Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra Camerata last week won the Queensland State Luminary Award at the APRA Art Music Awards.

Each year the Art Music Awards celebrate outstanding artists and works in Australian art music and sound art. Co-presented by APRA AMCOS and the Australian Music Centre, it’s a well-deserved gong for Camerata.

This much-loved outfit has made a praiseworthy contribution to Queensland’s urban and regional communities while also significantly championing Australian music. The ensemble’s imaginative programming embraces new Aussie works.

True to form, Camerata will present Camerata, Lou Bennett & Lior: Ngapa William Cooper at this year’s Brisbane Festival, an intense song cycle which is a tribute to the legacy and brave activism of Uncle William Cooper, who played a major role in establishing equal rights for Indigenous Australians.

Sung in English and Yorta Yorta, the production has been created by three individuals: singer-songwriter Lior, Dja Dja Wurrung songwriter-composer Dr Lou Bennett (also a descendant of Cooper) and Aussie composer Nigel Westlake (known for his film scores for Babe and Ali’s Wedding).

In 1938 Cooper led the Australian Aborigines’ League through the streets of Melbourne in allegedly the only non-Jewish protest worldwide against Nazi Germany’s Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass).

During this terrible event synagogues were torched and Jewish homes, schools, businesses and hospitals were ransacked or destroyed across Germany. About 90 Jews were killed and 30,000 people were sent to concentration camps.

Cooper’s story is one which people should know about, according to Camerata’s leader and artistic director Brendan Joyce.

“We could all afford to do more cultural training and reading about our First Nations compatriots,” Joyce says. “It’s striking because of the empathy Cooper showed towards people suffering on the other side of the world. Tragically, he had lost his own son in the First World War.”

Camerata, Lou Bennett & Lior: Ngapa William Cooper is a compact 40 minutes in seven sections, starting with a call to ancestors and Cooper learning about the atrocities of Kristallnacht through news reports. In the sixth section, The Protest, there’s a recording of Cooper’s grandson reading the petition Cooper penned to give to the German Embassy.

According to Joyce, there are several reasons why Camerata chose to present this work.

“The music is powerful and cinematic, bridging the divide between opposite spiritual perspectives,” he says. “Many of the players love working with Lior, his voice is a remarkable instrument and Bennett’s contralto is rich and bluesy.”

The moments these two sing in harmony are gold.

“Audiences enjoyed Compassion, also written by Lior and Westlake, which we presented in 2022,” Joyce says. “It’s a logical step for us to stage another of their works. Westlake writes sympathetic music which cuts to the heart of the matter. It reaches in and presses all the right buttons. It’s an authentic work which values Cooper’s actions without coming across as patronising.”

It is also technically challenging, which is why the ensemble’s instrumentalists are currently walled in at home “woodshedding”, a term musicians use for having to practise tricky passages repeatedly until they can be executed perfectly.

Percussionist Nozomi Omote’s role is a feat of staggering difficulty. Westlake has crammed four percussion parts into one. Charmingly, the rustle of eucalyptus leaves into a mic conjures the Aussie bush.

Camerata will perform an unconducted arrangement for chamber orchestra – a Queensland premiere.

“Performing without a conductor is complex due to balancing two soloists with such contrasting voices,” Joyce says. “The music is challenging because, yes, there’s an emphasis on virtuosity, but the task is not to let the showiness get in the way of this work’s emotional message.”

Surprising synergies and synchronicities surround the enterprise. In Lior’s case, he sings about Cooper’s sympathy for his relatives, on his mother’s side, who lived and suffered in Nazi Germany.

In the first half of the program, Lior and Bennett will deliver a selection of their own songs with string arrangements while Camerata will offer a short piece by Max Richter.

“That’s intended to acclimatise the audience and ease them in to the contemporary yet accessible and deeply moving music in the second half,” Joyce says.

The performance culminates with At the End of My Days sung in a blend of Yorta Yorta and English.

Camerata, Lou Bennett & Lior: Ngapa William Cooper plays the QPAC Concert Hall, September 7, 7pm; qpac.com.au

brisbanefestival.com.au

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