The Australian World Orchestra will premiere a new song cycle from Jonathan Mills

BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE

What is the sound of Australia?

You will hear it in the notes of Jonathan Mills’ composition Songs for the Stranger, which is deeply connected to the Australian bush. You will hear it in the notes of the Australian World Orchestra, which brings together top musicians from across our country. This year, the AWO celebrates its 15th anniversary. And alongside works by major composers including Shostakovich and Stravinsky, the orchestra will present the world premiere of this new song cycle by Mills — an Australian-born composer who has paid homage to the eucalyptus tree.

The sound of Australia is one of talent and creativity. We asked Mills how he created this sound that is intertwined with place and story, and how AWO will bring it to life under the baton of Alexander Briger.

AWO will present Stravinsky, Mills & Shostakovich in Sydney and Melbourne this August, with Michael Petruccelli singing these new Australian songs from Mills (pictured throughout).

This is a special anniversary event for AWO, and your role within the concert is substantial. What does it mean to you that AWO will perform the world premiere of your song cycle in its 15th year?

The Australian World Orchestra is an extraordinary musical phenomenon. It is an exceptional survey of Australian talent, remarkable for its quality and depth. It is unique among orchestras across the world in the uniformity of the citizenship of its members. They are all Australian.

It means a great deal that the AWO will give the world premiere of Songs for the Stranger, a song cycle created from material from my opera Eucalyptus, with additional songs drawn from Murray Bail’s novel, not in the opera.

To return to the world of Eucalyptus, two years after its premiere, with this incredible orchestra and Michael Petruccelli and Alex Briger as our guides, is a rare privilege.

There is a long and distinguished tradition of composers arranging orchestral suites from their own operas — Bizet’s suites from Carmen, the suite made from Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes. Unlike purely instrumental renditions of existing vocal music, Songs for the Stranger presents three songs from the opera, alongside two entirely new settings of stories from the novel. While keeping the voice of the Stranger at its core, Songs for the Stranger shifts the emphasis, away from a theatre to a concert hall; from an entire opera to a series of songs.

For those who haven’t read the novel, how would you describe the storyline for listeners to keep in mind as they follow along to your new song cycle?

Eucalyptus is, at its heart, a universal story — one that draws on some of the oldest stories we continue to tell each other. There’s something of Scheherazade in it, something of Rapunzel, of Pelléas et Mélisande, of Hansel and Gretel.

It tells the story of a father and a daughter; perhaps every father and every daughter, except that here, the location is different. Holland and his daughter Ellen live in the Australian bush. Holland, the doting father and grieving widower, seeking escape from the world, creates an arboreal refuge and cage: a forest prison, comprising every known species of eucalyptus. Sincerely misguided in his desire to protect Ellen, he initiates a competition with the offer of her hand in marriage to whomsoever can correctly name every tree in his forest. Hardly an escape for Ellen.

Suitor after suitor fails. Until only one, a bland tree inspector, is left with any prospect of winning both the competition, and Ellen’s hand in marriage.

Suddenly, in the dead of night, out of nowhere, a Stranger appears. He begins to engage Ellen — not to compete through naming, but through storytelling.

Night after night he tells her fragments, fables, and digressions. Through these stories, rather than through the contest her father has set, Ellen finds her way out of the eucalyptus forest, to a life of her own, and on her own terms.

Songs for the Stranger focuses directly on this eccentric anthology of stories that the Stranger tells her. We do not hear Ellen. We do share the songs which the Stranger chooses to sing to her.

What are some of the things that go through your mind when preserving the integrity and intentions of your larger-scale music in the opera, and translating it into the more intimate medium of the song cycle?

An opera is bound by staging, by dramatic continuity, within the multi-sensory experience of a single evening in a theatre, with lights, and costumes, makeup, props, and sets.

A song cycle answers to none of these constraints.

What remains constant in Songs for the Stranger is the voice of the Stranger himself — an inscrutable, elliptical, sometimes playful, sometimes devastating character. We never know his name. He is always just the Stranger. He is simultaneously Prince Charming, and a wandering vagabond. A person who strives to find meaning not through facts, but in fables – by telling stories; dozens of them, all different – funny, sad, strange, devastating, witty, weird – and from many parts of the world, offering glimpses of the itinerant life of their author.

It also needs to be said that the music of this song cycle is not any more or less intimate than the music of the opera. This is not a song cycle for voice and piano – but for voice with full orchestra. The orchestral forces are exactly the same: the same number of musicians; the same harmonies, timbres, and textures.

The distinction lies in the dramatic form. Whereas in the structure of an opera, each story builds a dramatic narrative from one scene to another, in a song cycle, each story stands alone, complete in itself.

What are some of the core themes or emotions from the novel that you’ve chosen to feature in your new songs?

To a composer in search of a story, Eucalyptus has more than a passing resemblance to Turandot or Scheherazade; to the riddles that an unknown Prince (Calaf) solves; or the 1,001 tales, which an elusive young woman (Scheherazade) deliberately never quite finishes telling each night before dawn, in order to stay alive for just one more night; as it turns out, for A Thousand and One Nights.

In place of riddles and stories with no endings, the tree inspector Mr Cave and the Stranger in Murray Bail’s poetic novel offer a contrast between fact and fable; between the names of trees, and the convoluted tales and eccentric ways by which a tree is named.

Cave’s relentless focus is juxtaposed with the Stranger’s extravagant discursive rambles. Mr Cave inhabits a taxonomical world of lists of names in Latin. The Stranger conjures fantastic tales about trees in all sorts of surprising places, from deserted cities to fecund deserts.

