It’s been far too many Friday nights spent indoors and away from the luscious velvet curtains of the Princess Theatre and icy blonde locks of Draco Malfoy.
A small group of amateur actors, some professionals, no overarching theme for some ten minute plays. What could possibly go wrong?
I have heard many performances of this great work over the years, starting with Barenboim’s of the 1960s. But Levit’s gave me a new insight into it.
The concert Birds was part of a series of nine chamber music concerts held at the wonderful Ukaria centre near Mount Barker in the Adelaide hills.
This long and interesting concert was structured around Schoenberg’s extraordinary setting of 21 poems by the Belgian poet Albert Giraud, Pierrot Lunaire. Composed in 1912, the work created such a sensation that Stravinsky went all the way from Paris to Berlin to hear it.
The revelation of this concert to me was that, yes, musicians, like audiences, have been starved of live performance opportunities for the last year, but that has given musicians plenty of time to practice, time that isn't always there during normal concert life for successful groups such as The Streeton Trio.