The Planets was composed between 1914-17 as a seven-movement orchestral suite, receiving its premiere in the final weeks of World War I. I have to admit it was one of the first orchestral works that captivated me and I remember first attempting to perform (I use the term “perform” very loosely!) “highlights” in a simplified version for my primary school orchestra. This week I have the chance to play it with the Sydney Symphony in a performance complete with a film displayed above the orchestra, showing NASA images and visual renderings of the planets themselves. One of the best video recordings i’ve come across is by the BBC Philharmonic conducted by the late Sir Charles Mackerras at the 2009 BBC Proms. It’s one of those works that’s so arresting that it has been used widely in popular culture. The Planets seems to pop up in the most unexpected places in a range of guises. The menacing opening movement, Mars: The Bringer of War, has been heard in everything from TV documentaries to the background music for Nintendo Super Mario Bros 3 in the “Dark Land” levels (albeit in a horribly distorted MIDI arrangement). Similarities have been drawn between Holst’s Mars…

Naming a chamber ensemble may not be as tricky or permanent as naming your firstborn, but can still pose many challenges for young musicians starting their careers. The contenders for this years competition come from myriad cultures and backgrounds – from Hungary, USA, UK, Russia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and Australia. Here’s a quick summary of some names we’ll see this year, and some from the past. Named after a group member Kelemen Kvartett named after the first violinist, Barnabas Kelemen, and UK’s Lawson Trio after pianist Annabelle Lawson (wouldn’t it be refreshing to see a group named after the cellist or violist for a change…) Kelemen Kvartett Named after a composer/musician/artist Finzi Quartet after British composer Gerald Finzi, Barbirolli Quartet after the famous maestro Sir John, Australia’s Streeton Trio after the Australian Heidelberg School landscape painter Arthur Streeton, Trio Paul Klee from France after the Swiss-born artist, and Piatti Quartet, supposedly after the 19th-century cellist Alfredo Piatti. Famous examples: Alban Berg Quartet, Amadeus Quartet, Borodin Quartet, Cuarteto Casals… It’s a long list. Barbirolli String Quartet The prosaic, the poetic and the cryptic A musical term inspired the Attacca Quartet (meaning to continue without break from the end of one…

I came to Los Angeles pretty much for one reason only, to meet composer and conductor Eric Whitacre, whose work little man in a hurry will have its Australian premiere in a concert in August with the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs alongside works by Schumann, Wolf and of course, Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem. I have only been to LA once and that must have been over 15 years ago as part of a tour with a children’s choir for which I was the repetiteur – I only remember seeing parts of Hollywood from the back of a tour bus and Venice Beach. Everything else was sound checks, dressing rooms and billets. It was an intense tour and LA was the last stop with concerts at Disneyland and Universal Studios. This time I had been advised to hire a car but it was not until I checked into my rather trendy hotel that I realised that Los Angeles is no New York – a subway trip to any destination. As they say in the film Sunset Boulevard (where I was staying!), if you lose your car in this town, it’s like having your legs cut off. So with my navagatrix GPS in…

A few days ago I was thrilled to attend a rehearsal of the Australian Chamber Orchestra as they prepared to embark on their current national tour, Baroque Virtuosi. As usual I was struck by the brilliance and energy of the ACO musicians, particularly in this program stepping out of their ranks to perform as soloists in their own right. There may not be a star guest director for these concerts, but who needs one when you’ve got a Strad? The ensemble’s newest member is a Stradivarius violin dating from 1728/9. With a price tag of $1.79-million, it joins a growing number of fine instruments in use by members of the orchestra, including Richard Tognetti’s 1743 Guarneri del Gesù, a 1759 Guadagnini violin played by Helena Rathbone and a particular favourite of mine, the 1729 Guarneri filius Andreae cello played by Timo-Veikko Valve. In the rehearsal we were treated to three works featured in the tour: Tartini (arr. Kreisler) Violin Sonata, Op 1 No 4, the Devil’s Trill, performed by Satu Vänskä, the Telemann Viola Concerto featuring principal viola Chris Moore and the Vivaldi Concerto for Four Violins (Helena Rathbone, Satu Vänskä, Madeleine Boud and Mark Ingwersen). Hearing the newly acquired (as yet unnamed – but you can still…

