In 2004, I set off on an international piano tour, performing in China, Greece, France,

Italy, England, New York, Brazil and Argentina. My partner, photographer Nicholas

Purcell, accompanied me and documented the trip. It seemed like good manners, as a guest

of so many places, to pack an offering for our hosts. So I learnt a small piece, or group of

pieces, from each country. Put together, the selections became a travel diary of our trip.

I didn’t select the pieces with any other scheme in mind, but soon they began to talk to each other,

and when I added two of my favourite works by Janácˇ ek and Prokofiev the chatter grew louder. Tan

Dun reclaimed Ravel’s ‘orientalism’ for China; Hadjidakis joined Prokofiev’s attack on romanticism;

Janácˇ ek and Tan Dun whispered nostalgically into their diaries. I knew that visiting these countries

would illuminate their music for me; what I didn’t anticipate was that the music itself would offer a

window into these countries – a small one, but any portal is better than none.

Several of the works are early works, in which a young composer seeks a national voice, paradoxically,

by mining the music of cultures other than his own. Thus Tan Dun looks west, Hadjidakis turns to

Russia. My travel diary, which began as an exercise in nationalism, ended up supporting a different

cliché, of music as a universal language.

All of the repertoire dates from the 20th century, but the program does not pretend to be any sort

of comprehensive survey. Instead it is a tribute to the privilege of travelling. It speaks to this trip

and to other trips I have taken, with music providing another space, another dimension, through

which to wander.

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TAN DUN born 1957

Eight Memories in Watercolour, Op. 1 [14’15]1 I Missing Moon 2’282 II Staccato Beans 1’223 III Herdboy’s Song 1’444 IV Blue Nun 1’135 V Red Wilderness 1’536 VI Ancient Burial 1’577 VII Floating Clouds 2’078 VIII Sunrain 1’31

MAURICE RAVEL 1875-1937

9 Jeux d’eau 5’44

MANOS HADJIDAKIS 1925-1994

0 Conversation with Sergei Prokofiev from For a Little White Seashell, Op. 1 1’40

SERGEI PROKOFIEV 1891-1953

Sarcasms, Op. 17 [11’19]! No. 1 Tempestoso 2’20@ No. 2 Allegro rubato 1’36£ No. 3 Allegro precipitato 2’01$ No. 4 Smanioso 2’06% No. 5 Precipitosissimo 3’16

LEOŠ JANÁČEK 1854-1928

On an Overgrown Path, Book I (Nos 1-5) [12’56]^ I Our Evenings: Moderato 2’53& II A Blown-Away Leaf: Andante 2’36* III Come With Us!: Andante 1’22( IV The Madonna of Frýdek: Grave 3’40) V They Chattered Like Swallows: Con moto 2’25

HEITOR VILLA-LOBOS 1887-1959

¡ Choros No. 5 ‘Alma Brasileira’ 4’33

SAMUEL BARBER 1910-1981

™ No. 1 Un poco allegro from Excursions, Op. 20 3’10

CARL VINE born 1954

Red Blues [5’14]# Red Blues 1’19¢ Central 1’26∞ Semplice 1’19§ Spartacus 1’10

Total Playing Time 58’51

Anna Goldsworthy piano

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Eight Memories in Watercolour, Op. 1Tan Dun

Tan Dun’s Eight Memories in Watercolour date from1978-9, when he moved to Beijing to study at theCentral School of Music. He was 21 years old, andhad spent the previous few years working as a rice-planter during the Cultural Revolution. Tan Dun’smove to Beijing was a stimulating one, in which hewas exposed for the first time to Western influencessuch as Debussy and Ravel. It was also a time ofintense homesickness for his native Hunan. Each ofthese responses finds expression in his Eight Memoriesin Watercolour. The work’s impressionistic texturesprovide a backdrop to Chinese folksong, in a set thatTan Dun described as a ‘diary of longing’.

