What Times Are These

                                                                 
What times are these, where

A conversation about trees is almost a crime

Because it includes silence on so many atrocities!

 

(Bertolt Brecht, "To Generations Born After" 1939)

                                                                  

Ninety years after Brecht, the need of one generation to account to others unborn is urgent again. Music itself is a constant interplay between generations of composition, poetry and historic experience – a flickering between present and past, with a capacity to express tensions and characters of a coming era.

Two choral trilogies by Australia’s senior composers Helen Gifford (b.1935) and George Dreyfus (b.1928) are the focus of Astra’s first concert for 2026. Each of the two cycles, composed two decades apart, “flickers” between graphic, contemporary musical styles and recollections of drastic historical moments.

Helen Gifford CATHARSIS (2001), three poems for choir
George Dreyfus, THREE PIECES FOR CHOIR (2020–22)

Heinrich Schütz, Gustav Mahler, Max Reger, Alma Mahler, Stefan Wolpe, György Ligeti, Samir Odeh-Tamimi;

Poems of Hölderlin, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Lenau, Falke, Dehmel, Anna Akhmatova, Kathleen Raine, Elizabeth Riddell, Bertolt  Brecht, Mahmoud Darwish, George Dreyfus.

THE ASTRA CHOIR & SOLOISTS
Kim Bastin and Peter Dumsday (solo piano)
Timothy Phillips (percussion)
conducted by John McCaughey

Drinks available for purchase before and after the show, as well as at interval.