DA VINCI PUBLISHINGDreamscapes: New Australian Music for Flute and Piano

Additional information

Artist(s)	Chloe Chung, Pavle Cajic
Composer(s)	Chloe Chung, Ennes Mehmedbasic, Jolin Jiang, Kate Reid, Pavle Cajic
EAN Code	7.46160917528
Edition	Da Vinci Classics
Format	1 Cd
Genre	Chamber
Instrumentation	Flute, Piano
Period	Contemporary
Publication year	2024

Description

Sidere Duo’s debut album, Dreamscapes, extends an invitation into their imaginative realm, featuring original compositions by the artists and their collaborators. The pieces range from fervent romantic expressions to rhapsodic improvisations and vivid portrayals of treasured Australian landscapes.
In this album, Pavle, composer and pianist, presents three new compositions for flute and piano. “A Shower of Sunbeams” joyfully evokes the natural beauty and vibrancy of Australia’s coral reefs. “Sky Prelude” depicts the shifting colors of the sunset sky, inspired by a poem from a solitary observer during the COVID-19 lockdowns. “Ballade” is a grand, romantic epic that explores the expressive potential of the flute, with the piano serving as an equal partner in this dramatic love narrative, reminiscent of Frederic Chopin’s Ballades.
The album also features contributions from three other Australian composers, each offering personal interpretations of similar themes. Kate Reid’s “Ode to the Reef” mourns the destruction of Australia’s reefs due to global warming. Jolin Jiang’s “Weathered” draws from the composer’s Taoist experiences with water and the ocean. Ennes Mehmedbasic’s “Romance” is an intimate vocalise. Additionally, Chloe contributes three evocative pieces brought to life through improvisation: “Kindness Sprinkles”, “Through the Eyes of a Dragonfly”, and “Eternity”, the latter of which concludes the album with the unfolding of a slow musical motif that appeared to her in a dream.

This album successfully challenges some of the (arbitrary) tenets of many contemporary (or perhaps not-so-contemporary anymore) avantgardes. Every generation, in art as it is in life, tends to refute the values and principles of their immediate ancestors, sometimes turning their attention back to their grandparents’ world or to an even earlier epoch. This permits to human beings to both cultivate tradition (“the democracy of the dead”, as Chesterton defined it) and to surpass it in innovative fashions.

In Europe, indeed, a new wave of younger composers in the third Millennium is trying and finding languages which, without renouncing modernity, can be more palatable and certainly more communicative than those of the late twentieth-century avantgardes. The emphasis put by the Darmstadtians and post-Darmstadtians on structuralism and formalism failed to conquer the audiences’ hearts; people want music to give them emotions, to be moved by it.

This is what this album is not afraid of doing: finding and proposing a unique musical perspective (notwithstanding the variety of styles of the different composers contributing to it). These composers also dare question another seemingly intangible dogma of
contemporary music, i.e. that music “signifies” nothing. And this in spite of generations of composers, performers, and listeners, who have felt, and at times even codified, the “meaning” of music. Here, again, the wisdom of old is recovered, and most pieces in this album boldly proclaim their extra-musical inspiration.
Many of its titles are related to nature and to natural phenomena; and this is possibly the interpretive key for this whole endeavour. After the dizzying intoxication of technicism and modernism, where machines seemed to be the only future of humankind, today we are (all too slowly) recovering an experience of nature, which, at times, also leads human beings to an experience of the supernatural. For the Romantics, the connection between natural and supernatural was self-evident, and very frequently music was the mediating power between them. Most pieces of this album operate in the same fashion, and this seems to be one of the explicit purposes of the duo’s very existence. Their name, Sidere, derives from the Latin sidera, “stars”; a compound form of sidera is desiderium, literally meaning an aspiration to stars, and etymologically at the root of the English word “desire”. The contemplation of the stars leads human beings to the contemplation of infinity, and of what this may signify.

In all of these experiences (the respectful observation of nature, taking inspiration from it, and going beyond it up to transcendence), these Australian artists have probably much to teach to an all-too-Eurocentric Classical music world. There is a much deeper and closer experience of nature in Australia and Oceania; the Austral sky is perhaps more mysterious and suffused with enchantment than its Boreal counterpart. A continent which has a much more recent experience of technicism with respect to Europe is likely to have preserved, at least in part, the dimension of wonder and enchantment which has always caught human beings when they observed the beauty of nature. Thus, as the artists themselves state, the Duo’s name “captures [their] ongoing fascination with music, and its ability to transport us along endless cycles of wonder and play”.

