Music / Griffyn Ensemble. At the Larry Sitsky Room, March 15. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD.
Close on 20 years ago your reviewer attended a performance by a new group in a lecture room somewhere in the CSIRO campus on Black Mountain.
This was the first outing of the Griffyn Ensemble, a group of recently graduated music students at the Canberra School of Music. They were under the direction of Michael Sollis, a mandolin-playing composition student under Larry Sitsky and Jim Cotter.
Your reviewer remembers little of the concert, other than it was interesting enough to draw him back for subsequent performances and over the intervening years Griffyn Ensemble performances have been the source of much musical pleasure. Their concerts were always worthwhile, always different and never confined to any narrow style of music.
Illness has meant that this concert will likely be the Griffyn’s last, and Sollis has drawn on music from several previous concerts to produce what was 90 minutes of fascinating music.
It began with a lengthy, three-movement work from Polish composer Henryk Gorecki. The first movement was a simple melody played in unison on alto flute and harp by Kiri Sollis and Meriel Owen. The second section suggested a duet on koto and shakuhachi before the two were joined by soprano Susan Ellis and two gongs for the final movement.
This led into two works by Estonian composer Urmas Sisask. These were inspired by obscure constellations visible in the southern hemisphere and the basis for a Griffyn performance entitled Southern Sky some years ago. They were originally scored for piano and arranged for various combinations of instruments by Sollis. The first, Gold Fish, was done for mandolin and harp and the second, Triangulum Australe, for harp, recorder, vibraphone and soprano with Kiri Sollis playing recorder and the vibraphone from Wyana O’Keeffe.
The next bracket of music came from collaborations with First Nations musicians with clarinettist Matt O’Keeffe, violinist Chris Stone and bassist Holly Downes joining the others. The first was a song by Steven Pigram, Mimi, arranged by Matt O’Keeffe. This was followed by a lengthy improvisation over actuality recordings of the bush sounds of Mulligan’s Flat and inspired by the music of local musician Richie Allan. The musicians took it in turns for short solo passages, at times cleverly picking up rhythmic patterns from bird song.
This flowed into a work for solo cello by American composer John Kennedy played by Downes on bass with great skill, followed by another work by Kennedy, Eagle Poem, scored for voice, alto flute, violin, mandolin harp and bass.
The final two works were more from Sisask, Horologium and Reticulum, again two southern hemisphere constellations charmingly introduced and explained by astronomer Fred Watson. The first was full of rippling, cascading notes while the second gradually faded away to silence to finish the concert and the musical career of the Griffyn Ensemble. They will be missed.
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