Essential Grevillea Series 2024 – No. 2

​

For our second Essential programme, we featured Six Songs by Margaret Sutherland. Sutherland is one of Australia's most innovative and influential composers. According to the Wirripang website, "she considered it her mission to promote new music, especially that of Australian composers who, she said, 'experienced public indifference and a profound sense of isolation'". The songs are settings of poetry by Judith Wright and are considered by Graham Abbott to be "one of the finest examples of the composer's innate gift for word-setting". Click here for an ABC podcast about Margaret Sutherland's life and work.

​

The Sutherland songs were complemented by a setting of North Country folk songs by fellow Australian Don Banks, written while he was in London with Sutherland in the 1950s.

 

The programme concluded with Edvard Grieg’s portrayal of a young herding girl’s first love affair and heartache, intertwined with imagery of the mystic Norwegian landscape. Click here for a taste.

 

Programme:

• Don Banks: Three North Country Folk Songs

  • Buy broom buzzems

  • My bonny lad

  • King Arthur’s servants

​

• Margaret Sutherland: Six Songs (settings of poetry by Judith Wright)

  • Midnight

  • Winter Kestral

  • The Old Prison

  • Woman's Songs

  • The Twins

  • Bullocky

​

• Edvard Grieg: The Mountain Maid song cycle

  • You know now the dream

  • She is slender and dark

  • Are look, there are berries here

  • She sits one Sunday morning on the hill

  • That crazy boy has my mind enchanted

  • Oh hip and hop

  • She counts the hours

  • You soft swirling brook