Music You Can't Get Out Of Your Head

Have you heard this beautiful piece of music? It is one of the most popular pieces of contemporary Australian music. It is called Eliza's Aria and was composed by Elena Kats-Chernin for her ballet Wild Swans, which is based on a Hans Christian Andersen story about Eliza, a princess, whose eleven brothers have been transformed into wild swans by a wicked witch. Eliza must knit magic shirts from stinging nettles to break the spell.

The tune is the third most performed in UK television advertising.

We heard it recently in a staff concert performed by Prem Love and Elena Day-Hakker, in a student performance opportunity, played by Chloe Walker and Elena Day-Hakker and then by David Pereira (cello) and Alice Giles (harp) at All Saints Cathedral.

Not sick of it, yet. There are several interesting versions of it available on Youtube, including Sarah Cracknell's The Journey Continues.

Music Is For Life

For the past six weeks, Mitchell Conservatorium has been hosting a Music Appreciation program for Bathurst's University of the Third Age. Each year in Term 4, David McKay presents a one hour program which includes interesting top-quality performances and recordings of music on a selected theme. This year we have been focussing on French Music from the past two hundred years.

Performers have included Julia Romano, who sang French chansons by Debussy and Fauré, Glen Wholohan, who played movements from an enjoyable, jazzy saxophone suite by Jean Françaix, Chloe Walker, who played an arrangement of Debussy's first Arabesque for flute and piano, and Joan and David McKay, who played Fauré's beloved Dolly suite for piano duet.

For the final week's program, Cheryl McKellar played Tango en Skai by Roland Dyens, which you can hear played by the composer himself in the video at the head of this post.

Mitchell Conservatorium's first director, Laurie Orchard, inaugurated the Bathurst Music Appreciation program in the 1990s. David McKay is humbled and honoured to be following in his distinguished footsteps. (Laurie, an octogenarian, is still hosting a U3A Music Appreciation program in Lismore, where he now lives.)