Frog and Star Cycle (2015)
(Double Concerto for Alto Saxophone, Percussion and Orchestra)

“In some nations, a composer of Ross Edwards’ enduring stature would be widely celebrated, even allocated an annuity. His music affirms life and humanity, underpinned by decades of dedication to his craft. Long may he compose for us.”

Composer Ross Edwards AM is one of Australia’s best loved and most recognisable compositional voices. Over the past four decades he has forged a style that combines elements as diverse as the sounds of the East Coast Australian bush, non-European pentatonic scales, and Western church plainchant. Once an arch Modernist, he famously rejected its strictures to create an intuitive music that celebrates ecology and ritual as it shifts and shimmers between ecstatic dances and deep contemplation. A new release of three of Edwards’ major orchestral works – two recorded live, and one in the studio – is a significant event for Australian art music.

Frog and Star Cycle commences with Edwards’ Symphony No.2, titled Earth Spirit Songs, which was written for soprano, Yvonne Kenny and premiered by the Sydney Symphony in 1998. The texts choice is eclectic, including the Introit from the Mass of Pentecost, The Lost Man, a poem by Judith Wright, and O Viridissima Virga, from the pen of Middle Ages’ Christian mystic, philosopher, composer and Abbess, Hildegard von Bingen.

Movement one of Symphony No. 2, ‘Invocation and Dance of the Holy Spirit’ vaults to life with repeated settings of the first line of the Introit to the Mass of Pentecost. ‘May the grace of the Holy Spirit be with us’ flies back and forth over a pedal bass. There is a long history of dance, even ecstatic dance, embedded in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. The Old Testament book of Samuel tells us that the Psalmist, King David, ‘danced before the Lord with all his might’, a tradition that continues within branches of the Pentecostal church. Edwards, the great Australian composer of the dance, revels in giving his soloist and orchestra the opportunity to leap and race and scurry for the sheer joy of movement. The soprano part features melismas with an almost Spanish feel to them. The composer’s grasp of orchestration is such that it is easy to miss the deep resonance of the instrumentation, the subtle variations of timbre, and effortlessly evocative word painting. A reverential hush, for example, comes with the setting of ‘Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit’, before the movement closes with a repeat of ‘May the grace of the Holy Spirt be with us’.

A drum flurry marks the transition, without a break, to the second movement, ‘The Lost Man’, a poem by Judith Wright. Initially I struggled to see how an Australian poem would work sandwiched between the Catholic Mass and a text by Hildegard of Bingen. Then I read the poem, which even by Wright’s high standards, left me stunned. The first stanza is worth quoting as a reminder of her talent:

To reach the pool you must go through the rain-forest – through the bewildering midsummer of darkness lit with ancient fern, laced with poison and thorn. You must go by the way he went – the way of bleeding hands and feet, the blood on the stones like flower, under the hooded flowers that fall on the stones like blood.

From the first notes we are immediately in that mysterious rainforest, a place tainted with unexplained blood and implied sacrifice. ‘The pool’ is the poet’s metaphorical focus and destination, but the journey is one of secret peril, peril for which no explanation is given. (The poem was actually inspired by the true story of James Westray, one of three survivors of a plane crash in the Lamington Ranges of Queensland. Westray separated from the other two men in search of help and died falling over a waterfall.) The sparsity of the orchestration matches the solitude of the transit to the pool: a lyrical melody spun over a slow-pulsing bass pedal in the strings. Between the stanzas divisi strings break out from the tension, only to take us back to the same dark waters in the first lines of stanza two, access to which now entails traverse through a menacing valley:

To reach the pool you must go by the black valley among the crowding columns made of silence under the hanging clouds of leaves and voiceless birds.

Edwards setting is of the highest calibre, conjuring up both Mahler and Britten in his writing for voice and orchestra: and of the understanding that it is one thing to have the forces of a great orchestra at one’s disposal, but quite another to know when to forgo those forces, to shepherd them in service of the text. Composition students have much to learn from the soaring, yet subtle orchestration of the final line of the poem. The heavens burst into the purest of light as Yvonne Kenny sings:

the sun by which you live. Even in the dankest of forests, there is light.

