The official website of The Sculthorpe Office
Last updated 13 March 2008
PETER
SCULTHORPE
COMPOSER
SCULTHORPE
being interviewed by Peter Thomson
on Talking Heads,
ABC 1 (17 September 2007)
(PHOTO: © ABC)
”
The most original sound to emerge from Australia since Nellie Melba and the first to show awareness of regional contexts; it established Sculthorpe as musical figurehead for the entire Pacific basin.
Norman Lebrecht
On
String Quartet
No 8
as recorded by
the Kronos Quartet
published internationally by Faber Music. This year he will complete several new works in preparation for celebrations at home and abroad of his 80th birthday in 2009. He is currently working on a major new commission for the official opening of the Elizabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre, on 9 February next year.
on 29 November 2007, was that of
String Quartet No 17 (2007)
by the Goldner Quartet, at Musica Viva's Huntington Estate Festival, Mudgee, Australia.
Djilile for piano
(opening)
(© 1997
FABER MUSIC LTD)
”
Roger Covell The Sydney Morning Herald (5 December 2007)
CATALOGUE OF MUSICAL COMPOSITIONS (with discography), a selection of his own PROGRAM NOTES on musical works and other writings, a SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY, and links to other recommended web resources.
Already available,
meanwhile,
by clicking here:
The long-awaited SCULTHORPE authorised biography (Part 1, 1929-1974) was released on 19 October 2007 and was officially launched by the composer himself at Sydney Conservatorium on 16 November. It is on sale now at good bookstores and by online order.
Graeme Skinner
PETER SCULTHORPE
The
Making of An Australian Composer
UNSW Press,
Sydney, 2007
Hardback, 693 pages, illustrated, AU $59.95
ISBN 978 086840 2
What the press says so far ...
”
Roger Covell The Sydney Morning Herald (1-2 December 2007)
William Yeoman The West Australian (3 January 2008)
Blackwell (UK) online (January 2008)
John Carmody The Australian Literary Review (6 February 2008)
.jpg)
Sculthorpe in
Archibald finals ...
Danelle Bergstrom’s portrait of the
composer Two Movements,
painted in February, has been
selected as one of the finalists
in the judging of Australia’s
most prestigious annual portrait
competition, the Archibald Prize,
currently on show at the Art Gallery
of New South Wales.
Two Movements - Peter Sculthorpe (2008)
(© The artist)
SCULTHORPE has been captured many times on canvas, by among others Russell Drysdale and Judy Cassab. He has been the subject of two previous Archibald entries. Eric Smith’s portrait of him won the 1982 Prize. Reproduced on the cover of Sculthorpe’s 1999 memoirs, Sun Music, Smith's painting is now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra; for online catalogue entry see: http://www.portrait.gov.au/static/coll_738Peter+Sculthorpe.php. Adrienne Levenson’s painting of Peter was hung in the Salon des Refusés in 2001.
BERMAGUI Four Winds
Festival
Friday 21, Saturday 22, Sunday 23 March 2008
SCULTHORPE
is this
year's Guest of Honour at the
Four Winds Festival
and will appear in an on stage interview with ABC Classic FM's
Margaret Throsby
on the festival Friday. For concert details see below.
SCULTHORPE and biographer Graeme Skinner
will be guest speakers at the 2008 Sydney Writers’ Festival
SCULTHORPE will attend the Canberra International Music Festival,
SAN FRANCISCO
(USA)
Tuesday 29 January 2008, Berkeley City Club
Del Sol
Quartet
Stephen Kent
didjeridu
String Quartet No 16
(2005)
”
Peter Sculthorpe’s 16th String Quartet ... Kent and the Del Sols gave this one its didgeridoo-included premiere a little over a year ago at San Francisco’s
Other Minds Festival.
The piece is in five brief movements, the didgeridoo appearing in all but the central one. Its subject is the experience of asylum-seekers — mostly people who fled Afghanistan and its environs in the wake of 9/11 and the U.S.-led war against the Taliban — who reached Australia only to be held in remote internment camps. The odd-numbered movements take their thematic material, Sculthorpe writes, from “an ancient love song from Central Afghanistan.” The intervening movements are brusque scherzos titled, respectively, “Anger” and “Trauma.”
From the quartet came yearning, passionate strains, moments of eerie calm, and strange birdcalls. Sculthorpe seems particularly fond of the “seagull-cry” effect that a cellist can make with a glissando in artificial harmonics (a device first introduced into a piece, I think, by George Crumb in his 1971 Vox Balaenae). But in addition to the gulls there came flocks of other, weirder fowl; the end of the fourth movement was beset by them, chattering and squawking sul ponticello.
The didgeridoo most obviously anchored the music with its powerful low drone (on three different pitches over the course of the piece), but there were subsidiary effects — not only the wash of higher harmonics that is the instrument’s most characteristic sound, but also a startlingly physical rhythmic huffing in places and, once, a wild call like an elephant’s bellowing.
The last movement, “Freedom,” is meant to represent “dreams of a free life beyond confined spaces and razor-wire fences.” The opening, though lovely, initially affected me as cheap: Here was the Afghani tune of the first and third movements, only now rendered in radiant major mode, all its anguish (and all its augmented seconds) vanished. Complexities and tensions crept in over time, though, and the music took on a richer sort of elevation. In places, the string harmonics and the wash of harmonics from the didgeridoo meshed in such a way that I couldn’t tell which was which. It was heady stuff, and played with dedication and concentration.Michelle Dulak Thomson San Francisco Classical Voice (March 2008 online)
BRISBANE (AUS) Thursday 28 February 2007, 7.30pm, Powerhouse
Brodsky Quartet
String Quartet No 11 (Jabiru Dreaming) (1990)