NOTES. TWILIGHT. ZACHARY DUNBAR

THURSDAY 3RD SEPTEMBER 2026

TEMPO RUBATO

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), the exiled Czech writer Milan Kundera posed a moral dilemma: ‘What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?’. Asking it of those living under totalitarian occupation, he was concerned with whether we remain tied to the earth, dutiful and responsible, or drift into insignificance, tethered to our personal comforts. The recital, built around the notion of 'twilight', is a kind of brooding meditation on this dilemma, as we watch with utter disbelief the current dismantling of civility and order in the world, and the abject state of political and cultural conscience. Playing (and listening to) such music—if one rises to Kundera’s conundrum—is in fact to encounter the interplay of both forces in the form of solace, nostalgia and hope. A way to make bearable twilight.

Thomas Adès (b. 1971) – Darkness Visible (after John Dowland)

Based on Dowland's lute song In Darkness Let Me Dwell (1610), Adès fractures the Elizabethan music’s sombre harmonies and melody littering the piano keyboard in polyphonic fragments, sonic booms, and shimmering tremolos. The result is a contradiction of sounds, made audible by Adès's superimposing of the piano's loudest and quietest extremes. It is also perhaps a nod to Milton's Paradise Lost, where hell is an unimaginable place of ‘no light, but rather darkness visible’.

Ravel (1875-1937) - Oiseaux tristes (‘Sad Birds’)

Ravel conjures a single birdcall into the oppressive hush of a summer forest, its faint pulse dissolving into diaphanous shimmers. The nearest Australian impression that comes to mind is the sound of Bellbird in a heat-stressed forest.

Chopin (1810-1849) - Nocturne in C-sharp minor, Opus 27, No. 1

In Chopin's nocturnes, it's often the left hand that acts as colourist, laying down the harmonic ground against which the melody unfolds. Upon a murky tide of open fifths, a half-discernible, disembodied melody takes shape: a darkness rendered almost visible. The stillness is broken by one of Chopin's most turbulent middle sections, an agitated, mazurka-like episode that gathers into a violent declamation in octaves. The opening doleful mood returns once more, before the nocturne closes in hope-tinged light.

Beethoven (1770-1827) - Sonata in C-Sharp Minor, Opus 27, No. 2 (‘Moonlight’)

Beethoven leaves no doubt how he wanted this piece received: alongside its companion Op. 27, No. 1, he labelled it a sonata quasi una fantasia, signalling a deliberate break from sonata-allegro convention. The usual fast–slow–fast sequence of movements becomes slow–moderate–very fast. The famous first-movement Adagio moves in a suspended half-light, a triplet murmur that a later poet, Ludwig Rellstab, would compare to moonlight on water (a nickname Beethoven never used). Marked to proceed without pause into the second movement, the brief Allegretto offers a strange relief, its short motif and off-kilter syncopations feeling tentative after such stillness. The finale erupts by contrast into a Presto agitato built from the same restless arpeggios that opened the sonata, now transformed into something closer to a storm.

Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) – ‘October’ from The Seasons

The autumn, falling on our poor orchard

The yellow leaves are flying in the wind.

An epigraph from a poem by A. K. Tolstoy (1817–1875), supplied by Tchaikovsky's publisher, is almost needless in music that instantly conjures autumn, here heavily laden with a distinctly Russian ache—part longing, part grief, part homesickness. It's a mood the playwright Anton Chekhov later instilled in his characters, trapped in provincial towns and pining for cherished years.

Kreisler (1875-1962)- Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) – Liebesleid (‘Love’s Sorrow’)

The violinist Fritz Kreisler wrote Liebesleid as the twilight years of the Habsburg Empire approached, passing it off cheekily as the work of a forgotten nineteenth-century Viennese composer. Decades later, Rachmaninoff transcribed it for the piano, thickening the harmonic textures but leaving the tune’s bittersweetness intact.

Chopin – Etude in C Minor, Opus 25, No. 12

This etude, closing the second of Chopin’s two published sets of exquisite piano exercises, sweeps away the gloom in thunderous waves of arpeggios and arrives in glorious C major.

INTERMISSION

Janáček (1854-1928) – Selections from On an Overgrown Path

Janáček’s cycle of miniature fifteen piano pieces, On an Overgrown Path, was written over a span of many years (1900-1911), its tone shadowed throughout by the death of his daughter Olga (in 1903). Its title is drawn from a Moravian folk song about past memory, while the individual pieces carry Janáček’s own poetic titles, each piece a fragment of personal, unresolved grief, expressed by short folk-like melodies and abrupt interjections. This stark juxtaposition of utterances draws on Janáček’s ear for human speech, and perhaps Olga’s faltering breath.

Chopin – Ballade in F minor, Opus 52, No. 4

The recital closes with Chopin’s Fourth Ballade, one of his most searching and complex works. Its narrative circles around a half-dreamt theme, later interleaved with a second theme, a cross between a barcarolle and a chorale. Typical of the ballades, everything here surges organically toward something like an epiphany, the remnants of twilight dissolving into a coda that the Russian pianist Heinrich Neuhaus aptly called 'passion as catastrophe’.

ABOUT ZACHARY DUNBAR

Associate Professor Zachary Dunbar is a Principal Fellow of the University of Melbourne (Faculty of Fine Arts & Music). Born in the Philippines, and raised in the US, he studied piano at Rollins College with Thomas Brockman and Sylvia Reynolds, and took master classes with Gary Graffman, Guido Agosti, and Rudolf Firkušný. As a scholarship student at Yale School of Music, he studied under Claude Frank, Peter Frankl, and Daniel Pollack, won the prize for most outstanding piano recital, and played in the Honours piano trio coached by the Tokyo String Quartet. A Fulbright Scholarship took him to the Royal College of Music to study with Beethoven scholar Kendall Taylor, followed by several years as a concert pianist performing chamber music across Europe, including a recording for Radio Netherlands and an artist residency at Haileybury College. Mid-career, Zachary built a parallel practice in theatre, spanning radio drama (BBC Radio 4), Greek tragedy, musical theatre, and post-dramatic theatre. As a writer-director, his work has been staged at the Pleasance, Bloomsbury, and Camden People's Theatres, at the Edinburgh Fringe (Fringe-First Nominated), and at Denmark's Jungehunde Festival. He has worked over twenty-five years as a musical director, including in Charlotte Jones' award-winning The Diva in Me, and directed Euripides' Bacchai (Central School of Speech and Drama) and Martin Crimp's The Country (Camden People’s Theatre). In Australia, recent work includes Florida (La Mama, 2016) and AntigoneX (Theatre Works, 2018), and a political satire Overacting (current). He has also given musical theatre master classes internationally. His scholarly publications span music theatre, classics, and Stanislavski studies. His book Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), co-authored with Stephe Harrop, won the 2020 Australasian Drama Studies Association prize. He formerly served as Senior Lecturer in Music Theatre and taught Classical Acting at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Since retiring from academia, Zachary remains active in theatre, has returned to piano performance, and fundraises for charities including the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre.

4th September 2026