Concert Hall, QPAC, Brisbane
April 7, 2018

A full house was treated to a choral concert celebrating life and death with Igor Stravinsky’s Funeral Song, followed by the Four Sea Interludes of Benjamin Britten, Cloudburst from Eric Whitacre, then returning to the funeral theme with Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem Op. 48. The Swedish choral conductor Stefan Parkman, Chief Conductor of the WDR Rundfunkchor Köln, was at the podium, having replaced Alondra de la Parra, who is on maternity leave.

Stefan Parkman conducts the QSO. Photograph © Peter Wallis

An excited audience was hushed by a gentle eerie whisper from the strings as the clarinets, strings and brass crept into a graveyard born of horror movies, with the brass conjuring a menacing dark figure amongst the gravestones. As Stravinsky’s Funeral Song progressed you were transported to a dark, bleak and miserable Russia, with overtones of poverty, until the piece wells with a loud roll of grief from the timpani, to subside to a peaceful end.

Stravinsky wrote Funeral Song as a tribute to his mentor and teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. It was first performed in Russia in 1909 and has uncanny similarities to its successor The Firebird. However, the...