Dreaming Across the Horizon - Memories of Childhood at Fitters' Workshop review

I am conflicted in my response to the concert, Dreaming Across the Horizon – Memories of Childhood. While the performances of works by the four featured composers were professional and technically assured, aspects of the settings of traditional children's songs made me uneasy. Under Roland Peelman's direction, the Turner Trebles and Vocal Fry Children's choirs gave exemplary performances and the musicians in the large ensemble provided well-balanced accompaniments to the vocal works.

Andrew Ford's collected traditional nursery rhymes brought together in the work There was a Man Lived in the Moon offered some nice moments: an interesting rhythmic treatment for the setting of Aiken Drum; clean, sparse string parts in See-Saw, Marjorie Daw and a spacious arrangement for harp and alto in Little Star. However, the lack of part writing for the choir and the variable complexity of the settings diminished the impact of the composition. For all their commitment to the lyrics by the soloists, their overly dramatic delivery was at odds with the origins of these simple, well-loved melodies. Given the excellence of Katie Cole's vocal ornamentation in Bonny at Morn, her theatrical interpretation was doubly unnecessary. Traditional songs such as this lullaby from Northumbria have been handed down the generations by telling the story in the music and do not require any physical action. The drama and beauty is in the way the individual makes the song their own through carefully considered and skilfully executed embellishment to support the melody.

The second part of the concert featured the music of three respected Indigenous composers: William Barton, Brenda Gifford and Chris Sainsbury with lively works that featured the children's chorus performing songs in the Dharug language from the Sydney and South Coast regions and the Kalkadoon language from the region around Mount Isa in Queensland. The performance of William Barton's Matjumpa had a formidable intensity. These works were written for the children's choir by the Indigenous composers, and the children performed them with focus and enthusiasm, but the fact remains that the musicians, choristers and audience (including me) were predominantly white. It feels unbalanced. I hope that we might see future collaborations at the Canberra International Music Festival with more musicians from Indigenous communities performing in Canberra to build on this year's initiative thus transforming Dreaming Across the Horizon into Connecting Across the Horizon.