One of the great achievements of the novel is its timelessness. It is hard to pin down exactly when it exists. The dozens of stories the Stranger tells throughout the book are a virtuosic mixture of characters and locations that meander effortlessly between fantasy and plausible reality.

They serve a deeper purpose, offering an alternative to the claustrophobia of her father’s forest sanctuary. Eucalyptus is simultaneously a fairy story and a compelling allegory of the emotional awakening of a beautiful young woman.

Songs for the Stranger brings together five songs, three of which already exist within the opera and two of which are newly composed for this cycle.

The order in which they are performed is: ‘A Fruit Shop in Carlton’, ‘Hairdressing’, ‘The Girl with the Long Hair’, ‘Drummoyne’ and ‘Moldova’. Between them, they move through unrequited longing, class and transformation, captivity and rescue, loneliness and eccentricity, and the loss and endurance that come with fleeing tyranny.

In addition to their emotional impact, each song is very specifically located, as some of their titles suggest, in the beautiful displays of fruit and vegetables in the window of a green grocers’ shop in Carlton, an inner city suburb of Melbourne); in a hairdressing salon in Double Bay in Sydney; in a flat-roofed house occupied by an eccentric loner and his hundred canaries in Drummoyne, again in suburban Sydney; in a claustrophobic stone hut on a stone plain on the edge of a desert in Mauritania in West Africa; and in the repressive and obsessive world of a stamp collector in presumably Soviet-era Moldova in Eastern Europe.

‘Hairdressing’ and ‘The Girl with the Long Hair’ are the two songs I have added specifically for this cycle — stories from the novel that never made it onto the operatic stage, but which belong just as fully to the Stranger’s repertoire of tales.

AWO states that your new work will be ‘evoking the Australian soundscape‘. What does the sound of this country mean to you, and how do you connect with this idea as a composer?

There is a rich tradition of operas set in forests, from Die Freischütz to Don Carlos, Norma to Hansel and Gretel, Pelléas et Mélisande to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Through Eucalyptus – the opera – I want to trace how a world of ‘landscape and memory’, to borrow from Simon Schama, might find musical expression and dramatic form in the unique physical and psychological contours of the landscape of Australia.

Thinking about how landscape and memory might become intertwined through imaginary time and space, both unfolding on stage, has been essential to the process of writing an opera like Eucalyptus.

Eucalyptus presents a particular challenge: to imagine a love story not in a European forest, nor in an Asian nor North American one — not in a pine forest, not in a grove of oak trees, nor a cluster of birches, nor an avenue of elms — but amid the distinctive smell, sound, and intensity of a forest of multiple species of eucalyptus trees.

While the sound of a eucalyptus forest forms the foreground of the opera, it is a more peripheral presence in this song cycle. Here we add to the range of stories told by the Stranger without direct reference to Ellen or her father’s trees.

In the novel, and in the opera, the eucalyptus forest is a vivid, real presence throughout. In Songs for the Stranger the existence of the forest is not direct or immediate. It is at one removed. It is the context in which the Stranger’s stories exist, and are given life.

When having a new work premiered, you must put your ideas in the hands of one particular group of musicians who will perform it for audiences for the first time. Why do you feel AWO is the right fit for this moment?

The Australian World Orchestra is a formidable, virtuosic ensemble. There is very little music which any individual player cannot perform, and collectively, I doubt there is any repertoire its members have not already performed somewhere, in some concert hall, in some part of the world.

Every musician of the AWO holds a prominent position in many of the most renowned orchestras in the world. I feel genuinely fortunate to have such a group of artists with which to collaborate.

Songs for the Stranger offers something quite particular to this group of superlative musicians in their annual homecoming to Australia. Beyond the rhythms and harmonies, rhetoric and phrasing of each of these songs, lurks the presence of something quintessentially Australian – a eucalyptus tree.

Songs for the Stranger is the result of Alexander Briger’s unwavering commitment to keeping Eucalyptus alive beyond its original staged production. Michael Petruccelli, who created the role of the Stranger in the opera, returns to sing this premiere, so the character’s voice remains continuous from opera house to concert hall.

Your work will be performed alongside two giants of orchestral music: Shostakovich and Stravinsky. What can Australia learn from this decision to program a new local composition alongside older works?

It speaks to cultural maturity. It says that a new Australian work doesn’t need to be sheltered from the canon or treated as a curiosity before the ‘real’ program begins. It can stand in the same room as Shostakovich and Stravinsky and (hopefully) hold its own. Audiences and orchestras in Australia are still slightly hesitant about new (especially new Australian) music, as though it needs an almost apologetic kind of listening.

Placing Songs for the Stranger alongside works by Shostakovich and Stravinsky is a statement that Australian music deserves to belong in the same company — not as an aspiration, but as a matter of quiet confidence.

Is there anything else you’d like to share before the AWO performs your work to Australia?

My gratitude — to Murray Bail for his enthusiasm for both the opera and this song cycle, and especially for his willingness to allow me the freedom to interpret his acclaimed novel in so many different ways.

To Meredith Oakes, whose libretto gave the Stranger his voice in the first place and who has been a generous collaborator in finding more stories from Eucalyptus – the novel for us to tell. To Peggy Polias, who prepared this score with great skill, care and dedication. To Stefan Cassomenos, not only a great pianist, but an equally great repetiteur. To Alex Briger, who has championed the opera and who commissioned Songs for the Stranger.

And to our audiences, whom I ask to come prepared to listen to that most reassuring of all human pastimes – to someone telling you a story: once upon a time; let the music begin.