... Gasworks Theatre, Albert Park...Photograph: Gasworks Theatre, Albert Park...The old South Melbourne gasworks plant with its surrounding park was transformed in 1992 into a resonant performance space, whose flexible flat-floor expanse has allowed for many designs of Astra events involving choral performances with theatrical...Listen to Excerpt 1: Elliott Carter, March For Four Timpani (1949), and Excerpt 2: Martin Friedel, Dialogue Of The Pythagoreans - from “The Third Planet” (1995)
From the Gasworks Theatre concert, Saturday December 16 & Sunday 18, 1995.
Soloists ...
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.
