MCO’s Fantasia can be heard on Thursday 1 May 7:30pm and Sunday 4 May 2:30pm at Melbourne Recital Centre.
Celebrated conductor and composer Richard Mills generously responds to an invitation from the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra with a new work for strings, based on four key episodes in the life of Mary, the Blessed Virgin.
Taking inspiration from paintings by Italian grandmasters, including Ludovico Carracci and Leonardo da Vinci, Four Portraits of the Blessed Virgin is composed for 17 players in a form which Richard regards simultaneously as soloist-oriented as well as collectively driven.
The new piece is also, he says, “an Australian response to a great tradition.” This tradition is twofold, speaking first to the musical tradition of the concertante musical style which finds its roots in St. Mark’s Basilica. A religious and cultural centre in Venice, this arena of arts in mainland Europe continues to make substantial artistic impressions across the world to this day.
“In the late 1500s and early 1600s,” he says of his formal inspirations behind the new work, “opposing groups of instruments were used to create texture and interplays. There’s also the great tradition of Renaissance art, which fascinates me in terms of its perspectives: dispositions of material, colour, geometry. This is all present in the formulation of this music.”
Exploring how the piece situates itself within an Australian context, Mills draws upon an assessment of our European peers as, “something akin to a repository of mythos, of something that’s other than what we are here – but present in a distant, readily accessible form.”
He adds that many Australians naturally travel to Europe, anyway, so the link between the two continents is never completely thwarted by long plane journeys.
“One of the wonderful things about Australia,” he says, “is that we can have a somewhat detached view of the complexity of our heritage and create something interesting from that perspective itself.”
The curation of the paintings which served as inspiration for Four Portraits stems from Richard’s own religious faith and a familiarity, therefore, with these classical artworks.
“I personally have a devotion to the Blessed Virgin,” he elaborates. “I believe she can influence our lives in very beneficial ways if we have recourse to her, so it was a matter of personal relationship and devotion. It was also a tribute to the beauty that’s been created by artists of the previous generations.”
The new work represents the culmination of a decades-long friendship with MCO Artistic Director Sophie Rowell, for whom the piece was composed as solo violinist. Indeed, Sophie has been in Richard’s artistic orbit since she was “a young, very promising member of the Adelaide Chamber Orchestra,” where Mills was himself Artistic Director from 1990 to 1996. “So, I’ve known her since she was almost a child,” he says, though admits their paths have diverged at various points over the years.
It is now, he recognises happily, that they have met once again at the centre of this new work. The collaboration has been a harmonious one and marks a thrilling addition to the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra’s growing repertoire of original Australian compositions.
By Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier