Pictures at the Waikato Museum

About

These character piano pieces were composed as musical responses to art works in the Trust Waikato Collection, Hamilton.

Lace (artist: Jacquie Haselden)
The image appears as a lace tablecloth under glass. It is actually finely rendered in paint. The intention of this small piece of music is to capture the exquisite delicacy of the painting.

Play-Pen (artist: Jenny Doležel)
The creatures in Jenny Doležel’s Play-Pen, the title work of this recording, are not the comfortable companions of childhood that we might expect: the artist refers to them as “the outward manifestations of our inner landscapes”. The music adopts the comfortably archaic form of Prelude and Fugue but the fugue with its distorted whole-tone subject piles up relentlessly leading to a bewildering disintegration.

The Leading Violinist (artist: Garth Tapper)
The violinist, wrapped in a red gown, turns her face away from the viewer. She is absorbed in rhapsodic music making. We should hear the sweeping freedom of her bowing in the music.

Landscape with Cathedral (artist: Frances Ellis)
This painting is a dark, stylized, multi-faceted depiction of Hamilton. The music conveys the sense of simultaneous stillness and movement powerfully expressed in the painting.

Grandparents at the Door (artist: Michael Smither)
The door divides the strident, brightly coloured children’s world from the darker, quieter exterior space of their grandparents. We sense the door about to open, the merging of the two spaces, the patient love of the grandparents, and, above all, the insistent clamour of the children.