Blue Mountains artist Matthew Lynn wins with portrait of novelist and former model Tara Moss. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Arts community broadly welcomes National Cultural Policy initiatives – plus a stack of cash.

Vivica Genaux’s superb recording of arias by Handel and Hasse composed for Faustina Bordoni shows why that 18th-century singer, who had a notorious catfight with her rival Francesca Cuzzoni in front of the Princess
 of Wales, was so envied. Handel wrote some glorious arias for her, most notably Lusinghe piu care from Alessandro, beautifully sung by Genaux on the opening track. Johann Adolph Hasse didn’t quite have the magic touch of Handel musically, but he married Bordoni and then proceeded to compose 
at least 15 operatic roles for her – truly justifying their contemporary reputation as the power couple of 18th-century opera. As for Genaux, she began her career singing Hasse’s music back in the 1990s with René Kollo, and her interest in his repertoire has never faltered. Her tightly controlled coloratura is ideally suited to Hasse’s technical showpieces, especially in Padre ingiusto from Cajo Fabricio. Genaux’s voice gets swamped occasionally in the Radio Bremen mix, but such is her compelling presence on disc that it hardly matters, and generally she finds sympathetic support in the Cappella Gabetta, established in 2010 with brother and sister Andrés and Sol Gabetta as the driving forces. They are sparkling interpreters of the Baroque……

The most gorgeous thing, even though it’s not exactly a bargain, and it’s never sounded better either.

So apparently Benjamin Britten once died, and to prove it the BBC is making a docu-drama about his final decade. Well, it is the centenary, after all, and the English sure do love him. It’s taken most of the art out of guessing what Oxford ensembles might programme over the course of 2013. Actually, it turns out that some of Britten’s lesser-known choral music is pretty extraordinary. This livens things up no end if you happen to sing with Schola Cantorum of Oxford (as I do, having unaccountably passed the audition back in October). Schola has collaborated with the BBC several times recently on composer profile pieces, and we duly fronted up to the chapel at St Peter’s College – which is also our usual rehearsal space – on 11 February. Our task: to be filmed singing three Britten numbers while not stuffing up too badly or accidentally looking into a camera. Upon arrival, it was a bit like the first five minutes of a Doctor Who episode – all frosted blue light and dry ice, with unknown backlit entities lumbering through the murkiness from time to time. Sadly, we weren’t permitted to pretend to land a TARDIS, nor even…

Here begins our first tour back to Australia and New Zealand in 2013! We are so glad to be back! Sydney couldn’t be more perfect at this time of year. The first thing we noticed when leaving Sydney airport was the air – it is warm and smells sweet, like flowers and eucalypts. Trees and greenery are everywhere; we feel like we have landed in paradise after having just spent months surrounded by grey concrete and snow. One good thing about jetlag is that you wake early enough to watch the sun come up – on our first morning back home in the Blue Mountains, we woke at 4am to watch the sunrise. It’s absolutely magical – the kookaburras begin laughing at the moment that the sun appears. Even though I make this trip three times a year, I still find it so surreal how you can just cross seasons in the space of 24 hours. Before 24 hour flight: After 24 hour flight: This tour is going to be quite different from any other one we have done, because we're without our cellist this time. Martin injured in an accident with a taxi that ran a red light while…

By any standards, Opera Australia’s staging of La Traviata on Sydney Harbour in April was 
a triumph. The terrifying logistics included a purpose-built raked stage on foundations driven deep into the harbour bed, a signature oversized chandelier rising and falling above the action, and amplified singers coordinated by video-link with conductor Brian Castles-Onion and the AOBO Orchestra underneath it all. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, and did anyone mention how much this all must have cost? In the end, the critics were unanimous in their praise for 
a production that had so many unforgettable visual images associated with it, from the fireworks at the end of the drinking song, to the high notes in Sempre Libera being sung mid-air above Sydney Harbour, and on to the party guests in Act Two arriving by water-taxi. But as this incredible DVD demonstrates, what made this production one for the ages was the exact opposite of spectacle. With its superb casting, Francesca Zambello’s staging of the Verdi masterpiece centres ultimately on the deep and profoundly human relationships that occur against that tawdry world of the beautiful people and their glitter-ball existence. Librettist Francesco Piave’s intense psychological drama features lengthy duets wherein the……

