Canada’s Tafelmusik is coming to town as part of the Perth Festival. This baroque orchestra and chamber choir focuses on music written hundreds of years ago and uses antique or replica instruments that were popular at the time of the music being written. The orchestra is heading to Perth to perform The Galileo Project, Music of the Spheres: a selection of music including works by Vivaldi, Monteverdi, Bach and others, set to a backdrop of images of the stars including pictures from the Hubble telescope.
OUTinPerth spoke to Double Bass and Violone player Alison McKay from her home in Toronto as the orchestra prepared for their first trip to Australia.
How long has the Galileo Project being going for?
It was created in 2009 as part of the International Year of Astronomy, in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first use of the astronomical telescope. Since then we’ve been touring it all over the place, we’ve been in the states quite a bit, and in Mexico and also in Beijing at the Beijing Festival and Malaysia.
It really is a combination of music and words, there’s a narrative script and there’s quite a dramatic set piece that is like looking into a telescope and then about eighty projections.
What music has been assembled together to create the show?
There first half has quite a lot of music from composers from Galileo’s time… bringing them to life is an absolute joy. It made a lot of sense to take a musical look at Galileo and his time because Galileo himself came from a very famous family of musicians, he himself was an amateur lute player and he had a number of brothers and nephews and his father who were quite famous musicians.
We have a marvelous lute player in the orchestra, Lucas Harris and he plays an absolutely stunning piece written by Galileo’s younger brother Michelangelo Galilee – and that’s not music that you really get a chance to hear very often so it’s been a lot of fun exploring that music.
The Galileo Project is performed from memory, how hard is that to do in classical music?
We perform the Galileo Project all from memory, it was a huge challenge for us, and it seems kind of silly because soloist play from memory and as children we played from memory. But coming to memorise the inner viola parts of Handel doesn’t necessarily make much sense as melody, but it was a huge challenge, but it was so much fun, we felt a bit like folk musicians. It’s nice to be freed from the constraints of the music stand and it really made us change how we thought about our relationship with the audience, because now we can move and interact with them.
Tafelmusik perform at the Concert Hall on Thursday March 1, visit www.perthfestival.com for all the info.
Graeme Watson
