Four Winds revisited; again.

I write posts for my blog much less frequently than I used to do, but every so often I'm reminded of the benefits of maintaining it. My blog posts mark the rhythms of my life - the events that occur from time to time and that connect me to friends and family. I spent Easter with old friends in the southern coastal town of Bermagui, attending events for the Four Winds music festival. We've all lost count of how many such festivals we've attended, but for me it's now either seven or eight and given that the festival is held only every second Easter, that's a tradition now established for somewhere between twelve or fourteen years.

I've written about the Four Winds twice before, so it's difficult to find new things to say. Forgive me if I repeat myself.

The centre of the festival is two day-long programs of wonderful mainly classical music played in a most beautiful natural amphitheatre.

Blissful. We take wine and pate, cheese and biscuits for snacks and there is usually interesting food for sale for lunch (this year a confit duck burrito with beetroot relish was particularly memorable). Over the years, as well as wonderful performances of the usual classical repertoire, we've been introduced to new composers and unusual and exploratory performance modes. Often, parts of the program have been what might be described as world music.

A new director is appointed every second festival and this year's was the first for Paul Kildea. There was wonderful music, but by the end of the first day we were wondering what had happened to the diversity and unexpectedness that had characterised the best of previous festivals. We were inclined to be a little critical. By lunch time on the second day, however, we were won over by the new approach to the program. It might have been less diverse, but it featured virtuoso performers of admirable skill and range interacting with one another and with young musicians. We saw and heard masterly performances and witnessed the easy and apparently spontaneous collaboration that comes when musicians are at the top of their game.

This year the frogs, whose voices usually accompany the music, were silent, but we had the usual background of birdsong and less usually, flocks of raucous lorikeets and cockatoos.

But that's not all! There's always a cabaret-style performance on the night before the festival begins and this year it was Paul McDermott's 'The Dark Garden' - a mixture of haunting songs sung in McDermott's angelic voice and his offensive, confrontational humour. Puzzling, as I'm sure he intends it to be. And we also had an afternoon and evening of jazz at the Bermagui Wharf with the performers on a moored yacht and an audience in bring-your-own deckchairs. It was magical as the sun set, people chatted quietly, and the music wafted around us.

But even the Four Winds festival itself is not all. Old friends become even older friends as we grow older together. Over time such companionship is easy and much valued. And then there is the beauty of Bermagui itself. It's a long drive from either Sydney or Melbourne (though the drive can be a great opportunity to catch up with friends) and the distance has protected it from much of the development that characterises more easily accessible coastal towns. I particularly like the marshlands at the back of my friends' house with its pathway to the beach.

I'm hoping for many more Four Winds festivals - though it will be interesting to see if I am still writing blog posts in two years' time.

Four Winds revisited

Over the Easter break I've again been to Bermagui on the far south coast of New South Wales for the biennial Four Winds Festival. Bliss. Two whole days of sitting in a most beautiful outdoor amphitheatre, in perfect weather, listening to music that was variously challenging, meditative, amusing, exciting, nostalgic, and capable of producing almost any other (pleasant) emotion you could possibly imagine. I've written before about Four Winds and commented that it's a wonderful and extraordinarily well-kept secret. Well, no longer. The 2012 festival reached its capacity - around 1,500 people - so if you ever want to attend future festivals you need to get in early. This year the festival had a new, soaring, sound stage, designed by well-known architect Phillip Cox who is a long-time supporter of the festival. The acoustics of the amphitheatre have always been good, but they're now excellent.



The festival's artistic director, recorder virtuoso Genevieve Lacey, had put together an amazingly innovative program. There were were many new Australian compositions, many unexpected combinations of instruments, and a number of rearrangements of well-known pieces of music. Among my favourites were a grouping of pieces titled oriental pictures that contained some Chinese classics as well as Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition arranged for violin, cello, shakahachi and koto, and a rearrangement of Bach's Goldberg Variations (probably my favourite piece of music ever, if one can have such a thing) for two pianos. I also loved the playing of Scots classical accordianist James Crabb who, as well as playing some Piazzolla tangos I loved, played some Scottish folk airs accompanied by Genevieve Lacey on recorder. If this all sounds a bit gimmicky, it wasn't. All the musicians were masterly, and you could tell they enjoyed the broad and free contexts for music making that the festival provided.



I stayed with old friends for the weekend and so the festival program was surrounded by lots of discussion about the music and general chat and shared meals and wine and by a little sight-seeing and touristing. The festival included a whimsical soundscape as an adjunt to the music program - the seagull: a sound vessel. We boarded the seagull - a small boat - at about 7.00 one chilly morning and were rowed into Wallaga Lake.




As we sat in the boat, surrounded by the lake awakening to its daily life and the sounds and sights of the busy birdlife, we listened to tales of the area and its sounds. It was a magical half hour.

