David Lumsdaine
David Lumsdaine’s music binds serial craft to Australian landscape and birdsong, from the Bach-haunted piano meditation Ruhe sanfte, sanfte ruh’ to the dense cello concerto A Garden of Earthly Delights and pure field recordings of bush dawn choruses.
Though long based in Britain, he kept returning to Australian ground. Kelly Ground turns the bushranger’s last hours into cyclic strophes of restrained energy and hanging stillness. The Cambewarra, Mutawinji and Lake Emu soundscapes add nothing to the bush: selection, order and microphone placement alone shape dawn choruses, wind on ridges and pied butcherbird song into continuous listening. Chamber Bagatelles break a sextet into solos and duos of half-remembered gesture, as if Bach or Debussy had wandered into a dream. The Six Postcard Pieces flash past as pure idea. Across the complete piano music, pitch rotation and Baroque grounds never feel abstract; they carry human weight, from Kelly’s cell to the birdsong textures of Cambewarra.
David Lumsdaine is featured on the following titles
David Lumsdaine: Complete Music for Solo Piano
Tall Poppies presents the complete solo piano music of Australian composer David Lumsdaine. Spanning nearly thirty years, these works chart the shifting concerns of a major compositional voice rooted in landscape, history and birdsong.
Australian Soundscapes: Lake Emu
Lake Emu is a flood lake on the Darling River in far west New South Wales, in Kinchega National Park. River Red Gums and Black Box were recorded along the Darling. Both sites hold an abundance of birdlife.
Recording Engineer: Recorded By
Australian Soundscapes: Mutawinji
Field recordings by David Lumsdaine capture one of the most extraordinary bird songs on disc: pied butcherbirds at Spirey Creek in the Warrumbungles, with further bush soundscapes from the sacred site of Mutawinji in far western New South Wales.
Recording Engineer: Recorded By
Australian Soundscapes: Cambewarra Mountain
About two hours south of Sydney lies Kangaroo Valley, rising at its eastern end to Cambewarra Mountain. Lush rainforest and cedar forest shelter an astonishing array of birdlife, among them whipbirds and lyrebirds.
Composer
Recording Engineer: Recorded By
Compositions by David Lumsdaine also appear on
Red Earth
A world-premiere recording of important Australian works for instrumental ensemble. Performers and repertoire were hand-selected for the project, which was funded by the Australia Council.
An Australian Collection
Nineteen tracks drawn from the Tall Poppies catalogue, chosen to show the range and depth of Australian composition and performance across the label’s first decade.
A Garden of Earthly Delights
Three Australian concertos in exuberant performances by the Australian Youth Orchestra, conductor Diego Masson, and soloists David Nuttall, Ian Munro and David Pereira.
Mere Bagatelles
As an overview of Australian composition in the 90s, this CD could not be bettered: a musicianly survey of short piano works, with performances of real authority.
Cello Dreaming
Pereira has inspired more new works for his instrument than any other Australian musician. This is his first solo CD of works mostly written for him, and the first of three such discs then planned. His performances are powerful and persuasive.
Voices
Composer–pianist Roger Smalley presents a personal recital of lean, often quiet Australian piano works from the 1960s and 1970s, many appearing on CD here for the first time.