In the first piece, Missing Moon, Tan Dun creates asonic landscape. His pentatonic textures recall Ravel, but here they are being reclaimed for a distinctlyChinese purpose. Similarly, Ancient Burial’smonochromatic beginning evokes Debussy’s mutedFootsteps in the Snow, before growing into a clangorousfuneral procession that marches well away from Debussy.Staccato Beans is based on folksong, as is Herdboy’s Song, Blue Nun and the exuberant Sunrainthat concludes the set. Each movement is a small meditation rather than a narrative, a moment of captured time – or a watercolour.

I performed this work in Beijing in 2004, after practising all week in the air-conditioned comfort of the Steinwayshop. There had not been a single customer the whole time I had been there, but there had been a steadystream of visitors for the shop attendant. She served them tea and chatted animatedly, ignoring the dissonancesof my practice, only three metres away. I played on the same velvet Steinway in my recital, in a restored Imperialtheatre on the outskirts of the Forbidden City. It was good to meet this piano again in this venue’s remarkable

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silence. The piano glistened incongruously beneaththe Chinese lanterns – an incongruity that spoke tothe music’s mixed parentage. Afterwards there was areception in the balmy courtyard, in which paperlanterns swung in the breeze, and the traffic noise of Beijing was only a distant murmur. It was anenchanting pocket of quiet: perhaps these smallpieces offered a similar sanctuary to a young,disoriented Tan Dun.

Later, we stepped out of this otherworldly space intodazzling Beijing, hurtling into the 21st century. A four-year-old boy chased after us down the street,with a packet of Saddam Hussein playing cards:‘Saddam, Saddam, you want to buy?’ He tripped andfell, glared at us accusingly, and then burst into tears.His mother picked him up and offered him to us. ‘You want to buy?’ she asked, laughing.

Jeux d’eauMaurice Ravel

In 2005, I visited Ravel’s house, Belvedere, inMontfort-l’Amaury. The house is set near theRambouillet Forest where the nature-loving Raveltook his constitutionals, but it is a shrine to artifice.Constructed on the composer’s miniature scale, itfeels almost like a doll’s house, and is designed inthe style of a ship, with rooms opening off acentral corridor. Each room is impeccablydecorated, with one done up in chinoiserie, atribute to Ravel’s lifelong fascination with theEast. Ravel revered good craftsmanship inclockwork as well as music (leading Stravinskyto deride him as a ‘Swiss clockmaker’) and thehouse is fitted out with glass-fronted cabinets,displaying his collection of mechanical objectsand artefacts.

The housekeeper took a tiny golden bird outof a cabinet. ‘Watch this,’ she said. Shewound the bird up with a key and placed iton her palm. It was perhaps twocentimetres tall, a tiny intricate jewel, butsuddenly it fluttered its wings and came tolife, moving with the uncanny freedom ofa living bird, and singing the coloratura ofa nightingale. It must have been an objectof utter delight for Ravel.

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‘For a Little White Seashell is an anti-romanticwork at least according to the meaning given theword by Copland and Prokofiev in their music.Every exaggeration in interpretation and everyarbitrary choice of rhythm ridicules the interpreterand ruins the musical essence of the work.’

In 1947, Hadjidakis (in truth more revolutionarythan reactionary) scandalised Athenian society bydelivering a lecture on rembetika, the urbanfolksongs of the lower classes. Like Tan Dun,Hadjidakis combined the folk genre with foreigninfluences to create his own musical language.The strongest of these influences is Prokofiev,whose ‘anti-romantic’ stance held a clearattraction for Hadjidakis. And nowhere is thisclearer than in Conversation with SergeiProkofiev, a fascinating example of cross-cultural fertilisation. The left hand is importedalmost literally from Prokofiev’s Montagues andCapulets, while the right hand is based on thehasapikos dance rhythm from rembetika.

Alongside his excursions into ‘serious music’, Hadjidakisenjoyed a lifelong connection with the cinema. He won an Oscar for the title song he wrote for Never

on Sunday, starring his close friend Melina Mercouri, and directed by her husband Jules Dassin. In 2004, I performed For a Little White Seashell at the Melina Mercouri Cultural Centre in Athens, in a concert organisedby the Orchestra of Colours, which had been founded by Hadjidakis.

