Reflections on last Saturday's Voices In The Forest occasion at the bosky and (on Saturday) balmy National Arboretum.
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One felt sure that some elements of the ubiquitous Canberra Taliban would be there and sure enough, there were.
Just before it was time for Sumi Jo to begin her celebrity warbling, MC Alex Sloan (put up to it by Taliban forces, one felt sure, for I know for a fact that she loves children) asked that parents not allow their little children to go on romping on the small meadow in front of the stage. The Hatchet Faces of the Taliban who'd disapproved of the rompings that had gone on there for the previous two-thirds of the sweetly informal evening burst into righteous and indignant applause. Some of the Taliban around me in the middle-class seats ($90) showed more enthusiasm over this grim ruling than over anything sung or played during the concert. They rattled their jewellery with rage and seethed indignant things about the mothers who'd allowed their children to romp till now. Now I see that these Taliban types are writing letters to the editor, threatening to boycott next year's Voices if something isn't done to stop children behaving like children there.
By contrast with these Hatchet Faces my beloved consort and I had been enjoying the children and so, earlier, had personable ''warm-up'' songstress Amelia Ferrugia. She'd rejoiced at how they, the little ones, were cackling with laughter at her warbling the laughter there is in Johann Strauss's The Laughing Song from Die Fledermaus. Yes, we'd loved it, too. Littlies' laughter is one of the most musical sounds there are.
One of the great joys of Voices is the sweet, outdoor informality of it all. The performers themselves embrace this vibe with abandon, and chat and joke to the audience. On Saturday Sumi Jo and Stuart Skelton clowned together during a duet which, in an opera house and before a tightly corseted audience, they'd have performed with deadly earnestness.
And so, in the context of Voices In The Forest as the cheerful, uncorseted, family night out it is, the presence of children being children seems to me to enrich the occasion.
And of course, methought on Saturday, it was the Canberra Taliban that fought the vision of the Arboretum and railed against it. They used to queue, using the gangrenous medium of talk-back radio (on shows like Alex Sloan's) to gnash their teeth against it (oooh the cost! oooh the water diverted to its selfish trees that really belonged to us in the suburbs to keep our lawns green! oooh the socialist extravagance of that Marxist tyrant Jon Stanhope!). Now that the Arboretum is becoming as wondrous as visionary, big-hearted Canberrans always knew it would. In these times of official apologies perhaps the anti-Arboretumists should, all 50,000 of them, sign an apology to the city for their small-minded, un-Canberran behaviour. If only there was some way, now, to identify these miserabilists (they could wear a kind of brooch) so that when we see them at the shops we can taunt them and tell them to move to Wagga Wagga if they don't want to live in a broad-shouldered, big-visioned city like ours.
Sumi Jo, it struck me during Voices In The Forest occasion and as she mangled one of my great favourites I Dreamt I Dwelt In Marble Halls, is to classical music, to opera, what David Beckham is to soccer. In Australian soccer circles and in the sporting media there is breathless excitement at the thought that Beckham, a soccer codger, may one day soon pull on his boots in an A-League dressing room and then, once he's got his breath back from that exertion, run out to play. Both Beckham and Sumi Jo are, bless them, well past their excellent best but because we, Australians, don't know very much about excellence in classical music and in soccer we feel flattered and excited when these celebrities grace these colonies.
I have been an admirer of Sumi Jo and her voice for umpteen years and don't mean it as an insult to say that her voice isn't the instrument that it was. We are all mouldering and indeed there was a rite of decaying passage for me at this Voices In The Forest when, asked to stand for the National Anthem, the legs on which I once gambolled through 20 Canberra Times Fun Runs and seven ascents of Mount Everest, simply refused to help me up out of my seat sunk deep in the Arboretum's turf. What's more, privileged to meet her and to interview her during her week here, my already irrational love of her (my notebook and my voice recorder trembled in my star-struck hands) was further stoked by the discovery of what a good soul she is.
What I'm saying, I think, is that I look forward to the day when Canberra is big and brassy enough and has left its Wagga Waggadom far enough behind for us to bring to occasions like this performers who are at the absolute apogees of their careers.
I'm sure that Cecilia Bartoli, say, or Bryn Terfel, would charge like wounded bulls to appear here, but Voices In The Forest has some fabulously wealthy sponsors while we, the most bourgeois of Australians, can well afford to pay to see them, taking our most exuberant and irrepressible children and grandchildren with us.