Girl with the Flaxen Hair

It's been a busy year for award-winning pianist, Alex Raineri. As Artistic Director, he has been at the helm of the successful Brisbane Music Festival (BMF) and has also appeared with other groups, such as Southern Cross Soloists and Opera Queensland, throughout the year. BMF has been a mainstay of the City's thriving classical music scene in 2021, with refreshing and unanticipated collaborations popping up in unexpected venues since February. He has taken music across the City, from the Opera Queensland Studio at South Bank, to studios at New Farm, a church at Kangaroo Point cliffs, a radio station, the Salvation Army City Temple, the underground City Workshop, and the Judith Wright Arts Centre. With the challenges caused by the global pandemic, the festival also made innovative use of the online space to allow artists to contribute from interstate and overseas, including his sister, Laura Raineri, performing from London. Alex ended his BMF programme with a solo performance on piano, playing Claude Debussy's Preludes, Book 1 (including 'Girl with the Flaxen Hair') and a world premiere Melody Eötvös's Piano Sonata No. 2: A Story from the Sand Dunes.

Debussy's 12 Preludes from 1909-1910 are poetic pieces themed around nature, dancers and singers, people and experiences. A fitting mix to sum up the entire BMF catalogue of 2021 events with some magical melodies. Alex refers to them as 'storyboards' which is quite apt as many of them are so cinematic, it is like listening to a 'look book' of inspiration for every modern-day cinema composer we've heard today. A pick and mix of sonic delights that has no doubt inspired our current classical and pop composers.

Melody Eötvös is an Australian-American composer, currently based in Melbourne. On her website she admits to being drawn to writing music in reaction to an aversion to performance: "I was terrified that I might become a concert pianist... and probably the world’s most nervous, mousey one at that." Her new piece was inspired by Hans Christian Anderson's A Story from the Sand Dunes, a dark tale of an adopted fisherman living in Denmark, dreaming of being in his birthplace in Spain; of love and loss, ultimately ending in death. It evoked scenes of shipwreck, sand dunes, tumultuous ocean waves and calm seas. Alex's performance was outstanding, tackling complex playing, evoking a range of brushstrokes, from delicate tremolo whispers to thunderous chords of doom.

One thing that Alex said he has tried to achieve with his tenure as BMF's Artistic Director is to commission new Australian works, with a balance between male and female composers. His 2021 season has featured new original works, including by Jane Sheldon, Jenna Robertson, Yitzhak Yedid, Erik Griswold, and Alex Turley. The BMF 2021 performances featured some of the country's freshest new stars - from piano to percussion, woodwind to violin - all of international standing. The events I saw were exciting and inspiring and expanded my interest in classical music, past and present. For audiences interested in the Australian classical music scene, I recommend keeping an eye on plans for a BMF 2022.

Beth Keehn

Images: Alex Raineri (photographer: Nick Morrissey) and Melody Eötvös (phptpgrapher: Grant Heger).