Neither Mercouri nor Hadjidakis was still alive, but Jules Dassin, Mercouri’s widower, was a gracious host. Thecentre was established as a shrine to Mercouri, and the walls are covered with photos from her careers as actress

Ravel composed Jeux d’eau (or ‘Fountains’) in 1901, twenty years before he bought Belvedere. He stipulatedthat the work should be ‘played in the way you play Liszt’, and it looks to Liszt’s Les Jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Estefor inspiration. But it is also clear from the opening dissonance that Ravel’s Jeux d’eau occupies an entirely newsound-world. Ravel later acknowledged that the work was the ‘origin of my pianistic novelties’.

As I played Jeux d’eau on Ravel’s piano at Belvedere, I thought of the contradictions of the composer. There ismeticulous craftsmanship in this work, as in all of his works, and it unfolds in an approximate sonata form. (Thesecond subject resonates with Tan Dun’s Missing Moon, in its use of the pentatonic scale.) And yet into thisclassical framework Ravel pours the asymmetry of nature, almost creating a musical expression of chaos theory.

Ravel prefaces the piece with a line by Henri de Régnier, Dieu fluvial riant de l’eau qui le chatouille (‘River godlaughing at the water which tickles him’) and in this work you can indeed hear the water tickling, and splashing,and you can even see the light sparkling off its surface. Water is represented in all of its modes, from benigntrickle to sudden tidal wave, and despite the work’s classical framework, the moral of the story seems to be thatwater is an element that cannot be contained. Ravel is a master of artifice, but here he celebrates wildness.

Conversation with Sergei Prokofievfrom For a Little White Seashell, Op. 1Manos Hadjidakis

Like Tan Dun’s Eight Memories, Manos Hadjidakis’s For a Little White Seashell is his opus one. But while Tan Dunwas inspired by his conservatory training, Hadjidakis had different ideas on formal education. He prefaces hisscore with a manifesto:

‘Thanks to my innate loathing for sentimental interpretation in my time, the usual case with pianists andConservatories (which unfortunately, still exist nowadays), For a Little White Seashell was composed with a so-to-speak, reactionary intent. Reaction against maltreated ‘musical sensitivity’; against ‘feeling’ as defined bythe teacher with a coloured pencil; against the pomposity of professors and composers; and finally, against everydusty concept (provincially European in origin) concerning Music and its interpretation…

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Sarcasms, Op. 17 Sergei Prokofiev

In 1912, the 21-year-old Prokofiev unleashed his First Piano Concerto. At its Moscow premiere, the work was wellreceived by the audience, but not by the critics, who described it as ‘musical mud’. (Six years later, the Americancritic James Gibbons Huneker wrote that the concerto ‘evoked not only the downfall of empires, but also of finecrockery, the fragments flying in all directions.’) Despite such a reception, Prokofiev went on to furtherdelinquencies, including these five Sarcasms, composed between 1912 and 1914.

In his memoirs, Prokofiev identified his compositional traits as follows:

‘The first is classical, whose origin lies in my early infancy when I heard my mother playing Beethoven sonatas.The second is innovation, whose inception I trace to my meeting with Taneyev, when he taunted me for myrather “elementary harmony”. The third is the element of the toccata, or motor element, probably influenced bySchumann’s Toccata, which impressed me greatly at one time. The fourth element is the lyrical. I should liketo...regard the fifth element, that of the grotesque...as merely a variation of the other characteristics.’

The Sarcasms touch on all of these elements. While the Classical influence is not as pronounced as in his sonatas,it is clear in the thick pianistic texture of the first Sarcasm, tactile proof of his Romantic training. Innovation drives the fast-twitch second Sarcasm; in the third Sarcasm, the toccata element yields to the lyrical. And thegrotesque is present throughout these works, from the beginning of the First Sarcasm, marked ironico, to the set’s sardonic ending.

Unlike Tan Dun or Hadjidakis, Prokofiev seeks no expression of national identity in his Sarcasms, though theirrevolutionary spirit anticipates the ‘downfall of empires’ and ‘fragments flying in all directions’ that occurred threeyears later in Russia. But in many ways, Prokofiev’s sensibility looks beyond the Soviet regime to the post-modernage, in which the ironico counts for more than the ideological.

