Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra - River Mountain Sky: Orchestral works by Maria Grenfell (2024) Hi-Res

Maria Grenfell’s music has been described as ‘expansive, effusive and energetic’, ‘magic’, and ‘refreshingly groovy’. Her chamber music is played around the world. Her orchestral music has been commissioned and performed by all the major symphony orchestras in Australia and New Zealand; this album presents world premiere recordings of six of Grenfell’s best-loved orchestral works, exploring subjects as diverse as Maori legend, Tasmania’s natural beauty, the struggles of immigrant workers, and 18th-century explorer Matthew Flinders’ extraordinary cat Trim!

It's Flinders and Trim who open the album, in Grenfell’s orchestral tribute to companionship, humour, love and loss on the open sea. Trim the cat accompanied Flinders on his voyages as he circumnavigated the Australian continent, the first European to map much of its coastline. Trim spend most of his life on ships, climbing ropes, swimming in the sea, catching mice, eating food from the officers’ forks and even, on one occasion, stealing a cold leg of mutton from the pantry…

Stealing Tutunui is based on the Maori tale of the treacherous Kae who steals and eats the whale of the powerful chief Tinirau. Grenfell grew up in New Zealand and completed her undergraduate composition studies there; this vibrant and magical piece celebrates her connection with one of her two homes.

Grenfell’s other home is Australia, where she is an Associate Professor at the University of Tasmania Conservatorium of Music. Spirals was written for two of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra’s star players, Principal Clarinet Andrew Seymour and Principal Bassoon Tahnee van Herk. It is a rare work indeed: a duet for the unusual but exquisite combination of clarinet and bassoon, accompanied by orchestra. The only other composer to have written a major work for these forces is Richard Strauss.

River Mountain Sky is an impression in music of the beauty of the Tasmanian landscape: rivers and mountains painted by orange and pink skies at dawn and dusk; dramatic cloud formations that give way to quiet nights when stars sparkle across a clear southern sky; mist over estuaries, sunshine dancing off a bright blue river and cascades of rushing water. Fanfare for a City captures a very different mood, revelling in the energy and movement of urban life.

The album closes with Tarraleah, a journey back to the 1950s to meet the men who built the Tasmanian hydro-electric scheme: Polish immigrants who thought they were headed for NSW but ended up in Tarraleah, Tasmania, where they were told it would be ‘not as hot’! Their experiences, both hair-raising and humorous, of the cold, difficult and dangerous conditions, inspired Grenfell to evoke their stories in music, as a tribute to their labour, their spirit and their legacy.