Camerata – Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra closed their 2023 mainstage season with a charming collaboration, featuring bespoke short films set to classical pieces performed live by Camerata’s string musicians.
Founded in 1987, Camerata is a chamber orchestra that performs without a conductor, with the musicians taking full ownership. 2023 also marks Camerata’s 10th year as a Company in Residence at Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC).
Camerata Cinematheque featured eight bespoke short films by Australian filmmaker Anthony Lucas, paired with pieces of classical music that were curated and/or commissioned by Camerata and performed live by their string musicians. Four of these films had been created for a previous collaboration, the spooky 2015 concert series Things That Go Bump In the Night, and four more were created especially for Cinematheque. In several of the short films, Lucas’ children Peggy and Henry and partner Julia were credited as co-creators.
In addition to these screen-and-strings pairings, the concert opened with Edward Grieg’s Holberg Suite, a suite of five movements based on 18th century baroque dance and Norwegian folk music. The suite is named after Dano-Norwegian humanist playwright Ludvig Holberg, and was written to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Holberg’s birth. The Camerata musicians leapt straight into this suite to open the concert, from the galloping first movement Praeludium to the gliding, slithering Sarabande and dancing Gavotte, slowing with the sweet Air and concluding with the shifting colours of the energetic Rigaudon.
Following the Holberg Suite, Camerata principal violinist Jonny Ng introduced the first three films. The curtains behind the musicians parted and a huge screen came into view, showing Lucas’ short films as the musicians played the accompanying piece of music. Lighting designed by Zak Harrison also shifted throughout, setting the tone for each new work.
The first film was a horror-turned-surreal-comedy titled The Disassembly Macabre – a man (played by Christian Bagin) woke up strapped to a gurney in a dark room full of horrifying homemade torture tools, but everything was not as it seemed. The film was set to Camille Saint-Saens symphonic tone poem Danse Macabre, based on the French legend of Death playing a fiddle at midnight on All Hallows’ Eve, animating the skeletons to crawl from the ground and dance. Onscreen, the film used dramatic close-ups and cut sharply between perspectives to heighten the tension, before diffusing this with increasingly absurd revelations.
The second film, Farewell the Sky, was a stop-motion animation in silhouette with colourfully painted backdrops of a dying planet and outer space. This short animation was set to Solstice, from the eight-movement work Impressions of Erin by Camerata’s Founding Leader Cameron Patrick. Inspired by a 2006 road trip that Patrick took in Ireland, this large-scale work was commissioned by Camerata founder Elizabeth Morgan, and Camerata gave the world premiere performance in 2012. The Solstice movement was inspired by the ancient Irish tomb mound, Newgrange, where the rising sun of the winter solstice illuminates the chamber of the subterranean structure for only 15-20 minutes each year.
The Erlking Calls For Me was the third short film, accompanied by Franz Schubert’s unsettling Der Erlkönig arranged for string orchestra by Michael Patterson. Both the film and the composition were inspired by a poem written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was himself influenced by German folklore. All of these stories tell a version of the same tale – a young boy is lured into the woods by a supernatural being, the Erlking, as the boy’s father tries to save or protect him. Lucas’ film used a similar animation style to Farewell the Sky, telling its story in silhouette and with a limited colour palette of blacks, blues, and eerie green-yellow.
After a brief interlude, the concert continued with the short film Housefly, set to Concerto in Re by Igor Stravinsky, beginning with the second movement. Alone in a deep green room, a woman (played by KT Prescott, costumed by Oriana Merullo) seemed to be waiting. The music began in ominous tones, but became quirkier in descending trills. Onscreen, the woman was pursued by a fly, unpacked an increasingly strange array of items from her handbag, and checked her reflection to a chorus of frantic strings. Quick shifts and strange perspectives from the camera added to the unsettling tone of this visceral short film.
Lucas’ Portrait came next, with Love to Love Your Strings, Baby by Erik Griswold as the soundtrack. Portrait was a shifting collage of portraits of the filmmaker created by his partner, Julia Lucas, who also co-directed this short film. In two dimensions, Lucas was sitting, standing, waking, and napping through a cluttered abstract landscape of shapes, lines, and colours. Camerata premiered this work in 2013 and has performed it many times in the years since – Griswold’s composition is an homage to disco strings, taking inspiration from Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra and Donna Summer’s 1975 hit Love to Love You Baby.
Up next, One Way Streets was one of my personal favourites from the concert. Set to Leroy Anderson’s cheerful pizzicato piece Plink, Plank, Plunk!, Lucas’ short film began with historic and current photographs of the Brisbane CBD, but evolved into a stop-motion animation piece wherein pieces of litter and other discarded items shifted and rearranged to become delightful characters. Camerata Artistic Director Brendan Joyce noted that kids had been “dancing frantically” to this piece of music when it was performed it in Bardon as part of Brisbane Festival’s Brisbane Serenades.
The second-to-last piece was set to Psycho: A Short Suite for String Orchestra, composed by Bernard Herrmann. Lucas’ film for this iconic piece of music was an homage to Alfred Hitchcock and designer Saul Bass, who created the title sequences of many Hitchcock films including Psycho. The teeth-on-edge screaming of the violins in the Psycho Suite has become so ubiquitous in horror as to be a cliché, but there is nothing like hearing it played live! Titled Psycho Suite, Lucas’ short film created a dynamic, shifting collage of vintage images as well as direct references to Hitchcock’s 1960 horror film Psycho and the famous shower scene, such as an animated floor plan of the Bates Motel room.
The eighth and final short film combined live-action and timelapse filming with stop-motion for Lost, a sweet short film about a lost item on an adventure. A young woman (played by Anthony Lucas’ daughter, Peggy) crafts characters out of toilet rolls for her zine comic The Rollies, but one falls overboard as she cycles through the park. Set to Robert Davidson’s sweeping, evocative Elegy – initially commissioned in 2000 by the Australian Youth Orchestra – Lost shows the Rollie exploring their surroundings, sheltering from the rain, and watching the clouds pass overhead.
Anthony Lucas’ impressive diversity of filmmaking practice and his command of perspective and tension came together with the passion and artistry of Camerata’s string musicians to create something greater than the sum of its parts. Camerata Cinematheque was a charming and imaginative concert, closing 2023 on a high note for Camerata – Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra.
Camarata Cinematheque was performed at the QPAC Concert Hall on 15 September 2023 and at Empire Theatres, Toowoomba, on 22 September 2023.
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