In 2000, I spent some time in Russia, studying with Lev Naumov and Yuri Rozum. The Russia I visited was nolonger Soviet, but it still spoke of the downfall of empires. I practised on a piano in the basement of the MoscowConservatory with missing keys and broken strings; around me, other students practised on similar pianos as iftheir lives depended on it, as if they were in the traffic of ecstasy. My teacher, Eleonora Sivan, had often spoken

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and politician. She has the masculine, ancient beauty of a Maria Callas, eyes that have seen two millennia.Surrounding her pictures were small manifestos of her own, as Greece’s Minister for Culture, and her calls for thereturn of the Parthenon marbles: ‘One thing is certain: We have decided to launch a massive culturaloffensive…In the field of culture, Greece is armed to the teeth.’ I could see why Mercouri was a natural ally toHadjidakis. The entire centre resonated with a fierce Greek pride: a fitting venue for these revolutionary pieces.

of the material deprivation of growing up in Soviet Russia, and how its flipside was a clearer value to art. Thingshad changed in the Russia I visited, but deprivation remained, and audiences were still hungry for music. In theancient town of Yaroslavl, I stayed with an old man who had no running water. When I performed at the townhall, the audience was so warm I could have bathed in it.

On an Overgrown Path, Book I (Nos 1-5)Leoš Janáček

Leoš Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path was a relatively early work, but not the work of a young man. A prolificcomposer of old age, Janáček completed On an Overgrown Path when he was in his fifties, before hisinternational renown. Like Tan Dun’s Eight Memories, the set operates as a nostalgic diary, in which the composerreturns to childhood for inspiration – in this case, the Moravian village of Hukvaldy.

On an Overgrown Path had a mixed genesis: five of the pieces, numbers 1, 2, 4, 7 and 10, were composedoriginally for harmonica, and published in 1901-2. Janáček added the remaining five movements between theyears 1908 and 1911 (the first half of the set is presented here). The composer Thomas Adès describes theseworks as: ‘highly sophisticated reinventions of binary or ternary structure, exhibiting long-range events which relyon potent relationships between individual harmonic/coloristic objects almost to the exclusion of conventions oftonal “logic”.’ Without this harmonic prerogative, these piano pieces unfold with an occasional stasis, in a texturethat resembles consciousness.

Like Tan Dun, Janáček’s nostalgia is coloured by the pastoral, as in the ephemeral A Blown-Away Leaf. But whileTan Dun’s meditations operate objectively, Janáček’s diary entries recall the Romantic character piece in theirsubjectivity. Composer Martin Bresnick finds an ‘erotic intensity’ in the nostalgia of the opening Our Evenings. The inviting Come With Us! evokes childhood play, before the music takes on a new reverence in The Madonna of Frýdek, in the Romantic dream-key of D-flat major, and in which the Madonna makes a gradual, transcendentapproach. Janáček transcribed the rhythms of peasant speech into his compositions, lending his works adiscursive character, and They Chattered Like Swallows brings us back to gossipy humanity. This is music thatspeaks even more than it sings.

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Chôros No. 5 ‘Alma Brasileira’Heitor Villa-Lobos

Like Tan Dun and Hadjidakis, the Brazilian composer Villa-Lobos articulates a national music by fusing elements ofhis native music with a European tradition. Trained initially by his father, an amateur musician, Villa-Lobos rejecteda formalised musical education, maintaining (like Hadjidakis) that ‘one foot in the academy and you are changedfor the worst!’ Instead he was a passionate autodidact, assimilating Brazilian street

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music as a café musician, and making musical study trips to the Amazon, where he claimed to have beenkidnapped by cannibals. In 1923 he made a less perilous trip to Paris, where he met the great musical luminariesof his time, such as Stravinsky and Ravel, and became known as the face of Brazilian music.

