Energy … Wanted Posse go through
impossible motions.
Sydney Morning Herald
…Music and visual artists have been interwoven in two
festival pieces,
Songs from the Yellow Bedroom (invoking Gustav Mahler and
Vincent Van
Gogh) and the dark cabaret Three Furies: Scenes from the
Life of Francis
Bacon.
David Wenham bore an uncanny likeness to Van Gogh as he read
the tortured
painter's letters to his brother.
Wenham created a thoughtful portrait of
the painter, eliciting the poetry
of the letters written as Van Gogh's
sanity disintegrated. The letters
were interspersed with Mahler's Das Lied
von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), performed with colour and energy by
the Australian Youth Orchestra,
with soloists Bernadette Cullen and Keith
Lewis.
It seems a long bow, juxtaposing the composer and the
artist. Yet they
were almost contemporaries, shared
a passion for nature and Asian
traditions, and were preoccupied
with mortality. The
Richard Wherrett saw enough
parallels to have begun developing the project
shortly before his death in 2001.
The piece felt like a work in progress,
which invites a visual element. And
it invites a
been conceived in the city with its
own Yellow House artistic movement.