur Sam Hunt describes Anthony Ritchie's Coming To It as "a bit like a concerto for me" as Hunt reads his poems to a musical background supplied by the Dunedin composer. "Anthony recorded me saying the poems and then used my cadences and sounds when it came to composing the work."

Many associate Hunt with more populist brands of music, from Mammal days in the 70s (his Hot Water Bottle Baby Blues is a wayward delight) through to ongoing gigs with mates like Bill Lake, Wayne Mason and the Warratahs. And then there's his blistering take on The Ballad of Grady's Dream for the 2000 Baxter project, with Gareth Farr stirring an electronic maelstrom behind him.

Forget blues and maelstroms, this poet is no stranger to the soothing strains of the masters. There is even a musical lineage - Hunt's grandfather emigrated from England in 1890 to take up the organist's post at the Anglican Cathedral in Parnell.

Concerts were important to the young Sam Hunt in the 1950s, "hearing Pierre Fournier play the Dvorak Cello Concerto in the town hall, then catching the ferry back to Bayswater and staying up all night listening to the LP".

More recently, he has "just discovered Brahms' Clarinet Quintet in a major way and it is mind-blowing stuff".

Bach has been significant for some time. "When my young son was in the womb," he says, "I was playing a lot of the Bach unaccompanied cello suites, in the Rostropovich version. These days, whenever we're just knocking around the place and I happen to put that record on, it's just like there's our music, they're playing our song."

Hunt is equal parts writer and performer and the poems burst into bloom when he voices them. As a teenager, he had "grown up with the idea of the poem as a sung, spoken or chanted thing" and albums of poets like Dylan Thomas and Yeats reading their work cemented this concept. He likes to call his poems "Songs for the Tone Deaf".

There is music in the poems chosen for Coming To It - music in the way that Hunt manipulates the dance of vowels and consonants; music, also, in the poems' various references, from a shipbuilder who builds boats like Beethoven to the kids who wait for their bus on "a Van Morrison morning".

Come Sunday, Sam Hunt will be up there on stage with the Auckland Chamber Orchestra, "working the old CH3 factor of Charm, Charge and Chant". He likes being with professional musicians, "people who place such a high priority on the purity of sound. It's just like you've met someone who's read some poem that you thought no one else had read".

He gets a buzz out of having an orchestral backing for "just the sheer noise behind you. When I did ENZSO in Adelaide, my knees nearly buckled when the orchestra gave you the full blast".

Hunt selects two of Sunday's poems that are special. Hey, Minstrel was written when his old sheepdog died and is "very much a road song written on the banks of the Hutt River".

He likes the image of "the odd driver toots, spots a man without a dog" and muses on the last photo taken of Minstrel. "He's looking straight at the camera and he's so old, his muzzle's so white it looks like he's had his snout in a bucket of flour. All you can see are those lovely old eyes looking out."

The other poem, You House the Moon, is a "Hunt-archian" sonnet, the fate of many poems which start in the Petrarchian mould. The poet explains the working process: "I don't talk about writing a poem; I listen to poems and eventually, if I'm lucky, I hear them".

Ritchie had alerted me to Hunt's powerful images of building and timbering, but when I pursue this issue, he chortles and reminds me of Bob Dylan's answer when someone asked him what a song was about ... "about four minutes".

The conversation drifts back to classical music, to Beethoven Piano Sonatas, and to the Michael Houstoun set which Hunt has just been given. The writer is smitten ("what a gift, what a bloody gift") and admits that after we've finished talking, he'll probably spend some time with Houstoun and Beethoven. "Bugger the news," he cries. "Anyway, it's full of sports on a Saturday," is my comment.

"Even worse," is the retort, "it's probably full of politics."

Performance

* What: Coming To It: Auckland Chamber Orchestra with Sam Hunt

* Where & when: Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber, Sunday 6pm