... ...North Melbourne Town Hall......Photograph: North Melbourne Town Hall...The North Melbourne Town Hall was designed by George Raymond Johnson who also designed the Fitzroy Town Hall and the Meat Market.
The former North Melbourne Town Hall is registered as of historical and architectural significance to the State of Victoria. ...Mozart, Dixit Dominus (1780), choir & string orchestra from Vespers of the Confessor K.339, and Excerpt 2: Helen Gifford, Phantasma (1963) string orchestra.
From the concert at North Melbourne Town Hall, North Melbourne
Wednesday June 16, 1985.
Choir and chamber orchestra were conducted by three of Astra’s Musical Directors, George Logie-Smith (1957-77), John McCaughey (1978-1982 and 1985-2011), and Robert Smallwood (1983-4), who researched the early Australian music in the concert at the State Library of Victoria.
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Music always interacts with the architecture in which it is heard.
Melbourne has some wonderful acoustic environments. Often, these spaces were built for other purposes – for example the splendid public and ecclesiastical buildings from the first 100 years of the city’s history, and more recent industrial constructions.
Exploiting ‘non-customized’ spaces for musical performance celebrates and explores our architectural heritage.
For 30 years, the concerts of Astra Chamber Music Society have ranged around Melbourne’s architectural environment. Each concert has had a site-specific design that takes advantage of the marvellous visual qualities, spatial possibilities, and acoustic personality of each building.
The music, in turn, contributes a new quality to the perception of the buildings, now experienced by audiences as a sounding space - an area where cultural issues from music’s history are traversed, and new ideas in Australian composition are explored.
In this story take a tour of some of Melbourne’s intimate, hidden spaces and listen to the music that has filled their walls.
For further information about Astra Chamber Music Society click here.
