Above: Jess Hitchcock performed her original songs with Penny Quartet, in new arrangements commissioned by Musica Viva.Featured image: Jess with the quartet surrounded by trees of light. Images: Artshoot Media.
The last time I saw Jess Hitchcock perform, she was behind a large Sydney Symphony Orchestra and singing beside Deborah Cheetham Fraillon in her compelling Sydney premiere of Eumeralla, a war Requiem for Peace. It was a total thrill and instantly impressive moment to be able to hear Jess in singer-songwriter mode perform her originals in dynamic arrangement for voice and string quartet.
This genre shift to Hitchcock’s own direct, touching and emotionally sophisticated music illustrated well this important and versatile artist’s appeal and gifts of communication as well as collaboration. This important artist with a Torres Strait plus background is a trained opera singer. She is as successful and comfortable with an orchestra as with a country style band, as a vocalist playing piano and guitar.
Hitchcock has been a campaigner for the Voice referendum and is about to work again in stadium concerts with Paul Kelly. Her You Tube videos (which I have been bingeing since this moving concert) include community performances seen with First Nations musical royalty Jem Cassar-Daley and Dharpanbal Yunipingu, as well as a duet with ABC’s Tamara-Anna Cislowska-classical music hats off , performing a cover of Chandelier by Sia.
It was special to see the last concert in the Musica Viva tour, staged out of the city and in Sutherland-the area where Jess grew up. The stage for this homecoming concert, co-presented by the Pavillion Performing Arts Centre, featured the vocalist and Penny Quartet positioned centre stage, effectively surrounded by electric light trees.
From this warm, evocative landscape came an impressive line of music from the genre-globetrotting singer-songwriter and versatile quartet. This Musica Viva project gave the new ensemble a chance to champion the expressive possibilities and intensities of the modern string quartet with voice, (with bright new addtions to this colourful canon’s repertoire) and for an instant with piano, voice and strings.
Above: Jess Hitchcock and Penny Quartet performed surrounded by stunning lighting installations. Image: Artshoot Media.
A dozen songs (and a dozen newly commissioned arrangements) emphasised the creativity, huge vocal resources and virtuosity as a lyricist of this important modern musician. Hitchock shone as a strong and inspirational Australian, woman and thoughtful human.
Each song was chosen by a composer who was attracted to it. The programme documents composers’ observations on compositional potential in arrangement, or the resonating message in Hitchcock’s subtle but penetrating feeling-fable. The result of this sprawling Musica Viva commission project is impressive, touching and a needed reinforcement of contemporary music’s refusal of being put in any sort of stylistic box or predictable sonic outcome.
Jess Hitchcock’s tight compositions- from her first two albums Bloodline (2019) and Unbreakable (2023) transfer well to the modern arrangements. Obviously inspired by the high level of lyrics and clarity of their musical packaging in the album versions, each arranger had a fantastic time extending and developing sentiment and sound from the original songs.
Jess Hitchcock’s true and agile voice, making use of classical plus other techniques and experiences, had no trouble soaring above some complex string gesturing. The joyous collaboration was so endearing to witness. Here we were shown that a good song, with a well structured and perfectly place lyric, communicates and reaches us despite manipulation and performance practice.
So what were the messages that were so expertly packaged by Australian arrangers Ian Grandage, Holly Harrison, Isaac Hayward, Matt Laing, May Lyon, James Mountain, Nicole Murphy, Christine Pan, Ben Robinson, Harry Sdraulig and Alex Turley in this significant addition of new arrangements for voice and modern string quartet?
They are love-old, new, unsuitable and lost. Family, Gratitude. Fear. Defending our emotions. Falling in love. Maintaining relationships. Dignity in life. The tragedy of life lost. Some of this fare may have been in danger of sounding twee, cliche or all-heard-before. However, Jess Hitchcock’s elevated marrying of text and music with new filigree accentuating her svelte melodies ensure no lyric nor any musical trajectory was commonplace, trite or lack-lustre.
Above: Penny Quartet members Glenn Christensen and Madeleine Jevons. Image: Artshoot Media.
A gifted lyricist along with consummate talents of performance sensitivity, Jess Hitchcock’s intricate song-mesh structures were stunning snippets of surival and hope. These were often through composed pieces, with advanced storytelling language and evocative titles slammed their no-mucking-around messages home.
It was immediately edge of the seat stuff, and do sound or sentiment could ever be ingenuine. The newly arranged lessons in humanity were crystal clear lullabies for our modern challenges, though the themes could have led to trite testaments with lesser songwriters and creatives involved.
Songs to fracture a harmful status quo included: Fight for Me. (2019), Not a Warzone (2023), Running in the Dark (2019) and On My Own (2023). The ultimate gift as a creative- a creation to honour a family member, shone with Leader of the Pack (2019). Hitchcock’s song used to support her work on the Voice referendum, Together (2019) had retrospective gravitas. A joyous pleasure in environment reached us in By the Sea (2019) and even the hardest lyrics inspired hope.
The rendition and arrangement of Unbreakable– the title track of Jess’ 2023 album received an audible gasp from the proud homecoming crowd, marvelling at her wise words in this effective new envelope, so fluidly performed.
Local chamber music stars Penny Quartet (Glenn Christensen, Madeleine Jevons, Anthony Chataway and Jack Ward) demostrate a superb affinity with Jess Hitchcock’s messagemaking plus the elaborate extrapolating by the arrangers. Their accompaniment was clear and detailed, with no new gesture or packaging underplayed or unclear.
Above: Penny Quartet members Anthony Chataway and Jack Ward. Image: Artshoot Media.
Instrumental interludes came in the form of the string players delivering the innovate sounds of Pulitzer Prize winning, recent Grammy Award winner Caroline Shaw. Her quartet Plan and Elevation: The Grounds of Dumbarton Oaks is an innovative use of the modern string quartet. Its economical utterance and advanced string shaping across five movements explore the effects of external, natural environments on humans.
As in Penny Quartet’s playing of the song arrangement accompaniments- an outward response to the texts and human emotions within, these soundscapes were finely rendered and the level of quartet synergy plus group clarity was exemplary. A deft and different choice in the programming was to insert one movement at a time between the flow of songs grouped into brackets of linked themes. This innovation paid off, supplying superlative evocative interludes for the portraits of survival in song
This concert represented an immense creative and performance collaboration. Bravo Musica Viva for such a worthwhile legacy of new music, a busying of considerable local talent and a showcaing of unique performers with a huge future in Jess Hitchcock and Penny Quartet.
