MCO’s Pastorale can be heard on Thursday 10 July 7:30pm and Sunday 13 July 2:30pm at Melbourne Recital Centre and Saturday 12 July 7:30pm at Wyndham Cultural Centre.
Concert pianist, scholar, and leading advocate of new music in Australia and beyond, Aura Go returns to Melbourne Chamber Orchestra for a thrilling recital of a scarcely heard work by British composer Doreen Carwithen.
In MCO’s Pastorale program, Aura will be performing the 1948 Concerto for Piano and Strings in what is believed to be the first recital of the piece on Australian shores. It offers a compelling new discovery for audiences in a program of titanic works among the western canon including Samuel Barber’s aching Adagio for Strings and Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings in C major Op 48.
These concerts mark a return visit for Aura, having performed with the MCO on a number of occasions. While she can’t remember the exact year, she has a clear memory of what was programmed for that first performance.
“One of my absolute favourite pieces,” she reflects today. “It was Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 9, K271, and that was my first time playing that concerto. I remember, I was actually living in the US at the time and very much looking forward to coming back home to Melbourne, and playing with MCO for the first time.”
Calling from her home in Melbourne, Aura brings with her a storied and celebrated career of overseas placements and concerts. With ten years of study in the US, followed by seven years’ residency in Finland, Aura returned to Victoria in 2018. Freelancing as a concert pianist, Aura is also stationed full time at Monash University as Head of Piano.
“Actually, quite a few members of the MCO are on the teaching staff at Monash,” she reveals, “so I bump into them regularly, around the corridors at uni! It’s really lovely.”
Aura expresses great excitement for the star piece of the Pastorale concerts, by composer for both film and concert hall Doreen Carwithen. It is with a combination of pride and gratitude that Aura approaches this recital: the former in light of her Australia-first presentation of the work, and the latter toward MCO Artistic Director Sophie Rowell for deciding to program it.
Aura admits that Carwithen is a new discovery for her, citing that it wasn’t until last year that she had encountered any of her work. It has been a swift learning period, however, and Aura now represents a passionate advocate for the little-known female composer.
“It’s a really wonderful concerto,” Aura practically sings through the phone. “I think audiences are going to fall in love with it. Doreen Carwithen is a really exceptional, trailblazing composer: she was actually one of the very first women to be working full-time as a film composer, just after the Second World War.”
Aura speculates over thirty film scores were credited to Carwithen in the decade following the war, affording her a high level of technical craft for film music which makes itself keenly apparent in her Concerto for Piano and Strings.
“It’s full of rhythmic drive and vitality,” Aura reveals, “of such beautiful lyricism and tenderness.”
By Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier