Here are two large-scale works from either end of the 1980s by the Australian composer Barry Conyngham (b. 1944), performed with authority and recorded with wide-spaced clarity. The music is undoctrinaire, eclectic, yet, for a composer who likes to fill out spans of 25 to 30 minutes, Conyngham seems to me to rely too much on repetition of ideas which ought rather to provide the basis for more concentrated evolution.
The double concerto Southern Cross (1981) sets out to illustrate the concepts of its five movement titles—''Magnitude'', ''Velocity'', ''Duration'', ''Collisions'', ''Distance''—and although it does this with some flair, I felt that time was being marked rather than mastered. The ideas simply aren't strong enough, at least until the work's big orchestral coda, which seems to bury the soloists in a gesture of defiant dismissal.
Monuments (1989) continues the project of attempting to integrate concerto form with a pictorial plan, and in each of the movement titles Conyngham juxtaposes a natural feature of the Australian landscape with a man-made structure—for example, Uluru (or Ayers Rock) and the Sydney Opera House. Again, the music is strong on the establishment of atmosphere, but less convincing as a treatment or development of substantial musical ideas. Asking the soloist to move between the piano and the DX7 synthesizer opens up a wider range of tone-colours, but the impression remains of an essentially romantic style that only assumes a more modern guise from time to time. In the last movement of Monuments Conyngham establishes an engaging, even primitive vitality, and I wished that more of the music in these compositions had cut through its own rather ponderous rhetoric in this way.'