Driving to the Sydney Opera House the other day, I became aware of the number of signs and directions along the way. Speed signs, Go Back You Are Going the Wrong Way signs, merge carefully signs, reduce speed signs. As I merged and indicated and sped as directed I had a sense that two aspects of my life had also merged – driving in Australia is like playing a page of classical music, with the government composer telling us what to do and when to do it. Rallentando here, softer there, play with passion here, don’t overtake the bassoons on the left there. All composers give performance information in their scores, but some go way overboard in their directions. Mahler was probably the worst, his symphonies littered with lengthy Germanic directions. In one symphony he writes: “An dieser Stelle wirken die Posaunen, Violinen und Viol. nur im Notfalle mit, wenn es gilt den Chor vor “Fallen” zu bewahren” (In this passage the trombones, violins and violas should play only if necessary to keep the chorus from going flat). What excellent advice, once you’ve hired a German translator to work out what he was saying. Here’s another: “Muss so schwach erklingen,…

Where would the world be without love? There certainly wouldn’t be as much music, because most of our singing and dancing is about this complex human emotion. I remember as a young person being besotted with Schubert’s Du Bist die Ruh – this beautiful song, with piano and voice rising higher and higher, as the singer tells his or her beloved that they are the only thing that will bring peace to the heart. At the same time I was also fascinated with Every Breath You Take by The Police, which is a song about love gone wrong. There is a relentless rhythm to the song underscoring the idea that the protagonist is not going to give up. In fact this is the song of a stalker – every move you make, I will be there watching and waiting and looking. Creepy but very effective. I am sure Schubert would have approved.  More recently Bruno Mars had a hit with Grenade where he complained that he would have done anything for his girl, but she didn’t feel the same. He would catch a grenade for her, throw his hand on a blade, even take a bullet through the brain –…

The other night my wife and I decided to abandon the children and go out. As there was no concert or play of interest to us in the entire Sydney basin, I suggested we go on a restaurant crawl instead. We drove to Balmain and stopped in at a swank Thai restaurant and had delicious duck pancakes, salt and pepper squid and prawns, then drove down to Glebe to an upmarket diner where we had lamb cutlets with a tasty salsa of mint, jalapenos, coriander and chilli and shared a pork rack in a red wine sauce. As we sat nursing our delightfully deep glasses of Argentinian malbec, I pondered on variety, the spice of life, and how we need more of it in concerts, many of which have acquired a stodgy meat and two veg flavour.  Alex Ross wrote a wonderful article recently in The New Yorker on two books that investigated the development of the modern concert. In After the Golden Age, Kenneth Hamilton writes that Franz Liszt used to bring an urn on to the stage containing slips of paper the audience had written with the titles of pieces upon which he would improvise. “On turning out…

In 1993 I taught for three months at the James Cook University in Townsville. The degree was full of delightful middle-aged women who were local piano teachers taking the opportunity to refresh their teaching skills. Because it was a Bachelor of Performance, these women found themselves in the terrifying position of having to perform as part of the course.  To their credit got up and performed – but it was a daunting experience. Afterwards the staff had to sit down and mark them. In many ways the students were nowhere near the standard of other music institutions and there was much discussion about whether they should be failed at the end of second year. Some of the talk was about the effect on the student, but most of it was about the effect their failure would have on the course – they needed to keep the numbers up to bring in the government dollars. These ladies were being used as cannon fodder. They filled up the course in its early stages, and as younger students arrived, the older ones would be failed, having served their purpose. I found this very dispiriting. We were expected to ditch any idea of musical…

I had an Amish day recently. I’d been spending too much time in front of my various screens, editing music and speech on my various electronic devices, doing the company tax, emails, watching videos on YouTube, filling in spreadsheets, reading books, watching ABC iview and SBS On Demand, listening to radio and writing Soapboxes for Limelight. After all this my mind was a blur of digits and pixels and I needed a break.  I went for a walk and listened to the sounds of the neighbourhood. I heard birds and crying babies and bad piano practice. I was at one with my environment, attuned to the physical world. For all our obsession with the digital age, we aren’t digital. We are made up of blood and bone and we eat food not bytes.  Music, like digital information, is totally ephemeral. Sometimes when I pre-construct a radio program and download it onto a memory stick, it feels like a lot of time and effort has been spent with nothing to show for it. Three hours of stereo radio is about 1.37 gigabytes of information, but for all the impressive sound of that number, there’s no extra weight on the memory stick….

I was staying in a hotel recently in Adelaide, while conducting the Adelaide Symphony, and the walls of the lobby were scrawled with handwritten aphorisms. I will enjoy a belly laugh. I will have my cake and eat it too. I will be honest. I will play. I will make love not war. I will unlock my potential. I will believe anything is possible. I will swap worry for wonder. I will promise not to throw a bucket of white paint over this drivel. Sorry, that last one was mine, but really, what is this nonsense? It is verbal pollution and our lives are full of it. Everywhere you go these days modern corporations are bombarding us with little messages that are supposed to make us feel better about ourselves and as a consequence feel better about the products of these companies and then presumably buy more of them. But they just make me mad.  The strapline of the ANZ Bank is We live in your world. Well unless the bank had its headquarters in Alpha Centauri, we can safely assume we already know that. So what is it meant to be telling us, that the bank is not a vast…

Georgian soprano causes outrage for describing LGBT people as “faecal matter”. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Classical music and the arts would dwindle and starve without them… but what makes Australia’s biggest donors dig into their pockets? Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Did Aaron Copland accidentally invent the American sound in his expansive 1944 ballet Appalachian Spring? Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Viola virtuoso gives the violin a run for its money in this masterful recital. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Deutsche Grammophon’s latest Vivaldi app presents Four Seasons in two ways. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Celebrated young Serbian violinist, and DG’s latest signing, returns to Australia to perform with Ensemble Liaison. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in