Wizards of Oz
“ Sculthorpe’s evocations of the natural world created an iconic sound that would affect generations to come ”
Brett Dean’s Fire Music crackles fiercely in the concert hall, replete with the sound of hissing smoke. Musicians are spaced around the audience, who are hemmed in by a claustrophobic musical heat haze and smouldering lower brass.
While climate change spurred the fires at the beginning of 2020 to unprecedented ferocity, fire has always been a feature of the Australian landscape – Dean wrote Fire Music after the devastating ‘Black Saturday’ fires of 2009.
The composer – whose latest opera, Hamlet , premiered at Glyndebourne and is due at the Met in the 2021/22 season – is certainly not the first Australian to draw on his country’s landscape in his music, nor is he the first to experiment with the physical space of the concert hall.
Just as Australian painters captured a different sense of light to their European counterparts, it might be possible to hear a unique sense of space in the work of Australian composers. While Percy Grainger (1882-1961) is better known for his, written almost a century before . It’s something of an anomaly, however, as Grainger is more famous for his miniatures – collections and arrangements of folk songs – and for his sexual appetites. The artefacts of the former (his wax cylinder recordings) and the latter (a variety of whips and other paraphernalia) are on display in a museum devoted to his life in Melbourne.