Alma Brasileira dates from 1926, and is the fifth of sixteen ‘chôros’ Villa-Lobos composed for various instrumentalcombinations. The title means ‘Brazilian soul’, and the work charts the contradictions of the composer’s own soul.It reveals the colouristic influences of his new acquaintances, such as Ravel, while assimilating the three strands ofhis Brazilian inheritance: the Indian, the European and the Afro-Brazilian. The work unfolds with a clear sense ofnarrative, taking us from a lyrical, serenading opening that recalls the modinha, a Brazilian love song of theeighteenth and nineteenth century, to a rhythmic middle section based on popular rhythmic patterns, before theserenade returns, perhaps more nostalgically.

Like Tan Dun, Villa-Lobos’s sense of his country is coloured by nature. ‘Yes, I am Brazilian,’ he wrote, ‘veryBrazilian. In my music, I let the rivers and seas of this great Brazil sing. I don’t put a gag on the tropicalexuberance of our forests and our skies, which I intuitively transpose to everything I write.’

My own experience, performing in Brasilia and São Paulo, was of a more urban Brazil. Both cities were rife withcrime. ‘Please try not to get express-kidnapped,’ the cultural attaché said, and posted a security guard by theauditorium in Brasilia where I practised. Despite such poverty, Brazilian audiences were passionate about music,and the most enthusiastic I encountered on this tour.

Alongside my concert performances, I performed the Villa-Lobos for broadcast from a shopping mall in Brasilia.The glamorous announcer turned up two minutes before the performance began. She introduced me, rolled herhands with a theatrical flourish, and turned to me with a dazzling smile. The smile was of such unnatural wattage– such tropical exuberance – that it burnt into my retina, and stayed there, Cheshire-cat like, for the duration ofthe Villa-Lobos.

Excursion No. 1Samuel Barber

Samuel Barber’s four Excursions of 1942-1944 mark his first attempt at ‘Americana’: he later claimed that hewrote them to prove he could write American music. Thus they mark a departure, or an excursion, from his morerefined usual style. In a quick preface to the score, Barber writes that ‘these are “Excursions” in small classicalforms into regional American idioms. Their rhythmic characteristics, as well as their source in folk material andtheir scoring, reminiscent of local instruments, are easily recognized.’ Paul Wittke describes the works as ‘clever,

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almost wry comments on the rush to embraceour cultural roots that was current in the 1940s’.Others have questioned the existence of suchwry commentary: H. Wiley Hitchcock wrote thatthe pieces lacked the ‘amused side-long glance’ of parody.

Whether they are in fact parody or straighthomage, these Excursions fuse European pianisticculture with Americana. The first Excursion is builton a boogie-woogie bass, combined withdissonances and syncopations that might beGershwin’s tooting horns.

The first Excursion’s moto perpetuo reminds me ofNew York itself, a city that also never stops, whereit was premiered by Horowitz in 1945. When I visitNew York, I am always taken by an urge to find aperspective on the city – to climb the Empire StateBuilding or the Brooklyn Bridge, the better to knowit. But it doesn’t help. Playing in the high rise of theAustralian Embassy, next to the dazzling Chryslerbuilding, the city looked as unknowable as from thestreet. It’s impossible to comprehend all the lives

going on in those buildings and those streets, and all those extra lives buzzing around underground on thesubway. This Excursion reflects that great energising bustle, but alongside its incessant motion it is also a littledisengaged. It is street-smart and knowing; a classical interpretation of cool.

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Red BluesCarl Vine

The disc returns with a trip homeward, after encircling the globe. Carl Vine’s Red Blues is not the work of ajuvenile, but is composed for juveniles, comprising four small pieces for the intermediate pianist. Vine’s music iscosmopolitan rather than distinctly Australian, though it speaks with a laconicism that we could claim as a nationaltrait: a laconicism which is as much a relief to the weary traveller as Australian accents at the airport.

Anna Goldsworthy

Anna Goldsworthy has won numerous prizes and scholarships for piano performance, including the David PaulLanda Memorial Scholarship. In 2004, she completed a world tour performing in festivals and concert halls inAustralia, Asia, Europe and North and South America. Highlights included appearances at the Teatro Colón forthe Buenos Aires International Music Festival, at the Prince Yong Theatre in Beijing, for the Orchestra of Coloursin Athens, and for the Festival Musicale delli Nazioni in Rome. In Australia, she performs frequently as a recitalistand concerto soloist, including appearances for the Melbourne International Arts Festival, and in the AdelaideSymphony Orchestra’s Masters series. In 2005, she undertook a three-month residency at the Australia CouncilStudio at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.