We also visited Tathra, further south from Bermagui and, before roads south were built, a major port for the south coast area of New South Wales. The Tathra Wharf, built in 1862, has been classified by the National Trust. As we drank coffee and ate delicious cake at a cafe that opens to a stunning view of the wharf and surrounds, a dramatic storm blew up from the south. Apparently this signalled good fishing weather because in the time it took to drink our coffee and eat our cake the wharf was filled with fisherfolk.





I think this was my sixth attendance at this festival. Each year it just becomes more wonderful - apart from the lengthy drive to and from Sydney. I hope to attend more of them. Not only the festival is wonderful - every time I visit I marvel at the beauty of the landscape around Bermagui and just how much this beauty is part of one's everyday life. All the photos below were taken within a ten minute walk of the house in which I stayed:

the beach


the dunes


and the wetlands. I can't resist boardwalks...


and I can't wait till Easter 2014 and whatever the next Four Winds brings.

Four Winds

I've been to Bermagui over Easter for the Four Winds Festival, which is one of Australia's best-kept secrets. Actually, it's no longer such a well-kept secret as more and more people attend each festival that's held.

It's an outdoor music festival, held in a beautiful natural amphitheatre surrounded by tall trees.



There's a simple, shaded stage (with superb sound equipment)



and behind the stage a small lake with waterlilies and innumerable frogs. One of the pleasures of listening to the music is to hear it accompanied by frogs and birdsong!



The festival's held every second year, and is made up mainly of classical music, with lots of new music and interesting combinations of musicians and instruments. Among the delights we had this year were Gregorian chants, Elizabethan and traditional English folksongs accompanied by a harp, superb classical guitarist Karin Schaupp playing some of the wonderful Spanish guitar classics with the Flinders Quartet, internationally acclaimed viola da gamba player Paolo Pandolfo, and the emotionally charged 'Women of Dirtsong' from the Black Arm Band.

As well as having two full days of music for the Festival itself there's always an entertainment on Friday night - this year an enthralling flamenco performance from the Spanish-Melbournian group Arte Kanela Flamenco. And an innovation for this festival was a free performance on Friday by and for the local community. It featured many of the festival artists as well as local people in a loosely woven 'identity piece' for Bermagui - I particularly loved the puppetry using evocative ruined boats.



I always come away from Four Winds delighted, enlightened, musically challenged - greatly enriched. This is my fifth festival, and I hope to have many more.

Bermagui is one of the idyllic coastal towns in southern New South Wales. It served as a port for the area before roads were built along the south coast, and from the mid 1800s became important for its fishing. There's still a fishing port today,



the dairy farms that have long been a part of the area,



and pristine beaches framed by still forested ranges of hills.

Silence

After a bit of a break, I attended another Sydney Festival event last night - a music and theatre performance titled 'Ruhe' (Silence) that I found moving and emotionally absorbing. Each of the elements - the music, the spoken words, the setting, is excellent in its own way. But the wonder is that these very disparate elements come together so well.

It's a performance that deals with a subject I find troubling and fascinating: how do individuals and societies that collaborate with harmful - even evil - regimes come to terms with their behavior once the regime is overturned? Much has been written and said about this in relation to Europe after the second world war, and more recently of the aftermath of oppressive regimes in Eastern Europe. South Africa is dealing with the emotional and moral complexity of integrating oppressors and oppressed in its society, and Sri Lanka is just beginning to face this almost insuperable challenge.

'Ruhe' is presented by a Belgian theatre group, Musiektheater Transparant. It presents verbatim testimony from two Dutch survivors of the second world war who were attracted by German Nazism and who, even after the end of the war, found their own behavior explicable and justifiable. These two testimonies are voiced by actors who move informally among the audience who have been seated in a roughly circular fashion on 200 randomly chosen and arranged (and mostly uncomfortable) chairs. The ordinariness of this presentation is interspersed with achingly beautiful Schubert leider sung by the eleven members of the Collegium Vocale Gent. These very casually dressed, 'ordinary' men stand on their chairs to perform the leider. This seems odd, but it had the effect of surrounding us with beautiful voices and harmonies that provided a space for reflection and musing.

All of this was staged on the stone flagstones in the Gothic revival shadows of the Great Hall at The University of Sydney.

The performance provided no miraculous insight into how to reconcile deeply conflicted societies. Maybe it reminded us that societies are made up of individuals with diverse and often 'ordinary' motivations for collaboration with oppressive regimes. It certainly provides a wealth of visual and aural prompts to think about the complexities of our own and our society's moral views and assumptions.

As a footnote, it was timely to attend 'Ruhe' so close on the heels of Australia Day celebrations. I always feel very uncomfortable with the timing of Australia Day - marking, as it does, the anniversary of white settlement of Australia. It inevitably reminds us that our current existence as a society comes only at the price of the dispossession of the Indigenous peoples of Australia - a matter that calls, at the very least, for a process of reconciliation within our society.