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by
Martin Setchell, organist
&
Philip Trusttum, artist
on Saturday, May 31, 8pm

REPEAT PERFORMANCE, 2.30pm SUNDAY, AUGUST 8TH, 2010

On Saturday 31 May 2003, Town Hall Organ curator Martin Setchell (Senior Lecturer, School of Music) will give a public solo organ concert on the Rieger pipe organ in the Christchurch Town Hall Auditorium as part of the conference of the NZ Association of Organists in Christchurch.

The major work is an organ transcription of Mussorgsky's epic piano work" Pictures at an Exhibition", in itself an interesting transposition d'art.

Pictures was a 19th century Russian composer's response to drawings and paintings by his close friend Viktor Hartmann, who had studied at the art college in St Petersburg and whose death at the tragically young age of 39 deeply moved the composer. Few of the original drawings and water colours, which Hartmann produced during travels in Italy, France and elsewhere, have survived.

The combination of music with artworks aims not merely to fill that gap, for this, and doubtless many future performances of Pictures by solo pianists and orchestras (in the familiar orchestration by Ravel). It is to draw an artist's response to Mussorgsky's music (the exact opposite of the initial catalytic reaction), and moreover, in terms of contemporary New Zealand culture, from one of the country's most eminent artists.

Because of Mussorgsky's strong and bold music, there could be no better choice than a colorist of the stature of Philip Trusttum, one of the University of Canterbury's most illustrious graduates in Fine Arts. More than any other living New Zealand artist, Trusttum links into the milieu from which Hartmann and Mussorgsky emerged by virtue of the fact that he was mentored at Canterbury by Rudolf Gopas, an East Prussian-born, Lithuanian-trained artist who was heir to the Symbolist and Expressionist traditions of European modernism and a great admirer of synaesthetic 'cross-over' painters such as the Russian Wassily Kandinsky and the Swiss Paul Klee. Gopas was also familiar with the work of Mikolajus Ciurlionis, a Warsaw-trained Lithuanian composer and performer who switched over to painting in the early years of the twentieth century and attempted to paint music. Trusttum is conversant with the work of other like-minded composers of this era such as Scriabin and Schoenberg and the artists who were associated with them.

Trusttum's suite of paintings will be exhibited in the Town Hall Foyer over the weekend of the performance, and images of the paintings will be projected during the performance, with a moving image linkage by John Chrisstoffels (who is teaching film in the School of Fine Arts this year). There is no doubt that the finished artworks would become a unique, valuable, permanent collection, which with its direct musical parallels would serve to deepen appreciation of both art and music in Canterbury and New Zealand.

The whole project also seems a highly appropriate one to mark the month in which the new Christchurch Art gallery is to be opened.

All images on this page are of works in progress and are not the completed project. Many thanks to Philip for his kind permission to view them and display a taste of them on these pages.

Visit Philip Trusttum's website at www.trusttum.co.nz