L’Amour

L’Amour
Sofia Troncoso and Alex Raineri. Brisbane Music Festival opening weekend. Salvation Army Temple. 2 July 2022

The fifth annual Brisbane Music Festival started on the weekend with four performances in the intimate space of the Salvation Army Brisbane City Temple. The opening gigs showcased the style of events that Artistic Director, Alex Raineri, has programmed for this year – new Australian works (the opening night featured a new composition by Alex Turley in a performance featuring Claire Edwardes on percussion and Alex on piano), early morning music, and late-night sessions in a number of intimate and surprising performance spaces across Brisbane. This year the festival will take a brief region detour, too. The opening performances continued with mid-afternoon clarinet courtesy of Paul Dean – including the world premiere of Dean’s new original work ‘Miniatures’ – and the first of an Up Late Series ‘Old World Meets the New’ with Alex taking to the keyboard.

What is exciting about this year’s festival is Alex’s continued dedication to commissioning new Australian works, collaborations with our other excellent talent pools in Brisbane, and his skill at uncovering some of Brisbane’s hidden gem studios and venues for gigs where audiences can get up close and personal with stars normally seen on a grand opera or symphony orchestra stage. I saw the early morning opera, L’Amour with US-born and now Brisbane-based globally renowned soprano, Sofia Troncoso, accompanied by Alex on piano. For me this was a New York style gig in the heart of Brisbane. What a treat to be able to wander into the City on a Saturday morning and hear Sofia’s perfect voice performing to Alex’s enchanting work on the keys. L’Amour featured works by French composers, Duparc, Poulenc, Fauré, Nadia Boulanger, her younger sister, Lili Boulanger, and Debussy. Normally to see Sofia perform, you would be surrounded by hundreds of opera fans in a large venue. But here, the intimate space held fewer than 50 guests, and featured superb acoustics. One of the pieces was ‘The Exquisite Hour’ by Reynaldo Hahn, set to a poem by Paul Verlaine. For me, that perfectly sums up this one-hour performance.

I spoke to Alex Raineri after the busy weekend, and he explained the impetus behind his creative programming:

“A number of the artists involved in this year’s festival are composers and performers I’ve worked with before or have a creative history with. So, the festival is a wonderful vehicle for continuing those collaborations – and of course, as Artistic Director, I have the privilege of being in control of the creative content. Last year we featured Brisbane-based artists – a happy consequence of our talent being back at home due to the pandemic. This year’s festival will feature around half Brisbane-based artists and some of those international Australian artists who have been living overseas, including my sister, Laura Raineri, who has been working in London, and Tabatha McFadyen who is based in Berlin. We have some wonderful interstate artists as well, including Melbourne-based multi-instrumentalist, Luke Carbon – we worked together in 2021 on our album, ‘Liquid Crystal’.

“And because many of our performances last year were live-streamed or online on-demand, this year we are totally live. So, it’s nice to reconnect in person with some of these wonderful collaborators. I want to fill the festival with all the things that contribute to the Brisbane scene but also Australia-wide at large as well. We continue to commission new musical works. In the opening weekend alone, we presented world premiers of five new Australian pieces!

“It’s important for me to present a programme that isn’t presented by anyone else. So we want to show some of the lesser known musical works, address the gender divide and showcase some of history’s female composers.”

As in past years, the festival will be found in various venues – from small underground studios to the majestic St John’s Cathedral – across Brisbane City. I asked Alex how he chose all the venues.  

“There are some groovy little venues hidden around Brisbane – spaces I’ve performed in myself in the past, including my own studio, and lesser known hidden gems. I want to invite people into the festival as a place where they can discover new music and new spaces too.”

And, does Alex enjoy juggling the roles of curator, director, venue organiser, talent wrangler and performer?

“I love doing it. The biggest reward is all the support that comes from the Festival. It’s never the same audience twice – also, the beauty of the variety of performers is that they attract a different audience for each event, and it’s a great mix of people. And I am lucky – I get to present what I want, and the performers I want to see!”

Alex credited support from Arts Queensland, Australia Council for the Arts, plus private support and partnerships with Opera Queensland and Victorian Theatre Company, plus new partners Kawai Australia and the Brisbane Writers Festival with keeping the festival on the road. And this year’s festival will also tour to regional New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland.

The Brisbane Music Festival runs from 1 July to 17 December 2022.

Find out more: https://brismusicfestival.com/

Beth Keehn

Photographer: Jai Farrell

 

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