The Australian Chamber Orchestra’s M-rated tour with
comedian Barry Humphries must be their most unlikely collaboration yet. The orchestra
dressed in fishnet stockings and the comedian best known for his alter-ego Edna
Everage guided the audience through the revolutionary cabaret music of 1920’s
and 30’s Berlin.
Music by composers such as Grosz, Brand, Spoliansky was virtually lost during the Holocaust and much of it was being performed in Australia for the
first time . It turns out their entertaining and
provocative music has a passionate advocate in Humphries, who first discovered
old Weimar-era scores when browsing a second-hand Melbourne bookstore as a boy.
Humphries was aided by the outrageous cabaret diva Meow Meow who has been
singing this repertoire since her student days at WAAPA. Iain Grandage’s arrangement
of the music gave a gritty edge to the normally clean ACO sound, with the
wheezy combinations of accordion, banjo, saxophone and bassoon.
Humphries danced, sang duets with Meow Meow and even
conducted the orchestra ('Is there anything I can’t do!’). In between he kept the
audience delighted with his droll critique of Europe, Melbourne and Perth (‘We
should pay tribute to the owners of the land we are on – the Rinehart Family’).
The evening was marked by a sense of nostalgia for this
short-lived era of experimental frivolity and political satire. Schulhoff’s Sonata
Erotica evoking a female orgasm was delightfully articulated by Meow Meow who
paused mid-groan to turn the pages of the score. The same composer’s Suite for
Chamber orchestra started with an air raid siren and evolved into a complex
orchestral piece inspired by nightclub rhythms. Meow Meow seized Humphries as
her dance partner in Jezek’s Bugatti Step (written in honour of a female racing
car driver) and sang Spoliansky’s tribute to lesbian love When the Best
Girlfriend with violinist Satu Vanska. The orchestra played Hindemith’s
Kammermusik No 1 Op 24 with incisive energy and left instruments lying in their
laps for Toch’s intriguing spoken Geographical Fugue.
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