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Reviews
A curious conglomeration
By Raymond Chapman Smith
Songs from the Yellow Bedroom
MUSIC THEATRE
Who: Australian Youth Orchestra with David Wenham,
Bernadette Cullen, mezzo soprano, and Keith Lewis, tenor
When: Saturday and Sunday
Where:
Reviewer: Raymond Chapman Smith
SONGS from the Yellow Bedroom is a rather partial,
theatrical conceit that intersperses (or interrupts) the six parts of Gustav
Mahler's Song of the Earth with a selection of readings from Vincent Van Gogh's
rhapsodic and revealing letters to his brother, Theo.
Das Lied von der
Erde is arguably Mahler's masterpiece, an hour-long
cycle that sets Chinese poems in a dramatic, powerfully moving sequence in
which five highly contrasted ``Earthly'' songs are counterbalanced by a
remarkable, 30-minute ``Farewell'' - a solitary meditation on eternity.
Van Gogh's letters, while certainly of interest, are clearly
not his central work and the theatrical presentation of such intensely private
musings serves only to put them at a further remove. David Wenham's
mysteriously accented, drawcard recitation of the
letters was, for this audience at least, inevitably effective.
Beyond Wenham's skilful presence, and a chair or two for
props, it was a little difficult to discern what actually constituted this
much-vaunted ``theatrical production''.
Allocated seating in the front row of the stalls - no doubt
to absorb the full ``theatrical impact'' - I was able to hear and observe the
fine sound and unerring intonation of the AYO's first
violins at very close quarters.
The similarly impressive harps were also to the fore but
from this bird's-ear position, the rest of the orchestra was relegated to the
sonic background.
Conductor Diego Masson's tempi were uniformly slow to
sluggish, with a caution that did little to articulate the complex fluidity of
Mahler's phrasing.
Nevertheless, it was the 99 dedicated young musos of AYO who were the real stars of this curious
occasion.