Sound ideas for inspired vision

Old Master paintings and baroque music go together like wine and cheese and it isn’t difficult to imagine corpulent composers such as Handel or Bach enjoying all four at once as they presided over soirees in their Brook Street or Thomaskirchhof residences, the claret flowing as freely as the melodies of a violin sonata or the brushstrokes of a Rubens.

Now Perth music-lovers will find it even easier to imagine, with the return to Perth of Canadian period instrument ensemble Tafelmusik. Last here in 2012 with the Helpmann Award-winning The Galileo Project, an artful combination of baroque music and projected images of the night sky with readings from the works of early astronomers, Tafelmusik this time presents House of Dreams — an altogether different, if equally enjoyable, feast for the senses.

“It’s similarly a combination of live music with words and images,” Galileo Project and House of Dreams creator Alison Mackay says over the line from Vancouver.

“But House of Dreams was conceived in partnership with the organisations that run five former private homes which used to have important art collections and where musical performances once took place.”

Those five are London’s Handel House Museum, Venice’s Palazzo Smith Mangili-Valmarana, Delft’s Golden ABC, Paris’ Palais-Royal and the Bach Museum and Archive in Leipzig. As Tafelmusik, under the direction of Jeanne Lamon, performs music by Handel, Vivaldi, Purcell, Marin Marais, Bach and others, images appear on a large screen, framed in baroque gilt, of paintings by Watteau, Canaletto, Vermeer, Titian, Rubens and others. Audiences will also be taken into the rooms themselves and out into the streets, while narrator Blair Williams tells the stories of the places and the people, often in their own words.

Mackay, who has played violone and double bass with Tafelmusik since 1979 and who is the driving force behind Tafelmusik’s “multi- disciplinary and cross-cultural programming”, says that after The Galileo Project she was keen to experiment with a show involving baroque painting.

“The Galileo Project made me realise how the emotional experience of seeing images and hearing music at the same time can be something greater than the sum of its parts,” she says. “At first I thought we could focus on one collection, as if the orchestra had got locked in the Hermitage or something.”

But the further Mackay researched, the more she noticed connections between the five houses eventually featured in House of Dreams.

“Joseph Smith, who lived in the Venice’s Palazzo Smith Mangili- Valmarana, was the British consul in Venice and the main agent for Canaletto,” she says.

“Handel probably bought his Canaletto from Smith while he was there recruiting singers. And at one time Smith owned the same Vermeer painting known as The Music Lesson, which also hung in Delft’s Golden ABC.

“So there are all those little connections, and as we travel from London to Venice we zoom into the middle of the Canaletto painting on Handel’s wall and suddenly we come out the other side and you see it on the wall of the house in Venice.”

The title The House of Dreams comes from Book II of the Roman poet Ovid’s famous mythological collection, Metamorphoses. “There’s a wonderful description where Somnus, the god of sleep is visited, his bed covered by dreams as numerous as leaves on the forest floor,” Mackay says.

The god’s children — Morpheus, Phantasos and Phobetor — assume the form of humans, animals and objects as the dreams are despatched to haunt the heads of sleeping mortals.

“That becomes for us a metaphor for artistic inspiration — that these forms are sent to you by the gods,” Mackay says.

The conceit is set up in the first half of the concert — Triptych — while the full story that contains the description of The House of Dreams is left for the second half, Mirror Image.

“Many aspects of the second half are mirror images of the first,” Mackay says.

“And at the beginning of the concert, as well as during intermission and at the end, the screen above the stage turns into a giant mirror. The audience sees themselves and the entire concert hall becomes our House of Dreams.”

The House of Dreams is at Perth Concert Hall tomorrow at 7.30pm.