Helen Donaldson
Helen Donaldson is the soprano in Bruce Cale’s Cello Concerto, Op. 65, where her line joins cello and orchestra in long, soaring phrases across a rhapsodic single movement framed by a poem about music.
An Australian operatic soprano, she is best known for the light-lyric heroines of Gilbert and Sullivan, among them Mabel, Yum-Yum and Josephine. In Cale’s concerto the voice is not a constant presence: it opens the adagio, returns in two later episodes, and closes the work. The writing sits in open, luminous textures with the cello, part of a fluid dialogue rather than a set-piece aria, against the Queensland Symphony Orchestra.
Helen Donaldson appears on
Bruce Cale: Orchestral Works
Tall Poppies is delighted to present Australian orchestral works that might well have slipped from view forever but for the archives of their composer, Bruce Cale.