Melba Recordings

Feature: Stephen Emmerson  - The Melbourne Review   Michael Quinn

“It’s an exciting place to be and an exciting time to be here.”

Pianist Stephen Emmerson is waxing lyrical about the attractions of living on the edge of the world. Head east from his base at Griffith University’s Queensland Conservatorium of Music in South Brisbane – where he has taught since 1987 – and you won’t find much of anything in your way except the Pacific Ocean until you double back on yourself and collide with Chile.

As in Queensland, so in Australia, you might say; a country still perceived – even in a global village connected by fast planes and fibre-optic broadband – to be on the edge of the world. If technology has ameliorated many of the concerns embodied in Geoffrey Blainey’s description of a country defined by what he memorably called “the tyranny of distance,” there are also, argues Emmerson, benefits in the self-reliance such isolation has engendered.

“Australia is still relatively young. We haven’t got the established, institutional set way of doing things that other, older countries have. There’s a feeling that if you have ideas, want to blaze your own trail, you can do it.”

Much has changed since his youth when self-imposed exile was the norm, he adds. “Today, you don’t have to prove yourself overseas to succeed in Australia as you might have even a couple of decades ago”.

Despite the seemingly intractable issues about attitude, access and funding that continue to dog Australia’s classical music industry, the sector is displaying surprising signs of being in rude good health.

The emergence onto the international stage of Melba Recordings, new ideas at Opera Australia and the appointment of Asher Fisch as Principal Conductor to the West Australian Symphony Orchestra all point to something of a new era for contemporary Australian music making. Leading from the front is an especially ebullient chamber music scene.

“Chamber musicians can’t do much if audiences don’t support them,” says Emmerson. “But Australian audiences, open to all sorts of new and unusual things, are growing in their enthusiasm for the genre. It’s very common for Australian groups to be presenting traditional repertoire with avant-garde repertoire and new Australian music. There’s diversity across the spectrum which is very productive. If you’re playing music from the past, you have to give it a new energy and place it in contexts that allow it to resonate with our own time.”

Emmerson is about to test that claim with a new release for Melba Recordings featuring the first-ever recording of Heinrich von Bocklet’s 1914 arrangement for eight hands on two pianos of Mahler’s mighty Resurrection Symphony. No stranger to the recording studio, he feels a particular affinity with the Melbourne-based Melba, for whom this will be his third outing on disc.

“It’s a label the country can be proud of. Completely unexpected that it would be able to achieve what it has, but quality always speaks for itself. They produce much more than just a great recording; they package it beautifully, market it and promote it beautifully, and maintain the highest standards in every department.”

No less important, he adds, has been Melba’s “global vision of promoting Australian music beyond our borders. That’s been tremendously successful. Their original goal was to make sure what they produced was world standard in every respect. That’s more than other labels focused on: putting out a product that would be internationally up there with the best”.

Those qualities will be the fore in Emmerson’s double-piano duet version of Mahler. The project came from an initial approach by classical music radio station 4MBS for their annual festival. The idea was enthusiastically embraced by Melba Recordings in another first for the label’s founder, Maria Vandamme, who wrote about her early introduction to Mahler in a recent article for International Record Review,  (link to the longer version with the bit on Jascha added.)

Emmerson, too, has always been a Mahlerian at heart: “I’ve always loved Mahler’s music and I thought it would be fun, if nothing else, to record this extraordinary version of the Second Symphony. I wasn’t convinced it had much chance of being an artistic success until we performed it in concert. It was quite something and showed it was still tremendously powerful in this form.”

Although it is tempting to describe the 40-finger version as a ‘reduction’ of the original score, Emmerson insists it doesn’t dilute its begetter’s symphonic scale or intensity.

“As pianists we all use orchestral metaphor in our playing, so it was a revelation to find this music – without the huge orchestra, the choir and the singers – still had a fantastic impact. It’s astonishingly satisfying to play.

“One is so used to thinking about Mahler as this dazzling orchestral wizard who can brilliantly blend instruments and write thematically for them. But when you take the orchestration out, what you’re left with really shows his astonishing command of counterpoint – there’s a genuine musical integrity to the way these lines are interweaving.”

Performing alongside a trio of Brisbane colleagues – former student Angela Turner, current doctorate student Brieley Cutting and post-graduate Stewart Kelly (with whom he will perform at the Gold Coast Arts Centre’s season finale in December) – Emmerson discretely claims to be “the old man of the keyboard”.

More truthfully, perhaps, is the description of him as “one of Australia’s beloved musicians”, an accolade Emmerson himself modestly sidesteps as being “very flattering. I try to love the music I play as much as I can and if others can appreciate that, I’m very pleased.”