Anna was born in Adelaide, and began studying the piano at the age of six. At the age of nine, she beganstudies with Eleonora Sivan, who has remained a central guide and inspiration. In recent years, Ronald Farren-Price has also been an important mentor. Anna completed her Bachelor of Music degree with Honours at theElder Conservatorium, before acquiring a Master of Music degree at Texas Christian University, where she held theF. Howard and Mary D. Walsh Graduate Piano Scholarship, and studied with Tamás Ungár. In 2004, shegraduated from the University of Melbourne with the degree Doctor of Musical Arts. Additionally, Anna hasstudied in Moscow with Lev Naumov, with the support of an ArtsSA Emerging Artist Award, and in the AdvancedPerformance Program at the Australian National Academy of Music.

Alongside her solo performances, Anna has received acclaim as a chamber musician. She is a founding memberof the Seraphim Trio, which has performed throughout Asia and Europe, and appears regularly in Australia forMusica Viva and regional music festivals. The trio studied chamber music with Hatto Beyerle at the Höchschule fürMusik in Hanover, and was awarded the prize for the Leading Piano Trio in the 2001 Australian National ChamberMusic Competition. In 2007, the Seraphim Trio launched its national subscription series.

Anna currently teaches piano at the University of Melbourne, and is Artist-in-Residence at Janet Clarke Hall. Herwriting has appeared in publications such as The Monthly and Best Australian Essays 2007.

www.annagoldsworthy.com

In an email, Vine explained the title Red Blues: ‘There are three traditionally orthogonal colours: red, green andblue. “Blues” are innately blue, so obviously required extra red. The graphic designer of the printed cover agreed.The next set will obviously be green.’

Red Blues is as aphoristic as that email, and operates as a distilled version of Vine’s style. As in Prokofiev, thetoccata features prominently in Vine’s piano style, and toccata elements appear briefly in the first two pieces, andform the texture of Spartacus, which concludes the set. Vine explains that his Spartacus is named for its openfifths: ‘just like every swords-and-sandals epic since Ben Hur.’

Like Barber in his Excursions, Vine draws on popular music for inspiration, this time definitely with an ‘amusedside-long glance’. The second of the Red Blues, Central, concludes with an ironico ‘choo-choo’ that firmlyestablishes its locale as Sydney’s Central Station. Vine’s milieu is urban rather than rural: a truer experience ofAustralia for most of us, and the Australia I return home to.

Anna Goldsworthy

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Nicholas Purcell is a Melbourne-based photographer.His work has appeared in The Monthly.

www.purcell.co.uk

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Executive Producers Robert Patterson, Lyle Chan, Martin Buzacott

Recording Producer Lydia Warren

Recording Engineer Russell Thomson

Recording Editor Melissa May

Mastering Thomas Grubb

Piano Technician Brent Ottley

Editorial and Production Manager Hilary Shrubb

Publications Editor Natalie Shea

Cover and Booklet Design Imagecorp Pty Ltd

Photography Nicholas Purcell

Anna Goldsworthy and Nicholas Purcell thank our family; Eleonora Sivan; Ronald Farren-Price; Lydia Warren; Russell

Thomson; Melissa May; Stephen Snelleman; The Australia Council; Arts SA; The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade;

Janet Clarke Hall; Anna Thomas; Harriet O’Malley; John & Chris Conquest; Heinz Gorges; Helen Ayres; Timothy Nankervis.

ABC Classics thanks Alexandra Alewood and Melissa Kennedy.

� 2008 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. © 2008 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by UniversalMusic Group, under exclusive licence. Made in Australia. All rights of the owner of copyright reserved. Any copying, renting, lending, diffusion, publicperformance or broadcast of this record without the authority of the copyright owner is prohibited.

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