From the October issue of the 3MBS ON AIR subscriber magazine.
Melbourne pianist Coady Green is much loved by the 3MBS community, and we are delighted to have him present a twilight recital on Thursday 29 October as part of our Graduate House recital series. In this special feature, Coady reflects on the captivating program of music he has chosen to share.
When contemplating a program for the wonderful 3MBS Graduate House series, I wanted to bring together two composers whose music I have been working on extensively. Franz Liszt and Linda Kouvaras are composers from vastly different eras and geographies whose work nevertheless engages with landscape in fascinatingly symbolic ways. The music of Liszt and Kouvaras exploits the extraordinary colours, sonorities and range of the piano, while landscapes are treated as repositories of histories and memories through which human experience can be recalled. This idea lies at the heart of a program bringing together selected pieces from Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage: Première année—Suisse with Kouvaras’s Herring Island Piano Sonata.
Liszt’s Suisse emerged from his travels through Switzerland with Marie d’Agoult during the 1830s. Yet describing these pieces simply as musical impressions of Switzerland misses much of their significance. Mountains, storms, lakes, bells and historic sites become catalysts through which he explores liberty, transcendence, love, alienation and the search for meaning. His landscapes are simultaneously external and internal.
I chose pieces highlighting the journey travelled within Liszt’s cycle. Chapelle de Guillaume Tell transforms place into an emblem of freedom and collective identity; in Orage, the violence of nature becomes an expression of inner turmoil; while Vallée d’Obermann, inspired by Senancour’s solitary, searching protagonist, turns the Alpine landscape into a meditation on identity and existence. In Les cloches de Genève, distant bells suggest a gentler merging of self and surroundings, encapsulated by Liszt’s quotation from Byron: “I live not in myself, but I become / Portion of that around me.”
This is what draws me to placing Liszt alongside Linda Kouvaras’s Herring Island Piano Sonata. Written in collaboration with N’arweet Dr Carolyn Briggs AM and Dr Tiriki Onus, the original narrated version uses Briggs’s evocative texts describing locations in Victoria and stories drawn from her ancestry. Landscape becomes inseparable from memory, culture and the histories carried within Country. In this performance without narration, those associations remain embedded within Kouvaras’s musical language, allowing the piano itself to evoke the places and stories in Briggs’s text. Like Liszt’s Switzerland, these are landscapes through which human experience is remembered.
Putting these works together creates something more interesting to me than a program of “music inspired by places”. Liszt’s Switzerland and Kouvaras’s Herring Island are separated geographically, culturally and historically, and their composers understand landscape through profoundly different traditions. Yet both ask what happens when a place becomes internalised: we bring ourselves to the landscape; it speaks back to us; and we leave it changed.
Join us at 5.30pm Thursday 29 October at the University of Melbourne's Graduate House in Carlton. Share a three-course meal and recital for just $40.