Of the third and final movement, ‘Dance to the Earth Mother’, the composer writes ‘The impulse to dance returns with Hildegard von Bingen…I’ve adapted one of her texts, O Viridissima Virga, a characteristically sensual celebration of the miracle of spring, when the earth sweats life-giving sap through its pores to germinate fresh green growth’. There is an element of pagan delight in this Christian-mystic text that, as with the Wright poem, somehow joins together joy in the earth as mother in Hildegard, and the mystery of dark places, marred by blood, in Wright. Once more Edwards invites his forces to give themselves over to the creation-affirming dance. The vocal line is demanding, not least the final note, but Yvonne Kenny more than rises to the occasion in presenting the first performance of a work commissioned for her by Andrew Kaldor.

Earth Spirit Songs is a fine work, accessible, yet deep, which calls into question, why it is not performed more frequently. This is a work that on merit deserves regular scheduling. The Sydney Opera House recorded live sound is of high quality, produced by Ralph Lane, with sound engineer, Yossi Gabbay, and mastering by Virginia Read. Congratulations to all concerned.

Symphony No. 3 Mater Magna was commissioned by Sir Jonathan Mills for the 2001 Melbourne International Festival and first performed by the Melbourne Symphony that same year. It was dedicated to fellow composer, Peter Sculthorpe. The work leaps into being like a puppy let off the leash in open parkland, as was the case with the opening of Symphony No. 2. The composer writes of the ‘schism’ our society has inherited, ‘between matter and spirit, masculine and feminine, mind and body’, and that his work reflects the ‘collective need for balance and conciliation’. Thus, the ongoing interplay between movement and primal energy, and quiet introspection, the two sides of the same coin for the life affirming Edwards. Prodigiously resonant pools of sound are juxtaposed with the natter of insect, the burps of bush frogs and fleeting bird calls. Not for the first time I was struck with how often Edwards’ melodies seek to fly upwards from a bass pedal drone, only to resolve back to the grounded, earthy root note, even if that ‘root’ is surrounded by a complex cluster chord!

The second, unnamed movement is relatively static, yet holds attention, ‘trance-like’ to quote the composer. The strings of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra are silken; a gorgeous harp solo also features. Around ten minutes into the movement a long play out begins that is as close to silence as music can be, silent as the almost silence of a looming Blue Mountains canyon at dusk, when the birds are gone to rest. The build into the third and final movement happens organically over a repeated note pulse. Edwards is comfortable with slow harmonic changes, the same chord or harmonic centre often goes on for many bars, but he creates endless energy and interest above. The last minutes of the symphony recall the final movement of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the ‘Sacrificial Dance’, but without the manic malice of the great Russian. The orchestral writing is scintillating, even exhilarating, and captured brilliantly by the ABC studio recording team.

In contrast to the two symphonies, Frog and Star Cycle: Double Concerto for Alto Saxophone, Percussion and Orchestra is an ambitious eleven movement concerto written for soloists Amy Dickson, saxophone, and percussionist, Colin Currie. At just under thirty minutes, it is the longest of the three assembled works. In general, the movements proceed without a break, often organised into groups. Premiered in 2016, it is a showcase for Edwards’ mature style, alternating between celebratory dances and moments of reflection. Once again, the orchestration throughout is exquisitely detailed, and the writing for the soloists astute. Frog and Star Cycle does not so much thrust its soloists to the virtuosic forefront, as engage them in a broader, more integrated dialogue with the orchestra and the compositional material. If I allocate less words to the double concerto, it is not because it is less worthy than Symphonies 2 and 3, but a reflection on the challenge of describing eleven movements in a few sentences. The gifted soloists, Amy Dickson, and Colin Currie, acquit their duties effectively, while taking care to stay within the composer’s overall conception of ‘the substance and direction my music has taken over many years’. Edwards is currently re-writing the work as his sixth symphony, with the original to remain as an alternative.

In some nations, a composer of Ross Edwards’ enduring stature would be widely celebrated, even allocated an annuity. His music affirms life and humanity, underpinned by decades of dedication to his craft. Long may he compose for us.