Arms of Love (The Song Company)

[Tony Senatore]

Arms of Love (The Song Company)

Amanda Harris

September 3, 2022

Arms of Love, The Song Company, 2022. Photo © Keith Saunders

In this new program in its MainStage series, the Song Company performs Dietrich Buxtehude’s seven-part oratorio Membra Jesu nostri patientis sanctissima (1680), interwoven with a world premiere of Chris Williams’ I pray the sea, and staged with choreography by Thomas E. S. Kelly (Karul Projects) performed by dancer Neville Williams-Boney. The Song Company is not the only group to juxtapose new Australian composition alongside key works from the European musical canon, and to introduce extra-musical components to its programming. But here the works were not just placed side by side, rather they were entwined in unexpected ways that highlighted their inter-relationships and placed us in the here and now.

The Song Company’s collaboration on this project also brought in Jenny Eriksson from The Marais Project and Hylton Mowday from We Love Jam. With their involvement, the continuo part that would routinely be played by a few string players and a Baroque keyboard instrument was here rendered by soprano saxophone and electric viola da gamba, with Musical Director Antony Pitts exploring the timbral possibilities of a Rhodes keyboard. It felt radical, but also not wrong, like playing Buxtehude this way could reveal something different than we might normally hear. Mowday’s clear vibrato-less tone in the opening movements of the Buxtehude could have fooled the listener that it was some kind of Baroque woodwind instrument that one couldn’t quite put one’s finger upon. His playing gradually bloomed throughout the program into the vibrato and portamento-inflected sound that we might be more inclined to expect from that instrument. It was partly the concept and overall design of the program that made all of this possible.

In his introduction to the concert, Director and ensemble tenor Robert Macfarlane suggested that the movements of Williams’ new piece would “lap at the shores” of Buxtehude’s cantatas, rather than be evenly interspersed. And indeed, the ensemble immersed the audience in three of Buxtehude’s cantatas before the opening notes of Williams’ work rang out. Throughout these movements, Williams Boney’s compellingly lithe and sensuous dancing shifted between foreground and background as the music alternately drew attention from his movement-scape, and then the choreography drawing on mime, character work, and contemporary and classical Aboriginal dance practices drew the eye. I sometimes found this overwhelming – both sound and vision could have captured my full attention, and I sometimes felt I wasn’t able to take in either one.

Arms of Love, The Song Company, 2022. Photo © Keith Saunders

Not just the programming, but also the performances made sense of this unusual ensemble and of the transitions between the sounds of different centuries and distant continents. The singers relished the dissonances in Buxtehude’s oratorio in ways that led seamlessly into Williams’ exciting new work. In its movements too, I pray the sea grew from sustained sections echoing the Buxtehude into more rhythmic movements driven by text and percussion. The sounds of Williams Boney’s feet and breath moving through the space that punctuated the first three Buxtehude cantatas prepared us for this new sound world too – for the variety of percussion played by Mowday and Pitts, and for the singers’ percussive breath and vocal effects. This was not a concert of hushed silence in reverence for high art (though not a pin drop was heard from the audience), but rather one intended to make us think and engage with ideas as well as sound and movement.

Williams’ new work draws primarily on text by Behrouz Boochani from his award-winning No Friend But the Mountains – written while Boochani was incarcerated on Manus Island as a result of Australian government policy and in spite of his legitimate legal claim to asylum. The programming of the two musical works along with Williams Boney’s performance, which he began by introducing himself as a Wiradjuri dancer and questioning what Country this is, placed these varied works in relationship to place and time.

The singers (Amy Moore, Brianna Louwen, Stephanie Dillon, Robert Macfarlane and Thomas Flint) were in excellent voice as usual. Secure pitch and the kind of blend that allows each of the five voices to be heard in their individual clarity and beauty, while never undermining the coherence of the whole are trademarks of The Song Company. Soprano Brianna Louwen was a stunning newcomer to the group, with almost improbable bell-like clarity in her upper range that cut through and filled the space all at once, while still blending with the ensemble. The singers were also lightly choreographed, operating lights which illuminated different parts of the singing, dancing and playing bodies throughout the performance. I was unconvinced about the purpose of the brightly coloured lights used by Williams Boney throughout, until two scenes when they produced dancing silhouettes on the wall behind the singers, and then later when the red light formed a beating heart under his white shirt during Ad Cor (To the Heart) – Buxtehude’s sixth cantata. Some of the props, backpacks and drink cans remained mysterious staging choices – but as Macfarlane told the audience in his introduction, this was a story, if one without beginning, middle and end.

Arms of Love, The Song Company, 2022. Photo © Keith Saunders

This was the kind of concert that can make us sit up and take notice, in which many stories can be interwoven. The fluidity between centuries, continents, art forms and senses made new resonances of each of the program’s parts – inviting the audience to hear old works anew and placing the program in relationship to the place we are in and the Country we are on.