Celebratory concert salutes the music of the recorder

Guest composer Elliot Leahy with conductor Barbara Jerjen at the CREMS 50th anniversary celebration. Photo: Peter Hislop

Music / CREMS 1974-2024: Celebrating 50 Years of Music Making in Canberra. At Ainslie Arts Centre, November 3. Reviewed by ALANNA MACLEAN.

Held in the lovely old Ainslie school hall, this celebratory concert was quite something.

The recorder has the virtue of being extremely portable which might account for centuries of survival. You can sling it in the boot of a car or carry it on a horse. The smaller ones could even live in a pocket. Further, it makes great music. Which the various Canberra Recorder & Early Music Society (CREMS) ensembles proceeded to do, under the precise and powerful conducting of Barbara Jerjen.

The age range was notable, the young and the older players sometimes separate, sometimes mingling. That bodes well for handing on of skills and traditions for the next 50 years. Even better was the choice to open with the work of a 21-year-old composer, Elliot Leahy, performed by the Anniversary Ensemble. Daintree Wonders brought the lushness and moods of the rainforest and was a reminder that recorders are more than ancient instruments.

The Youth Ensemble took the concert back to the Baroque and Alessandro Scarlatti with a precise performance of his Sonata in F major: Adagio-Allegro-Minuet, with some crisp accompaniment from Ariana Odermatt on a very elegant looking harpsichord.

Then it was back to 2010 and John Hawkes’ bright and fresh Silver Suite from Ensemble Banksia. Ensembles Blockfluits and Tangents combined to return to early Baroque With L. Grossi da Viadana’s spritely La Napolitana.

By now there was clearly a pattern emerging as Ensemble Wattle, a larger group, swung back to modern times with Soren Sieg’s slightly melancholy Vitambo Vya Moyo – African Suite no 4, which gave a chance to see those strange boxy basses up the back (the ones that don’t look anything like a conventional recorder but more like a tower of wooden containers) in action.

Given the program’s alternating modern with old it made sense that the final piece returned to the past with excerpts from JJ Fux’s Serenade in C Major that brought back Odermatt on the harpsichord and was a work with a pleasing grandeur to finish a very satisfying concert on.

It was a great way to commemorate CREMS’ founding in 1974 by Judith Clingan and Michael Sawer, and to show that enthusiasm for playing the recorder could be seen as a musically unstoppable force.

CREMS co-founder Judith Clingan and president John Dearn cut the 50th anniversary cake. Photo: Peter Hislop

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