New report reveals a former SS officer managed the orchestra as late as 1968. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The First World War took its toll on a whole generation but George Butterworth was probably British music’s greatest loss, killed on
 the Somme in 1916. Ivor Gurney survived, but was confined to a mental hospital for most of his remaining life. Ralph Vaughan Williams escaped with impaired hearing but his musical outlook was darkly coloured by his wartime experiences. Programming these composers side by side isn’t unusual (Simon Keenlyside’s excellent Songs of War is still fresh in my ears), but when the singer is as good as James Rutherford it’s a pleasure to revisit the repertoire. The songs were mostly written before the conflict and so are not all as mournful as the CD cover might suggest. Death is a regular guest of A E Housman, and Gurney’s poems are certainly elegiac, but there is much idyllic music here as well. Butterworth’s Bredon Hill and On the Idle Hill of Summer, Gurney’s Severn Meadows and Sleep and Vaughan Williams Let Beauty Awake and Bright is the Ring of Words are among the finest songs in any language. James Rutherford’s is a substantial baritone voice, darker than Bryn Terfel’s but with plenty of bite. Thomas Allen (or indeed Keenlyside) may…

Bernarda Fink has a vibrant mezzo-soprano voice and the sense of style to interpret this program to the manner born – which, despite her surname, she was. The daughter of Slovenian parents, she was brought up in Buenos Aires. Her repertoire includes Baroque music and mainstream German and French song, but this Spanish recital does not come out of the blue: it follows an earlier release of Argentinean songs from 2006. The diverse program,
which includes many rarities, concentrates on three of the
four masters of 20th-century Spanish song. (The missing one is Joaquín Turina.) It opens with Falla’s well-known Seven Popular Spanish Songs, and straight away Fink reveals her strengths: a strong chest voice for Andalusian declamation, the ability to float her warm tone at the top of her register and an understanding of the emotional terrain that allows her to hold nothing back in this spirited, heart-on-sleeve music. Rodrigo’s gentle Adela 
follows, the first of his Tres canciones españolas, and here Fink presents a beautifully poised cantilena against the simple accompaniment, rendered with style by American pianist Anthony Spiri. Rodrigo’s songs tend to
be spare in texture, Granados’s popular Tonadillas notable for their elegance, while Falla remains the most earthy. Throughout,…

It can’t be easy being Lang Lang, what with the hype surrounding him as the world’s favourite pianist and all. And yet as a commercial commodity the 30-year-old’s been delivering that showmanship and technical excellence ever since he wowed Beijing and the world more than half his lifetime ago. The hard bit comes in translating the unparalleled reputation into musical performances that truly take your breath away year after year. He remains a wonderful player, the recording quality of his discs is a given, and in the show- off works like those featured on his previous Liszt album, his extrovert style is hard to beat. But Chopin? Sure, it’s well- known that Lang Lang has built much of his career on this beloved composer’s work, and for the non- specialist music-lover buying on the performer’s well-deserved reputation alone, there will be more than enough musical ability here to leave a favourable impression. But for those comparing Lang Lang’s Chopin
 with recent efforts by the now- septuagenarian Maurizio Pollini
on DG, and Lang Lang’s labelmate, young tearaway Khatia Buniatishvili, things become more competitive. With all the poetry and sadness deriving from a lifetime of supreme musicianship, Pollini’s take on
the 24 Preludes Op…

Not many composers would be reasonably justified in releasing a retrospective collection of their works at the meager age of 33, let alone have the arsenal in their creative inventory to present it in five meaty volumes. But then, having already collaborated with the likes of Richard Tognetti, Jon Rose and Brett Dean, Melbourne-raised Anthony Pateras isn’t like many other young composers. Pateras’ Collected Works 2002–2012 affirms his position as one of the most respected and sought-after Australian composers of his generation. The 5-CD limited edition box set spans a decade of creative output across various instrumental media, from chamber, orchestral to solo piano. Reproduced in the notes are excerpts from a handful of Pateras’ highly personal and oftentimes clinically schematic scores, offering a fascinating insight into the composer’s unique way of assembling sounds. The list of Pateras’ recruited performing artists reads as an all-star line of Australian talent, comprising Dean conducting the ANAM Orchestra in the fragmented, free-wheeling Immediata electric violin concerto with Tognetti as soloist, Melbourne-based experimental outfit Golden Fur in chamber piece Broken then fixed then Broken, and Timothy Munro as bass flautist in the ethereal and monolithic Lost Compass. Pateras himself executes a mix of prepared…