Classically trained, I forsook opera to become a pop singer. After a long conversion I’ve found my way back to the light.

MoFo’s midwinter event is moved upstream as Tasmanian Police show their funny side. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

How do young players deal with the generation gap between themselves and their audiences? Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

John Adams' masterpiece is done full justice, proving itself the late 20th century's great opera of ideas.

The world’s leading violist talks rockstar aspirations, “divorce” from his own group and bouncing back.

Opera Queensland’s baritone talks Rossini, six packs, bullock trains and stage disasters. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

New survey suggests surreptitious “tune-smuggling” is rife in the organ loft. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Portrait of Asher Keddie proves the popular winner from this year’s Archibald exhibition. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

This CD is a treat for lovers of English music and English folk song in particular. A Cotswold Romance is a concert version by Maurice Jacobson of Vaughan Williams’ robust ballad-opera, Hugh the Drover, written in the era before World War One and later refashioned as a cantata in 1951 using the opera as its prime source. The open-hearted, full fresh air composer is in fine form here; the music is very attractive and performed in great style by the assembled forces. It is led by the late Richard Hickox, whose work in rescuing forgotten English music is his legacy. This sweet rural fantasy is about a time when a young man could risk all to get the girl he loves and finally, after various tribulations, the happy couple sets off on the road to a new life, under the open sky. In today’s more cynical times, we can only look upon such idealistic foolishness with wry amusement and affection. As operas go (and the composer’s very fine Sir John in Love is similar) it inhabits a very different world to the more heady European styles, opting not for gripping drama but for more serene stories of village life with……

When the renowned flautist Johann Joachim Quantz visited Alessandro Scarlatti in Naples in 1725, it seemed he inspired the ageing composer, hitherto ambivalent about wind instruments, to write some flute sonatas for him. Not only that; in the years that followed, the younger composers of the Neapolitan School also wrote specifically for the recorder – the flauto dolce, or transverse flute. This had not happened in Naples before, and only once again in the same period, during an amateur flautist’s reign as Viceroy between 1728 and 1733. So it is that a talented player often inspires composers. Likewise, recorder virtuoso Maurice Steger inspires his fellow instrumentalists here, with compelling performances of music from the mid-1720s by Alessandro Scarlatti and his “spiritual heirs”. Using a range of alto recorders and, in the Leo concerto, a soprano recorder, Steger leads a small band comprising strings, psalterium and continuo in a selection of concertos, sinfonias and sonatas by Scarlatti father and son, Sarro, Fiorenza, Barbella, Mancini and Leo. Throughout, Steger emulates the great singers of the day such as Farinelli, with beautiful cantabile lines tastefully ornamented to complement the sparkling allegro movements. The band is superb, with violinists Fiorenza de Donatis and Andrea…

Petrenko is transforming what has always been a good orchestra into an undeniably outstanding one, catapulting the RLPO into the very top of the second tier – no mean achievement and no faint praise. Their recent Rachmaninov Third Symphony was a harbinger about Petrenko’s calibre as a Rachmaninov interpreter, and this superb account of No 2 more than fulfills that promise. Few, if any other Romantic symphonies, need as convincing a pulse in the first movement. By the end of the Largo and Allegro Moderato, Petrenko has delivered slow-release incandescence with both conviction and that uniquely Slavic sense of yearning. He’s not afraid to employ quite striking rubatos without resorting to sentimental overstatement, and the formidable climaxes are beautifully integrated. The second-movement Scherzo with its initial Prokofiev-like spikiness is easier to bring off, but in the Adagio we’re back in the emotional heartland with a polished but tender clarinet solo. The finale erupts spectacularly, Petrenko’s lively but sensible pace reassuring me that this really was a vintage Rach 2, not one which fell at the last hurdle. It’s thrilling how he gradually gathers momentum in the Allegro Vivace. The other works, orchestral excerpts from the opera Aleko, are well chosen…

Scary time, the 1930s, when the Stalinist denunciation of Soviet artists made for serious anxiety among composers just waiting for the dreaded knock at the door from the secret police, and some of the justifiable paranoia is manifested in the music itself. Take the searing opening solo melody in Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto for instance, with which Dutch star Janine Jansen opens her outstanding new all- Prokofiev disc. It’s a restless, unsettled kind of thing, and that first movement as a whole is a musical cat on a hot tin roof, jumping at its own shadows, and made all the more disconcerting by the intellectual clarity of the performance and the equivalent audio definition in a masterly production job by Decca’s engineers. Not that it’s all Reds-under-the-bed hysteria. The concerto’s slow movement is a gloriously long-arching melody, even if the mechanical accompaniment provides a menacing, albeit subtle, reminder of the machinery of war parading by outside. Every note here is made to count, and while it never fully engages the emotions, Jansen again demonstrates why her first recording back in 2004 sold 300,000 copies. She is the violinist for the age, detached yet precise, cool but considered, and when she……