The Sydney Guitar Trio, One Hour To Madness And Joy

One Hour To Madness And Joy is a beautiful but bitty offering from the Sydney Guitar Trio (Raffaele Agostino, Janet Agostino and Richard Charlton), continuing their fine work as ambassadors for Australian classical music. The playing is elegant and a few wacky embellishments bring this selection of seven contemporary guitar pieces to life, but the listening is trying. Modern guitar classics can tend towards the absurd in a bid to move away from the well trodden paths of chamber music and Spanish classics. So when collecting pieces together it requires great care to marry enough of the melodious with the discordant. Additionally, selection of a suite of many parts each on average only a minute long, needs bolstering with a sufficiency of longer tracks to restore balance. Thus, the flow of the album is choppy, but that aside, the pieces are nice examples of contemporary composition. Richard Charlton penned 2 of the pieces presented here, including his The Divine Guitar replete with a narrative that could be straight from the Steve Howe / Rick Wakeman catalogue. Philip Houghton, Alan Holley, accomplished guitarist Roland Chadwick (see review) and the suitably named Amanda Handel (her website simply says "no relation") are the other composers. Ironically, the piece that leans most towards Spanish classical is from the piano-trained Handel.

The album carries the title of Roland Chadwick's composition and refers to the poem by garrulous U.S. author Walt Whitman (from his Leaves of Grass, 1900), an ode to a free spirited life, unconfined by societal expectation,

O something unprov'd! something in a trance!

O madness amorous! O trembling!

O to escape utterly from others' anchors and holds!

To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!

To court destruction with taunts with invitations!

To ascend to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!

To rise thither with my inebriate Soul!

To be lost, if it must be so!

To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!

With one brief hour of madness and joy.

The subtle pyrotechnics on this album are probably considered rather "out there" in the world of classical music repertory; not surprising from the country that brought us Strictly Ballroom. These eccentricities entertain and the music is charming. One Hour To Madness And Joy; the album runs for 65", and is slightly unhinged, and is quite joyous, but splintered.