Whilst some aspects of Romantic and Impressionist music will be recognizable in the works recorded here (whose broad emotional palette encompasses dreamy worlds, witticism, and powerful expression), the conquests of contemporary music are far from ignored. New playing techniques, pioneered in avantgarde pieces, are put here in the service of communication and expressiveness.
Chiara Bertoglio © 2024

Artist(s)

Chloe Chung is a multi-style flautist performing on Western classical flute and dizi, co-creating with others to foster meaningful connections on Gadigal land, Sydney, and beyond. A tapestry of influences shape her body of work, including her Malaysian-Singaporean-Chinese roots, classical music training, traditional Chinese music, poetry and improvisation as a tool for building bridges of connection between people, places, and things. She has performed at the Sydney Opera House Re-Tuning festival (solo, 2023), BackStage Music (solo, 2022), and most recently as the multi-flutes player in the touring orchestra of the Miss Saigon Asia tour (2024).

Recent creative partnerships include the long-standing Sidere Duo with pianist-composer Pavle Cajic, Box of Chocolates duo with Torres Strait Islander songman and didgeridoo player Murraywa Dow, and DeeBeeTees duo with composer and multi-instrumentalist Liz Cheung. In 2020, Chloe founded the Dreambox Collective as Artistic Director - a musician and artist collective putting on interactive concert projects partnered with local charities, NGOs and artists for positive social impact.

Chloe holds Master of Music (2018) and Bachelor of Music (2016) degrees from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. The former was undertaken under the Australian Postgraduate Award, and involved exploring the performance practice of the traditional Chinese flute from a classical flute perspective, including field research in Singapore, Hangzhou and Shanghai. In 2018, Chloe participated in Yoyo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, the Global Musicians Workshop, promoting multicultural artistic exchange. Her past flute teachers include James Kortum, Aldo Baerton, Alison Mitchell, Alexa Still, and Jocelyn Fazzone. Her dizi teachers include Qiu Dongming, Chai Changning and Zhan Yongming.

Pavle Cajic is an Australian-Serbian pianist and composer of contemporary classical music. Their instrumental music celebrates the beauty of nature and human experience, in works infused with narrative and story-telling. Pavle’s works have been performed in Australia, Norway, and the United States.
Pavle's music has been described as ‘passionate’ and ‘colourful and dramatic’ by acclaimed Pulitzer-Prize winning composers John Corigliano and Melinda Wagner, and as having an ‘impressive range of expression… and power of invention’ by renowned American composer David Conte. Their musical language draws eclectic influences from sources including Western Baroque and Classical-period music, Late Romantic forms and harmony, contemporary experimental harmony, Jazz and Latin American music, and traditional Chinese music.

As a freelance artist in Sydney, Australia, Pavle has been involved in multiple initiatives that use music as a vehicle for social change or justice, including the Sydney-based musical charity Voces Caelestium, with whom they’ve premiered many original orchestral works (2013-2020), and the musician-artist group Dreambox Collective (2020-2022). Pavle has performed extensively over the past seven years with flautist Chloe Chung as the Sidere Duo.

Pavle undertook their musical studies at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (Bachelor of Music, piano) and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (Master of Music, composition). Their mentors have included David Conte, Daniel Rojas, Richard Gill, and Brad Gill (composition) and Natalia Sheludiakova (piano).

Composer(s)

Ennes Mehmedbasic is a classical oboist from Sydney committed to exploring the versatility of the oboe. He performs a wide range of repertoire, often not originally scored for oboe, and also delves into other genres including jazz. Recently Ennes has been performing primarily as an orchestral musician, in particular with the Canberra Symphony, being locally based. As a soloist, Ennes has performed with a number of community orchestras in Sydney. He has also been the recipient of numerous prizes and scholarships, most recently the Ursula Hoff Prize for Most Outstanding Performance of a Mozart Work for his final recital at the Australian National Academy of Music. Romance, featured on this album, was written originally for oboe and piano as part of a larger scale composition, and was arranged personally for Chloe and Pavle as a single movement work.

Jolin Jiang (蒋钟毓) is an intercultural music composer & producer, singer-songwriter and folk artist. Equipped with 18 years of classical music training in Shanghai and Sydney, Jiang’s works are known for their reflective and theatrical qualities and, sometimes, a hint of the East & Southeast Asian aesthetics.
Projects she has worked on have been reviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald and exclusively published many times. She also played the guqin as a session musician for the SBS TV series New Gold Mountain.

Kate Reid, composer
A versatile actress, composer, and performer, Kate Reid was born in Bowral, NSW, in 1948. On leaving school, Reid studied piano in Paris under Mme Bascouret de Gueraldi of the Ecole Normale before returning home to complete a BA at Sydney University where she studied composition with Peter Sculthorpe and Eric Gross. Shortly after, Reid married and raised a family in Southern NSW, where her aesthetic sensibility was formed by the sights and sounds of the Australian bush. In 1977 she returned to Sydney to embark upon an acting career and this new direction provided opportunities to write music for theatre, cabaret, film, television and radio. An accomplished pianist, Reid has performed her own compositions at concert venues in Australia, Ireland, and Croatia. Her music has been performed and recorded in France, Korea and Australia. In June 2017 she completed her Master of Music (Composition) under the supervision of Paul Stanhope at the Conservatorium of Music in Sydney.