Matt Keegan: Vienna Dreaming at the Street Theatre

Millie Bull reflects on Matt Keegan's Vienna Dreaming at the Street Theatre last Saturday night. Photos by Peter Hilsop and animations by Monica Higgins

Saturday 17 April 2020, 8 pm

Walking into the Street Theatre on Saturday night, I made a beeline for the bar. After a long day, I had been fantasising about a cold beer on my cycle over. However, as I scanned the foyer, it quickly became apparent that this was not a beer-sipping event. Instead, a sophisticated (and dare I say it, largely grey-haired) audience milled politely with glasses of wine. Despite the choice between a pale ale or a lager, I panicked, ordering a glass of white instead, before joining my fellow audience members for the first live performance of this year’s Canberra International Music Festival: Matt Keegan’s Vienna Dreaming. As I settled into my seat, I was pleased to discover that the wine— a Grüner Veltliner chosen to complement the Austrian theme—was a surprisingly good drop. Despite my best efforts to blend in, I expect that I still looked like an outsider, markedly younger than everyone else in the audience.

As the lights dimmed, Keegan appeared on stage, smiling warmly. Vienna Dreaming, he explained, is a fifty-minute suite of music inspired by his great-grandfather, Heini Portnoj (1895-1984), an Austrian Jew whose career as a musician and composer was cut short by the rise of Nazism. After escaping Europe, Portnoj settled as a refugee in Australia. Commissioned by Keegan’s aunt, Vienna Dreaming translates their shared family history into music, re-animating the most exuberant and calamitous years of Portnoj’s life, from jubilant nights in Viennese dance clubs to the horror of fleeing the Nazi regime. With this brief introduction, Keegan picked up his saxophone and welcomed five other musicians on stage: Ben Hauptman on electric guitar, Véronique Serret on violin, Freyja Garbett on keyboards (plural), Cameron Undy on electric bass and Miles Thomas on drums.

From the opening bars, I found Vienna Dreaming extremely cinematic. I could easily visualise each movement of this suite as a different scene in an epic blockbuster. Just as film composers use musical cues to guide us through the ups and downs of the hero’s journey, Keegan’s composition skillfully navigates the emotional arch of his great-grandfather’s life. As Festival Artistic Director Roland Peelman joyfully exclaimed after the performance, this piece of music is a testament to just how much music can express without a single lyric.

One of the most innovative and mesmerising parts of the performance was a series of animations by Monica Higgins. Projected above the stage, these glorious moving collages, based on vintage photographs of Portnoj and mid-century Vienna, allowed the audience to attach Keegan musical narrative to specific faces and places. Whimsical, surreal and kaleidoscopic, they added visual intrigue to an already entrancing performance.

Despite the average age of the audience, I was surprised by the youthful exuberance of the performance (and performers). This was not the sort of reverent concert-hall recital in which the performers wear black. Not only did keyboardist Freyja Garbett wear a charcoal boiler suit with crimson red boots, but drummer Miles Thomas appeared to play shoeless in a pair of fluorescent yellow socks. The stage was dressed much like the soundstage of Triple J’s Like A Version, with the drum kit set up on a paisley rug. At times, the composition even sounded like the electronica played on Triple J. I read online that Keegan’s music has been likened to that of pop indie darlings Tame Impala. I think it’s an apt comparison. Much like Tama Impala, there is a psychedelic quality to Keegan music, an ethereal dreamlike sound that comes from the combination of acoustic and electronic instruments.