Events
Rodion Shchedrin's The Sealed Angel
On Wednesday 16th May, SCUNA will be performing Rodion Shchedrin's The Sealed Angel as part of the Canberra International Music Festival.
Along with Georgi Sviridov, Rodion Shchedrin (b. 1932) is one of the most important Russian composers of the second half of the 20th century.
His cantata The Sealed Angel, for unaccompanied chorus and flute solo (symbolizing the Angel), is a beautiful and moving work, composed on the occasion of the Millennium of the Baptism of Rus' in 1988.
Like Sviridov, Shchedrin borrows freely from various liturgical texts, as well as from chant motives, to create a majestic choral edifice, which derives its inspiration from Nikolai Leskov's short novel of the same name as the cantata.
Subtle, thinly veiled themes of greed, governmental opression, and betrayal are juxtaposed with those of repentance and redemption--clearly this is the work of a Soviet-era composer seeking an appropriate response to the great celebration of the Christian faith about to take place in his land, still under Communism at that time, despite the promises of 'perestroika.'
- Musica Russica
Arvo Pärt's Credo
On Friday 18th May, SCUNA will be performing Arvo Pärt's Credo as part of the Canberra International Music Festival.
In 1968, the largely unrecognized Estonian composer Arvo Pärt composed Credo, a work for solo piano, chorus, and orchestra, and the twentieth century found its representative voice.
The twentieth century was a period of turmoil and chaos, both musically and culturally, and Pärt-himself experiencing a spiritual and musical crisis-captured this sense of transition and change better than any of his contemporaries.
Credo is more than just a curious blend of eclecticism, tonality, and twelve-tone serialism, however: it is a violent conflict between those musical theories.
Simultaneously, Credo contains the battles between serialism and tonality, the sacred and the secular, and most profoundly, the two great schools of post-World War II musical philosophy: order and chaos.
While this piece is one of the key works for an understanding of Pärt's oeuvre as a whole, it demonstrates more importantly the battle of ideas that raged in music and culture throughout the twentieth century.
- Mark Lawrence
Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 "Resurrection"
On Saturday 2nd June at 2pm, SCUNA will be performing a joint concert with the National Capital Orchestra of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 "Resurrection" at The Q.
Gustav Mahler, not long after completing the Symphony No. 2, said, "The term 'symphony' means creating a world with all the technical means available."
The Resurrection Symphony is an all-embracing work, the first of the Austrian composer's symphonies to make use of voices and words as well as the orchestra, and the piece that set him decisively on the path toward the grandly scaled, high individualist and confessional style of symphony that was to become his legacy.
It was also the composition that brought Mahler his first fame, and its premiere in Berlin on the night of Dec. 13, 1895 (staged with the help of Richard Strauss), marked the real beginning of Mahler's career as a composer.
- Ted Libbey
