Icy Snaps Add To Musical Grandeur

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday March 8, 2007

Steve Meacham.

Photographer Herbert Ponting was with Scott at the Antarctic, and will accompany him again, writes Steve Meacham.

THE harrowing words, delivered by John Bell, are from the final diaries of Robert Falcon Scott. The emotional music, performed by the Sydney Symphony, is Ralph Vaughan Williams's much-loved Sinfonia Antarctica.

And the breathtaking photographs of Scott's tragic race to the South Pole? The ones that will be projected onto a massive screen the full width of the Sydney Opera House's concert hall? The 80 specially selected images which will help transport concertgoers who attend the unique multimedia event back to the icy world where Scott and his men perished in 1912?

They are by Herbert Ponting, the Scott expedition photographer whose pioneering work has been overshadowed - in Australia, at least - by the subsequent images of Antarctica by our own Frank Hurley.

For Raff Wilson, the orchestra's artistic manager, discovering Ponting's photographs was a piece of timely serendipity. The orchestra was planning to stage the Vaughan Williams piece interspersed with appropriate readings from Scott diaries by Bell. That formula had been tried, successfully, by other orchestras around the world.

But as Wilson was flicking through a book of Ponting's photos of the expedition, he realised they were so stunning - and so technically proficient - they would add a magnificent third dimension to the performance: something that had not been attempted before.

Wilson approached the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University for permission to use the Ponting images, and in doing so found out much more about the highly strung man who created such beautiful pictures in such appalling sub-zero conditions.

"Ponting was already an established landscape photographer by the time Scott chose him out of the hundred who had applied," says Wilson. "He'd tried a career in banking, a career in agriculture, in mining. But everything he attempted was either a mixed success or a failure."

Then Ponting abandoned his wife and children to pursue a career in photography, travelling extensively through Japan, Burma, India and Ceylon before he read that Scott needed an expert lens man.

"His brief was to chronicle the expedition," Wilson explains. Scott had sold photographic rights to various newspapers that needed heroic images of man versus nature. But the much-maligned leader also understood the scientific aspects of the mission and instructed Ponting to take photographs of things such as penguin breeding cycles.

Ponting worked in dreadful conditions. Each shot had to be painstakingly set up, posed and shot in freezing temperatures. His equipment was bulky and temperamental. His fingers suffered frostbite whenever he touched the camera. Yet his work is faultless, the depth of field so large that the images can be blown up to cinematographic proportions.

Having photographed the polar expedition heading southwards to the Pole, Ponting left for New Zealand. As we know, Scott was beaten to the Pole by his Norwegian rival, Roald Amundsen, and died on the return journey along with his four companions. Suffering frostbite and malnutrition, facing certain death, Scott stoically continued writing in his diary to the end.

Wilson chose the extracts which Bell will read, and found the task difficult.

"Scott was a phenomenal writer. Some say a better writer than he was explorer." But in the end, "there were some parts we just could not leave out".

As for Vaughan Williams, what eventually became his seventh symphony began as a commission to write the film score for Scott of the Antarctic, made in 1947 and starring John Mills. It was his eighth film score, and by that stage Vaughan Williams was experienced enough to demand full control of all music and sound effects, which explains how he was able to insist his chorus and soprano sections were used in the final film.

The Mills film borrowed extensively from Ponting's photographs for its visual imagery. But Ponting never saw it. He had died in 1935, an unhappy and disillusioned man whose photographic career never reached the same heights again.

And yet interest in the Scott story remains as strong as ever. Ticket sales for this performance - the most ambitious multimedia event staged in the orchestra's Kaleidoscope program - are going well. Wilson predicts such value-added performances will become a regular part of the Sydney Symphony's season. "People like to see the orchestra interacting with other elements," he says.

Ralph Vaughan Williams's Sinfonia Antarctica, conducted by Richard Mills, at the Sydney Opera House, March 22 and 24.

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

Back to News Index | Back to Home