Melbourne Chamber Orchestra Artistic Director Sophie Rowell will be the soloist in the world premiere of a new work from Australian composer Richard Mills. Photo: Peter Tarasiuk.
This year’s Canberra International Music Festival will start with a bang as a new Australian work makes its world premiere at the opening concert on 30 April.
The opening night at the Snow Concert Hall will be an all-strings affair called Fantasia, and the work is a violin concerto – Violin Concerto Sinfonia Sacra. Four Portraits of the Blessed Virgin – conceived by one of Australia’s most renowned composers, Richard Mills.
Written at the request of Melbourne Chamber Orchestra Artistic Director Sophie Rowell, the performance will feature her as soloist with the MCO.
Rowell joined MCO from being Co-Concertmaster of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and after an extensive performing career as a soloist, chamber musician and principal orchestral violinist both in Australia and abroad.
In town for rehearsals, Rowell told Region she asked Mills to write the work because she had always admired and loved the way he wrote so lyrically for string instruments, and the violin in particular.
“That’s certainly what he’s done with this new work,” she said. “He’s combined that soaring ability of the violin to really work with a string ensemble of 17.”
The Melbourne Chamber Orchestra will feature in an all-strings opening concert. Photo: CIMF.
Rowell said it was a piece that would really leap off the stage at the audience.
“While I am the main soloist, everybody else has a really vital complemental role in it, so that we’ve all got our own paths at times, which creates a texture that’s got so many dimensions,” she said.
Rowell enjoys directing composers at times, but this time, she left it to Mills to come up with a concept, having complete faith and trust in him to write something brilliant.
She loved the challenge of learning and playing a piece such as this for the first time, saying it’s a privilege to be part of a commission and a world premiere.
“At first, the notes are black and white, but then as you spend time with them, they take on colours and they take on form and the melodies start to present themselves and the virtuosic moments start to become really fun to play,” Rowell said.
“At this moment, I adore what he’s given me to play, and I think it is just wonderful, but I can’t wait to hear how it’s enhanced by those on the stage when you’re playing for the first time.”
The Ellery String Quartet will also perform at the opening concert. Photo: CIMF.
The MCO will also perform a new arrangement of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture before collaborating in the second half with Canberra’s Ellery String Quartet and Festival ensemble-in-residence Flinders Quartet, sharing the stage for the timeless Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
There will also be a new arrangement commissioned by the MCO of Molly Jalakbiya and Paul Stanhope’s Dirrari Lament, which is based on a Bunuba language song about a mother black cockatoo grieving for her baby.
The song also works as a lament for Jandamarra, a Bunuba man who led a resistance movement against European invasion in the late 19th Century in Western Australia.
Rowell said it was a haunting work with a chant woven through it that made the work quite mesmerising.
“I’m absolutely delighted that we’re bringing that to Canberra,” she said.
Also on the bill will be composer-in-residence Olivia Davies’ work Crystalline, and Jessie Montgomery’s Strum.
For Rowell, it will be a welcome return to the Snow Concert Hall stage, where she performed in the opening concert in 2022.
The opening concert begins five days of world-class music and events featuring Australian and international artists in venues across the national capital, some free of charge.
To view the program and buy tickets, visit the CIMF website.
