Perth Festival: Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds ★★½

Paul Kelly, James Ledger, Alice Keath and Seraphim Trio
Perth Concert Hall
15 Feb, 2020

The cumulative effect of things being awry at the performance of James Ledger and Paul Kelly’s Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds made for a frustrating, disappointing evening.
The recording of the same name won the 2019 ARIA for best classical album, and the snatches of it I’d heard on ABC Classic FM certainly augured well for its live performance.
Kelly has been a significant rock songwriter and musician for decades and has maintained both his quality and his popularity  – as evidenced by the capacity crowd at the Perth Concert Hall – so expectations understandably ran high.
The concept of the piece, too, was promising: a baker’s dozen of songs and instrumental pieces inspired by and featuring the work of famous and lesser-known poets on the subject of birds.
So the wings were all there, but, sadly, it just didn’t fly.
There were missed opportunities in the presentation of the material (I’ll get to them later), but the main culprits were technical and staging-related.
For some reason, the sound quality was below par. Kelly’s vocals, so obviously the central factor in appreciation of the material, was other-roomly throughout, a deadly problem for a singer whose voice, while very well suited to his own material, doesn’t have much cut or penetration.
The instrumental mix, too, was less than adequate. Anna Goldsworthy’s piano was over-amplified, badly affecting the sound balance, a problem exacerbated by co-composer James Ledger’s reticent approach to his guitar playing. Ledger is an estimable composer and musician, and watching him approach his instrument with such apparent caution was mystifying and painful.
No such problems with cellist Tim Nankervis, because it was all but impossible to watch him at all, hidden as he was behind a gigantic music stand that obscured his face and gave the audience only peek-a-boo glimpses of his playing. Nankervis and his megastand also obscured our view of Goldsworthy.
At least Kelly, violinist Helen Ayres and multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Alice Keith were clearly visible, but the damage was done.
The overall impression was of a lack of care in staging and production, and a kind of introspection in performance that was a slight on its audience. I’m sure that wasn’t the intention, but it was hard not to feel it.
Though poems and songs are two different beasts, and great poets are often lousy songwriters and vice versa, there’s no denying the quality of the material enlisted for this project. When it was fit for purpose, as in Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush, Glen Harwood’s Barn Owl and, especially, Emily Dickinson’s tiny, gorgeous “Hope” is the Thing with Feathers and Denis Glover’s The Magpies, the concert rose above its problems.
A.D. Hope’s The Death of the Bird is no song, but it’s a powerful statement of mortality and the great circle of life, and Miroslav Holub’s pitch-black, hilariously framed The Fly (translated here by George Theiner) is a historical novel in 33 short lines you should make it your business to investigate.
These works, and some others, made me wonder whether the structure of the show might benefit from having the poems recited – perhaps over some light musical prelude – before they are performed as songs. Apart from making the work clearer to the audience, it might often free the compositions up to do more than rigidly follow the poems as written, making them more amenable to the rhythm of the music.
Not that Kelly et al are likely to be disposed to take advice from a grumpy old bastard like me