In the first round of the competition we are playing the Haydn Trio in C Major and the Brahms Trio in B Major, Op 8. The Haydn Trio could only be described as glorious. It is a much more rhetorical piece than the others we are playing: you can hear a drama between characters unfolding as if we are caught in some kind of play. This is a fun piece for us to play, because we can really act out the characters ourselves, and we have the chance to change characters quickly and often. Our approach is to converse with and surprise each other through the performances. We really enjoy the freshness and vitality of the music. While the Haydn was full of dramatic characters and immediacy, the Brahms unfolds with a much greater feeling of breadth. Haydn coaxes more articulated “talking” from our instruments where the Brahms requires more singing. Maybe there is no other composer before or since who conceived such a satisfyingly rich sound for a piano trio as Brahms, and this trio in B Major is particularly harmonious. When we find the right sound, its lusciousness is much greater than the sum of its parts. Our…

Welcome to the Streeton Trio’s blog updates! As the only Australian group in this year’s Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition, we will keep you posted during our preparation for the competition. My name is Emma Jardine and I’m the violinist of the group. The other members are Martin Smith (cello) and Benjamin Kopp (piano). We are three young Australians who have been living in Europe for the past few years. Despite fears that volcanic ash would delay our return to Australia, we arrived last week and are thrilled to be back home again. We have a concert tour of Victoria and NSW leading up to the competition in July, so it’s going to be a busy month for us, but we’ll do our best to give you all the updates on the Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition from an insider’s point of view. But first, a recap on what we’ve been doing to get to this point. Most people are only just starting to hear about the MICMC now, but we actually applied for this competition back in August 2010. To apply, we had to send in a DVD of one of our live performances. Then, after a few nervous…

Lyricist W S Gilbert died in 1911 and I think it is simply splendid that he and his music collaborator Sir Arthur Sullivan are still able to make it to the news pages one hundred years later. I was the conductor of The Very Best of G&S with the Sydney Symphony and loved every minute of Stuart Maunder’s wonderful, jocular list of irritants in Ko-Ko’s updated song from The Mikado. I fully expect that Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, Clover Moore, Justin Bieber’s dermatologist, lovers of the music of Brahms, any aunty who has a moustache, anyone with a mobile phone, Westfield and all the others who made it to the list will follow Hillsong Church’s lead and send letters demanding legal clarification. This is not even a storm in a teacup; we’re talking a babycino cyclone here, a tiny waterspout in a Barbie-sized tea set. “That Hillsong lot on television, all joyfully singing psalms, I wish they would desist, and their happy claps resist” is so inoffensive it is hardly worth the effort of typing up a letter of complaint, and probably not even worth the effort of complaining about the complaint – so I’ll stop here and just quote…

After only a little while – more or less after the first read-through, in fact – the conductor requested that those singing the lower parts make some expressive changes. They were to abandon the legato, church-choir style that they had been using so far – as he noted with some pride, this particular ensemble was not a church choir. Instead, they were to give their lines some more “shape”. The conductor demonstrated, singing with almost caricatured emphasis on the tactus, and making so little of the unaccented final syllables that it almost sounded as though gaps were being freely left between words mid-phrase. He then elaborated: what he was after was, it seemed, akin to the down-up bowing of a cello. The singers undertook to meet the request. Oddly enough, the rehearsal then continued, and moved on to other pieces, without the subject being revisited at all. The episode got me thinking about what constitutes effective communication in rehearsing this kind of repertoire, which conductors may typically be expected to know a good deal better than their choristers. These particular singers may well have been left somewhat bemused: precisely which church-singing habits were to be broken was not specified; the…

