Very High Kings – exhilarating and joyous music, heard here in a magnificent live performance from the Sydney Symphony and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Inspired by Christopher Columbus, Richard Meale’s musical voyage charts a colourful new world.

A performance of Richard Meale’s Very High Kings is an exhilarating thing. The aural exhilaration can be captured in a recording, but the sheer physicality of the music is another matter. Meale employs an ‘enormously powerful orchestra’, which includes two pianos (often amplified to raised speakers on either side of the hall), a grand organ, and six trumpets. It was premiered in 1968 in Sydney’s Town Hall, a high-Victorian confection that boasts a very grand organ indeed (the largest in the world when it was built), as well as an upper gallery at the far end from the stage – perfect for six trumpets. It’s easy to imagine that Meale had the intended venue and the visual impact of the music in mind.

The Town Hall is no longer the Sydney Symphony’s home, but Meale’s music, performed in the modern grandeur of the Sydney Opera House, still works the same spatial magic, and none of the symbolism is lost. This symbolism ranges from the pianos, which toll like deep bells, says Meale, to ‘express unswerving conviction’, to the organ, creating a ‘feeling of greatness of vision, of dignity and gratitude’. The trumpets in turn ‘augur triumph and give the final touch to the feeling of confidence, grandeur and excitement’.

That feeling – joyous and irresistible in its effect – lies behind the success and popularity of this music, which counts amongst the more frequently performed of Australian orchestral works from the 1960s. (Stuart Challender, the Sydney Symphony’s Chief Conductor from 1987 to 1991, was a particular advocate.) And that feeling was present in the performance captured in this recording. It’s a performance that highlights, in the words of one local critic, a style that is ‘sinewy and authentic’.

Very High Kings forms the first part of a cycle called The Mystical Voyage of Christopher Columbus. Here Meale uses the word ‘mystical’ to suggest hidden meaning, awe-inspiring and mysterious rather than religious or spiritual experience. And ‘voyage’ is quitedeliberately in the singular – despite Columbus’ making five individual voyages – because Meale was evoking ‘the actual experience of artistic, creative endeavour as well as the adventure of living’ rather than any real journeys. The title comes from Columbus’ letter to his sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain:

Very High Kings:
From a very young age I began to follow the sea and have continued to do so to this day. This art of navigation incites those who pursue it to enquire into the secrets of this world.

[The letter continues]…that it was feasible to sail from here to the Indies, and placed in me a burning desire to carry out this plan…All who knew of my enterprises rejected…Only Your Highnesses had faith and confidence in me.

The formal opening of the music echoes the formal opening of the letter, addressing the audience, as it were. It is colourful and imposing: a massive E flat chord on the organ. The music then proceeds, as Meale describes it: ‘in a series of visions – each growing towards fulfilment before giving way to the next.’ There is an ever-increasing sense of conviction, an ‘expansive sureness of purpose’ that, by the end, is realised in brilliant spatial and colouristic effects.

In 1995 Very High Kings made a voyage of its own when the Sydney Symphony took the work on its European tour with the then Chief Conductor, Edo de Waart. That this work was chosen as an ‘ambassador’ for Australian music nearly thirty years after its creation says much for the sophistication and originality of Meale’s vision, and it says everything about the music’s confidence, grandeur and excitement.

Yvonne Frindle
Sydney Symphony © 2008