Live Review: Katie Noonan & Brodsky Quartet

Katie Noonan & Brodsky Quartet brought a unique combination of awe-inspiring vocals and thrilling string movements to the City Recital Hall in With Love And Fury. 

It's not often a musical act blends the layered beauty of modern classical music and the lyric poetry of a local legend in world-renowned Australian poet Judith Wright. Noonan and band however found the perfect harmony between these two singular yet complementary art forms. 

The opening song, Late Spring, filled the cavernous theatre with an at once lilting and wistful atmosphere, Wright's words proving simultaneously malleable and inspirational, a perfect springboard for the ensuing sonic majesty.

To A Child ushered in a change of mood to a more exuberant movement, lead by sweeping violin and tentative yet triumphant intrusions by Jacqueline Thomas on cello.

Sonnet For Christmas delved into a dreamscape, capturing the mystery and macabre of Wright's native New England from a whisper to a plaintive scream.

After The Visitors began turbulently with the accumulative whinny and cry of the strings but moved from tumult to calm in its final stages.

The Surfer undulated with a quiet grace and liquidity, matching the ebb and flow of the rhythm of the sea, the swish and swirl of the evening swell.

Night After Bushfire built with a funereal and eerie tone. The tormented hush of Ian Belton's violin chattered and fused with Paul Cassidy's viola in a ghostly compact. The quartet and Noonan's voice combined in a spectral moment, expressing a great trauma.

The Company Of Lovers found the ensemble encapsulating through blissful virtuosic composition the torturous throes of a troubled love affair. The whistle and screech of Daniel Rowland's violin met with Noonan's soaring voice.

The final three songs were varied in their auras, The Slope moving from tender to sorrowful to despairing, Failure Of Communication a pensive and frenetic journey into the existential, and Metho Drinker a dirge with shades of stark wintry loneliness, transforming into an interminable staccato mirroring iambic sorrow.

Noonan & Brodsky Quartet were a tour de force of artful adaptation, weaving a musical arc around the exquisite rhythms of one of the world's great poets.