JESS HITCHCOCK & PENNY QUARTET
Musica Viva Australia
Conservatorium Theatre, Griffith University
Tuesday March 4 at 7 pm
Jess Hitchcock & Penny Quartet (L to R Anthony Chataway, Jack Ward, Amy Brookman, Madeleine Jevons)
It was hard to get a handle on this recital, a rather specialized event from Musica Viva which is being heard in Perth, Adelaide (part of this year's Festival), Brisbane,, Newcastle and Sutherland. In the program, Glenn Christensen, a former resident with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, is listed as first violin of the Penny Quartet but was he present on this night, your honour? Or has his appearance changed significantly since those halcyon ACO days? The photograph above shows the current quartet's personnel, according to the body's website. I didn't recognize any of the players by sight - three males and a female - although their ensemble output impressed for its deftness.
Jess Hitchcock sang twelve of her own songs and the program included a full set of texts. But then, the organizers turned the lights right down so this information was completely useless. Mind you, the artists wended a lackadaisical way through the mixed dozen lyrics which were not performed in printed order so that you were invited to play a kind of detection game to work out what was going on. In the original concept, the program contained only eleven Hitchcock songs, all of them organized for a string quartet accompaniment by local writers. A fresh arranger - Christine Pan - attended to the additional song.
I think I got them in the right order but, as far as this singer's work goes, there be no ignorance like unto my ignorance. I believe I heard, in sequence: Days Are Long (arr. Iain Grandage), Homeward Bound (arr. Isaac Hayward), Collide ((arr. Nicole Murphy), Soak To My Bones (arr. Harry Sdraulig), Leader of the Pack (arr. Ben Robinson), By the Sea (arr. May Lyon), On My Own (arr. Holly Harrison), Together (arr. James Mountain), Running in the Dark (arr. Matt Laing), Fight for Me (arr. Pan), Unbreakable (arr. Alex Turley), and Not a Warzone (arr. Grandage).
Apart from the songs, the program also gave an airing to American writer Caroline Shaw's Plan & Elevation: the Grounds of Dumbarton Oaks. This quartet was written to commission by Harvard, celebrating the 75th birthday of the university's famous estate; further, Shaw was the original music fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in 2014-15. Now what I think happened was that the Pennies interspersed the songs with the five movements from Shaw's work. If so, the work was subsumed into the whole experience very cleverly. I can recall some viola double stops suddenly emerging at one point, as well as some rapid Verklaerte Nacht-style arpeggios with harmonics - both identifiable from Shaw's score. Sadly, the final effect was to make you think that one of the arrangers had included an above-average postlude or prelude, rather than transporting you to the estate's Herbaceous Border or Cutting Garden.
Adding to the mix, Hitchcock proved to be a fan of the pre-song address, giving us information about her background, her family, her musical training, her participation in the Voice referendum, her personal relationships with people that she was singing about - all the gallimaufry that might/might not add to a listener's appreciation of what was being offered. Certainly, this singer is involved in her work and is at some pains to tell us all about it, in the way of the young. Whether we need to hear it is another business.
To be honest, I found it hard to differentiate between many of Hitchcock's songs. Her melodic language shows balance and general placidity; the harmonic structures are innately simple, if spiced up by her arrangers; the tempo of each song rarely ventures into any territory but the four-square. For instance, the opening Days Are Long presented as a simple melody over a pizzicato support that developed into a thudding bass line, soon turning the lyric into a bit of a chug. Immediately, you were aware that the vocalist was well amplified; after a time, it became apparent that so were her string supporters.
During the following Homeward Bound, you encountered some rhythmic irregularity to complement the loud, punchy nature of the actual content but this spike of interest didn't seem to be part of the original matter but inserted by its arranger. And so the procedure continued with a quickening of interest before a return to the tried and true e.g. Collide where an intriguing drone effect shuffled back into a fluent chordal support. Or else the arrangement stole much of the thunder, as in By the Sea with its plain vocal line overtaken by Lyon's ornate string support.
Contrast that with the feistiness of On My Own, an unusually fast and assertive song which brought to mind some traces of American protest songs, although the text appears to point to an inter-personal crisis rather than a recrimination aimed towards the current social order. But then, it could be both.
Nearing the end of the night, Hitchcock started playing on a keyboard at the opening to Unbreakable. Mind you, I was in such a state of identification tension that she might have been making subtle contributions before this. This song fell into the same category as several others on offer that encourage self-belief, self-determination, self-confidence, self-assertion - statements of character development that flourish in the egotism of this age. Possibly these might not have grated so much if the vocal lines offered variety, but they didn't. All of Hitchcock's melodic threads bore a close resemblance to each other, and all sprang from a base in the American Neo-Romanticism that has flourished in the republic for some time.
What we heard across the twelve-part cycle was pleasant music-making that cast no threatening shadows of modernity. In this reversion to a well-trodden path, the composer stayed within the limitations you can hear in Sondheim's Into the Woods - a sampler of song construction for the contemporary writer with a disregard for recent advances in melodic design, metrical ingenuity and harmonic experimentation; when I say 'recent', I'm referring to anything past the first decade of the 20th century in the history of Western music. Of the original music of our country, I found no trace. Despite her Torres Strait Islander and New Guinean background/heritage, Hitchcock has been trained in her craft by serious musicians; as far as I can tell, she has yet to take up the mantle of original invention.
As a suddenly applied encore, Hitchcock and the Pennies presented a version of Sidney's My true love hath my heart. I wasn't able to decipher Hitchcock's attribution of musical authorship from her preliminary remarks, but the setting rocked no boats and so was of a piece with everything that preceded it.
In this light program, the five artists collaborated to fine effect and the smaller-than-usual Musica Viva audience applauded each segment with enthusiasm. So what was missing? Perhaps a kind of emotional depth, or an aspiring ardour to lift the evening's cosy level of engagement. You (meaning I) left the Griffith University venue with a sense that we'd heard a deft sequence of songs, thank you very much, but not much remained in the memory.
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