I’m writing to you from the second Adelaide International Cello Festival – a musical feast of concerts, recitals, lectures, masterclasses and more. I flew in last night, suitcase and cello in hand, just in time to see an idol of mine, Pieter Wispelwey, perform a marathon programme of Brahms, Schubert, Ligeti and Stravinsky followed by no less than three encores. A true performer, Wispelwey’s playing spoke to the audience. His extreme left-hand virtuosity was complemented by impressive bow control evident particularly from the sustained opening notes of Schubert’s Fantasy in C. What I enjoyed most about Wispelwey’s performance was the deep and compelling sense of his own personality that he so effectively conveyed through the music. From his occasional flamboyant bow flourishes at the ends of phrases to the freedom in his approach to Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne, he wasn’t afraid to push boundaries. In case the concert itself wasn’t enough of a treat, complimentary wine awaited us afterward, followed by an 11pm performance by Wispelwey of Bach’s Fifth Suite. If only every day could end in such a sublime way! After such a musically fulfilling evening the night before, I couldn’t resist taking my time strolling through town on this beautiful,…

This week marked the anniversary of the death of one of my childhood heroes. 17 years ago, to the day, Kurt Cobain‘s body was discovered in his Seattle home. Although he was only 27 (the same age at which Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison all passed away), the influence of his music was, and still is, huge. The Seattle sound, or “grunge”, was probably my first true sonic obsession. By the time I started studying the musical output of bands such as Cobain’s Nirvana, Eddie Vedder’s Pearl Jam and Chris Cornell’s Soundgarden, two of the three had already disbanded (and Cobain was already gone). Nevertheless, I spent years listening to, and attempting to recreate, the relatively small body of work they had produced. The first song I, and the majority of my axe-wielding school friends, learnt to play on the guitar was Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit – a rock song that continues to rank among the most popular of all time. In fact, 15 of the first 20 songs I learnt to play were probably Nirvana songs penned by Cobain. The music was simple, mainly built around power chord progressions, but it was melodic and…

The case was first heard by Justice Peter Jacobson, who concluded that there was indeed an infringement of copyright. Justice Jacobson’s reasons can be read here. An appeal was lodged, but on 31 March, last Thursday, the appellate court – constituted by Justices Arthur Emmett, Jayne Jagot and John Nicholas – unanimously dismissed the appeal, though each judge wrote a separate set of reasons. That judgment, paragraphs 13-26 of which helpfully summarise the bare-bones musical facts, appears here. Of course, there’s been ongoing media interest in the litigation, and articles appeared everywhere when the recent appellate decision was published. The piece run in the Sydney Morning Herald (and elsewhere) reported the original decision as ruling that Men At Work had “ripped off a popular Australian folk tune in their 1980s hit Down Under“. The ABC used “stolen” instead of ‘ripped off’, and reported Justice Jacobson as finding that the Down Under flute riff was “unmistakably lifted from” Kookaburra. Meanwhile, music-news.com called the lawsuit a “plagiarism case”, and reported the courts as concluding that Kookaburra was “the basis” of Down Under. With this kind of language, it’s not surprising that the decision was received with incredulity in many quarters. Kookaburra the…

We have just finished a string of successful performances with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra of John Adams’ Harmonium, one of his first truly great works for voices and instruments that explores the text of Emily Dickinson and John Donne. For anyone who doesn’t know it, it is a work of great beauty and forceful energy. At times the music seems to float suspended in the air and at other times has the precision and weight of a great old steam engine – all pistons and pulleys! Also great to work with former chief conductor Edo de Waart. As a colleague of mine once said, a real mensch! When working on these highly precise pieces, what I find fascinating is the contrast of the choir to the orchestra in the way they work and the preparation involved. The Sydney Symphony is a great orchestra made up of players totally in control of their individual skills and almost telepathically aware of each other which results in a sense of ensemble that only comes through constant playing together. The choir on the other hand is made up of people who for the large part have not trained as professional musicians but who are…

