―
Part art music, part poetry reading and part folk-rock oratorio, it was by turns profoundly moving, playful and darkly atmospheric
Paul Kelly, James Ledger, Alice Keath and the Seraphim Trio pulled off a coup with Thirteen Ways To Look At Birds, a musical response to verse about birds from poets including Emily Dickinson, A.D. Hope, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Judith Wright. Part art music, part poetry reading and part folk-rock oratorio, it was by turns profoundly moving, playful and darkly atmospheric – and something the rest of Australia will hotly anticipate.
Paul (likealike Phil) sung with his arms outstretched like a bird in flight and the music, words and voices combined effortlessly
Kelly, his co-composer Ledger, multi-instrumentalist and backing singer Keath and the Seraphim Trio took to the stage of the Adelaide Town Hall Auditorium and launched into spoken-word recitals of Judith Wright’s Black Cockatoos and Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush, without explaining exactly what we were about to see (the programme was a big help at first). Then there were quiet introductions, apologies for the use of one word, a little Ocker humour and some fond personal sentiments from Kelly as we continued through renditions of WB Yeats’ Leda And The Swan, Gwen Harwood’s Barn Owl and the first of several instrumentals, Mudlarking.
Occasionally haunting and always restrained, highlights from hereon included: Richard Wilbur’s beautifully repetitive A Barred Owl; John Keats’ epic Ode To A Nightingale; Miroslav Holub’s grimly comic The Fly (which seemed to not feature birds at all until the punchline); and Kiwi Denis Glover’s most lovely The Magpies. Sometimes the music became almost (dare it be said) ambient, but the often gorgeous orchestrations kept pulling it back from the brink, with Kelly’s soft, Aussie-as tones perfectly suited to the almost tranquil mood.
Lucky 🍀 *13 Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds
The suggestion that MEdia Dragons twisted Paul's arms to include a reference to Chekov gun and add Czech poet is exaggerated ;-)
The suggestion that MEdia Dragons twisted Paul's arms to include a reference to Chekov gun and add Czech poet is exaggerated ;-)
THE FLY
Miroslav Holub - Holub means the bird Dove - Translated by George Theiner
She sat on a willow-trunk watching
part of the battle of Crecy, the shouts,
the gasps,
the groans,
the tramping and the tumbling.
During the fourteenth charge of the French cavalry
she mated
with a brown-eyed male fly from Vadincourt.
She rubbed her legs together
as she sat on a disembowelled horse meditating
on the immortality of flies.
With relief she alighted on the blue tongue
of the Duke of Clervaux.
When silence settled
and only the whisper of decay softly circled the bodies
and only
a few arms and legs
still twitched jerkily under the trees,
she began to lay her eggs on the single eye
of Johann Uhr,
the Royal Armourer.
And thus it was
that she was eaten by a swift fleeing
from the fires of Estrees.
Miroslav Holub - Holub means the bird Dove - Translated by George Theiner
She sat on a willow-trunk watching
part of the battle of Crecy, the shouts,
the gasps,
the groans,
the tramping and the tumbling.
During the fourteenth charge of the French cavalry
she mated
with a brown-eyed male fly from Vadincourt.
She rubbed her legs together
as she sat on a disembowelled horse meditating
on the immortality of flies.
With relief she alighted on the blue tongue
of the Duke of Clervaux.
When silence settled
and only the whisper of decay softly circled the bodies
and only
a few arms and legs
still twitched jerkily under the trees,
she began to lay her eggs on the single eye
of Johann Uhr,
the Royal Armourer.
And thus it was
that she was eaten by a swift fleeing
from the fires of Estrees.
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