Described by Alex Ross of the New Yorker as “vast and all-consuming”, Alvin Curran’s five hour work for solo piano, ‘Inner Cities’, is a celebration of space, light, meditation and transcendence of time beyond our normal conception.

This Sunday, Gabriella Smart will perform the epic piece in the beautiful resonance of Beaumont House. Smart has previously received rave reviews for past performances of Inner Cities in 2014 in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, and in 2015 at MOFO Hobart.

The audience are invited to participate in a slow listening experience where the music unfolds over a protracted time-frame, moving away from the formality and limitations of the condensed, static listening conventions implicit in the classical traditional concert experience.

During the performance people are free to wander, absorbing the different architectural and acoustic perspectives of the space. Audiences have been known to meditate, bring their yoga mat, or simply sit or lie down. The audience can stay for as long as they wish, or to leave and return later; there is no expectation that people stay for the entire duration, allowing them to control their engagement with the artistic experience.

“My goal, as always, was to reduce the musical elements to their ultimate essences, to repudiate and embrace dualism, and to emulate, even in permanent notation, the feel of spontaneous music-making. The music therefore is open, unhurried, brutally lyrical, quiet, private and tonal as it is raucous, aggressively impolite and obsessively meticulous in making the simple relations between tones and durations an unending adventure of personal wonder.”