Image: City of Snakes; photograph courtesy Melbourne Recital Centre.
The general theme of this year’s Metropolis New Music Festival (9-21 May) presented by Melbourne Recital Centre and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra was the restless energy, drive and landscape of urban life.
This performance presented one of Australia’s most individual artists performing nine of his own compositions, three of which were first performances. Since jointly winning the Grand Prix in the International Solo Piano Competition (usually referred to as the ‘Ivo Pogorelić Piano Competition’ after its founder) in Pasadena in 1993, Michael Kieran Harvey has pursued a career offering his artistry and virtuosity as a concert pianist specializing in innovative repertoire and presentation. A champion of the solo piano music of Carl Vine and Olivier Messiaen, this was an opportunity for us to be introduced to his own writing.
Receiving its first performance, his Piano Sonata No 3 ‘Aporia’ (2016), commissioned by Graeme Lee for his wife Margaret, was a large-scale, single-movement conception exploring the harmonic series and portraying the chaotic sonic maelstrom of inner-city Melbourne. The only work in the recital played on acoustic piano, the Sonata paid homage to Messiaen (also inspired by the harmonic series) through references particularly to Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus though more in gesture than direct quote. Trains of scalic patterns, ascending and descending with long harmonic tails flashed through the work like spectacular comets. There was plenty of wild grunt as well; the playing was sometimes so loud that, within the confined space of the Salon (and I was in the back row), it was difficult to discern individual pitches within chords. The work’s ‘aporia’ or bewilderment at not being able to find a way forward was reflected in its somewhat two-dimensional emotional compass and lack of structure.
Frenetic energy continued with Kieran Harvey moving to multiple keyboards: a Kawai ES7 digital piano and a KORG Krome synthesizer. With two sound engineers the volume was more measured though still mostly loud. The following six compositions: City of Snakes (2012), From the Walls of Dis (after Robert Smithson) (2016) receiving its first performance, Deaths Head Mandala (2014), N Chromium (2014), 48 Fugues for Frank (Zappa); No 6 ‘G-spot tornado’) (2010), and The Green Brain; No 6 ‘Beetles’ (2015) flowed one to the other without interruption making it difficult to discern when one work finished and another started. There was a range of styles including rock, funk and contemporary free jazz all demonstrating Kieran Harvey’s striking virtuosity. These jointly pre-programmed and live compositions, though, soon began to sound extemporized with unrelenting pitch bends and background beat.
By contrast, Budapest Sunrise (after Saxby Pridmore) (2016) receiving its first performance was a gentle meditation of liquid sounds and slowly moving chords portraying the tragic genocide of Hungarian Jews at the hands of fellow-Hungarian fascists, a welcome opportunity to pause and reflect be the topic so grim. The poetry read by Kieran Harvey while he was performing was poignant. Kazochinia (after Sándor Szathmári, (1935) (1998; rev 2016) concluded the recital with the following program annotation: ‘This is a land without love, arts, money, politics, patriotism or war. I wrote the first version under the Reign of Howard, this version under Abbott, which is much shorter.’
Performing in bare feet and dressed in a white thaub Michael Kieran Harvey’s sheer energetic drive and virtuosity made this an unforgettable event; the capacity audience responded with enthusiasm. For me though, at just one hour’s duration the music soon exhausted interest; I wished that it had more to say.
Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5
City of Snakes
Presented by Melbourne Recital Centre and Michael Kieran Harvey
Michael Kieran Harvey, piano, digital piano and synthesiser
Blake Strickland and Neil Kelly, sound
Metropolis New Music Festival
Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre
Friday 29 May 2016 6pm
