... ...Gasworks Theatre, Albert Park......Photograph: Gasworks Theatre...The Astra Choir conducted by John McCaughey
_____________________________________________
Saturday December 16 & Sunday 18, 1995
GASWORKS THEATRE, Middle Park
Martin Friedel, THE THIRD PLANET (1995)
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 dimensions.
...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 including Merlyn Quaife (soprano), Jan Friedl (actor), John Arcaro (timpani) and the Astra Choir and ensemble conducted by John McCaughey.
...
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.