Zandonai: Francesca da Rimini Francesca, I’m pleased to say, is doing very well indeed. This doesn’t come as a massive surprise to me, though, given that my main inspiration for including it on the original list was my forthcoming trip to see a production of it at London’s Opera Holland Park, with none other than Australia’s Own Cheryl Barker and Julian Gavin as Francesca and Paolo. I’ll admit that seeing it live shook my faith in the piece temporarily — the libretto is not the strongest, though perhaps OHP’s Mike Volpe would beg to differ! — but after three shows, I was more or less converted. Italian verismo has never been the corner of the repertoire closest to my heart, even when brewed with other operatic influences, as Francesca is; but it has some fairly wonderful moments and I still recommend getting to know it. The small Francesca discography welcomed a new recording into the fold in April this year, with the release on Myto of a 1958 performance from Rome; and if you’re in the right place at the right time, staged performances are remarkably easy to find for such a non-standard work. Along with OHP’s production, 2010 saw stagings in…

A flash mob is a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and sometimes seemingly pointless act for a brief time, then disperse, often for the purposes of entertainment and/or satire. Flash mobs are a recent social phenomenon. Some might say they go hand in hand with the fairly fatuous “planking” craze. Both have arisen from the ability to share something easily via technology – an act so seemingly random that it becomes entertainment. From mass public pillow fights to “silent discos” (participants on the London Underground synced their portable music devices and silently danced for the unexpected viewing pleasure of bemused commuters), flash mobs have taken a variety of forms, but I would argue that they have an ability to serve a greater purpose. In particular I’ve taken an interest in the way classical music has been used in this context. It fits the bill perfectly; something that is widely perceived to belong in a concert hall, usually performed with a sense of formality to audiences who pay good money. Many people view classical music as a luxury. Taking it away from the revered theatres to the general public, free of charge and…

So now, a year on, I thought it would be interesting to see what’s been happening to my rarities since I featured them — what’s been performed, what’s been recorded and what’s been (understandably or not) neglected. Here’s the first part of a two part series. You can read the original piece here. Vivaldi: Ottone in villa Vivaldi’s first opera (and such a pretty one) has had just two staged performances in the past year, in August of 2010 at the Innsbruck Festival. This German review has some choice photos of the punk-baroque production, which featured a nice line-up of singers: Veronica Cangemi, Sonia Prina, Sunhae Im. (This opera is all about female voices. There’s a tenor in it, somewhere, who barely gets to open his mouth.) Prina, Cangemi and conductor Giovanni Antonini had also been involved, in May last year, in a concert presentation of Ottone in Krakow, and the same ensemble headed into the Naïve studio, to add this opera to their Vivaldi Edition. The gorgeous Roberta Invernizzi also features, as does young coloratura phenomenon (she’s only 21) Julia Lezhneva, whose disc of Rossini arias I’ve just reviewed for Limelight. Meanwhile, Brilliant Classics last year issued a 2008 recording…

Beautiful, passionate, neurotic, satirical… Just a few words I’ve seen used to describe this work, each movement with its own distinctive character and charm. Best of all, whether you’re an experienced lover of chamber music or someone with just an inquisitive mind, this piece just wins people over, one way or another! Probably the best-known movement would be the second, Assez Vif, Très Rhythmé. After performing this recently as part of the Sydney Camerata String Quartet, a member of the audience commented that it was the most erotic piece of music she had encountered growing up. That’s not something you hear very often as a classical musician, but interesting and definitely appropriate, I think. I have fond memories of hearing this movement for the first time on an ABC Classic FM Life is Beautiful CD that came with the paper. The performers were the Australian String Quartet in their current configuration, and their rendition of the second movement stands today as one of the fastest that I’ve come across. Exciting, brilliant and funky is how I would describe this one! It wasn’t for at least a year that I got around to listening to other recordings of the work, only to…