Samuel Wagan Watson: Smoke Encrypted Whispers

Samuel Wagan Watson. Image by Helen Kassila. 

Living up to the promise of ‘one extraordinary concert’, Smoke Encrypted Whispers was an appropriate start to the Australian Voices series presented jointly by the Melbourne Recital Centre and the Australian National Academy of Music.

The voice of award-winning Indigenous poet Samuel Wagan Watson provided a wellspring of inspiration for 23 composers associated with Watson’s hometown, Brisbane. Paul Dean, co-curator of the Music and Words series presented by the State Library of Queensland, commissioned 23 composers of widely diverse backgrounds and experience to write approximately 100 seconds of interlude music to be performed between each poem. William Barton (the sole Indigenous composer), Richard Mills, Gerard Brophy and Paul Dean himself were among the better known of these. Writing for Southern Cross Soloists, comprising clarinet, oboe, horn, bassoon, piano and soprano, each composer brought a distinctive response to Watson’s remarkable series of poems – a chronological journey of singular life experience.

Reading his own poems, Watson was at once unassuming and genuine. Without any hint of histrionics, he allowed his words to draw his audience into a world at once recognizable and full of mystery – ghosts, smoke and whispers. Despite the fact that he has won many awards, including the 2005 New South Wales Premier’s Book of the Year and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Smoke Encrypted Whispers, there would have been many in the audience unaware of this poetic voice and astonished at its creative power.

Given that poetry is such a concentrated form of expression, there was far too much to absorb in a single sitting of almost one and a half hours. Even the music itself made its own demands by being distilled into such a concise form. Whether the composition elaborated on one thread of an idea, complemented it or took a more programmatic approach, as in Tom Adeney’s piece in response to When I crossed the ditch, its relationship to the text and musical language called for alert engagement on the part of the audience.

Fortunately, Melba Records have issued a handsomely produced CD of this work, allowing listeners to appreciate these gems at a more leisurely pace. Although the CD does not have Watson reading his own poems, Ron Haddrick is a clear and quietly expressive speaker. With Southern Cross Soloists, the playing is more polished than some of that offered by the ANAM students, who, nevertheless, generally made a fine job of some very tricky music. Changing personnel half way through the concert was an effective way of involving more students and making the task less arduous for them. Judith Dodsworth’s musicianship was a decided asset in the eight interludes involving the soprano voice, either echoing part of the text or simply vocalising.

With a key motif of living a life within and across borders, from Boundary Street in Brisbane to the Berlin Wall, the poems are at once political and deeply personal. Amplified by music that resonated with the full gamut of emotional response, this was a concert to transform the listener: a concert to treasure.

Rating: 4 ½ out of 5 stars

Melbourne Recital Centre, Southbank
www.melbournerecital.com.au
24 March