This was the second time YouTube has assembled a symphony orchestra of this grand, global scale, this year with the orchestra flown in to Sydney from 33 countries. The audition criteria raised the bar from Carnegie Hall’s YTSO1. Cellists had to play no less than five excerpts including such notorious selections as Strauss’ Don Juan. There were also concerto (Schumann or Haydn in D for cellists) and Bach requirements. The same audition process applied of uploading your audition video onto the World Wide Web to be judged by a professional panel and public vote. No comfortable task by any means, but it was an experience that had me asking myself, “what good is it to be a musician and spend your life in a practice room behind closed doors?” There will always be people to deconstruct and comment on your playing, but at the end of the day I believe we shouldn’t be afraid of that. We should be sharing our music, embracing the chance to perform for each other and taking on healthy criticism. The week leading up to the final performance was absolutely jam-packed with activities. We had masterclasses, chamber music concerts, sectional concerts, a jam session and…

During a lazy afternoon at home, hiding from this New York winter which refuses (despite the theoretical advent of spring) to depart, I stumbled upon a film called Mr Imperium. Maybe you know it? No, me neither. It’s one of Lana Turner’s lesser efforts. In fact, if the IMdB trivia page is to be trusted, MGM thought it was so terrible that they delayed its release until after its male lead’s next film had had a chance to offset it. The man in question — and the operatic link which brings me to blog it — is Ezio Pinza, star of the Met, La Scala and Covent Garden, in his film début. It’s really not a very good picture. The plot is typically silly: actress (Lana Turner) falls for Pinza’s crown prince of somewhere-like-Monaco, they’re torn apart when he becomes king and picks politics over True Love, but he wins her back through the cunning use disguise and contrived musical numbers and she finds a way to 1. save his kingdom and 2. keep him in the USA with her, since he doesn’t want to be king anyway. And along the way, they shoehorn in a few moments like this:…

In September 2010, I was in Tokyo for a choral tour. My previous performing experiences had been squarely confined to the Western world: the Anglophone bloc of Australia, America and the UK, and two or three concerts in continental Europe. Of all the small things that made the Japan tour utterly different, the most striking was the demeanour of the Japanese audiences. After each item on the programme, not a sound: no coughing, no paper-shuffling, no shifting around, and certainly no talking. Simply silence – until the invariably generous final applause. We don’t see much of that in Sydney. To be sure, the Sydney concert culture to which I’m most accustomed – and next to which Tokyo seemed so alien – involves a noticeable amount of extrinsic audience noise. Regular performers on the scene often seem to roll their eyes by reflex when the subject of audience etiquette comes up. With each tour by a European stalwart – a Berlin Phil, or a Tallis Scholars – there’s a disgruntled second violinist (or the like) complaining that our audiences are the most ill-mannered they’ve ever encountered. Particular outrage issues, it appears, from those Sydney concertgoers rendered hypersensitive by harbouring a little…

Some time ago in a Soapbox article in Limelight I proposed that the arts should extricate themselves from arts funding and link up with the Department of Health, where the sums are so big no-one seems to worry about spending billions of dollars. I also suggested that doctors could prescribe a ticket to a play or an opera, so that the patient would feel better having a nice night out, and the arts organisation would benefit from the ticket price being returned like a Medicare co-payment back to the company. I had no idea that the Mayor of Turku in Finland was such an avid reader of Limelight, but lo and behold this is what they’re doing (or a version thereof) in Finland! The only problem I can see is that there would be a sudden influx of traveling arts company reps visiting GP surgeries, handing out Opera Australia mugs and Bell Shakespeare computer mouse mats, and taking doctors on lovely trips to Hayman Island to talk about the benefits of opera over straight theatre. With our theatres and concert halls packed to the rafters with the sneezing, sick masses, we could once and for all get rid of the…

Although I rarely share this fact with people, Nyman (I don’t feel familiar enough yet to call him Michael) was probably the foremost figure that drew me to instrumental composition. As a teenager, my musical interests lay in the guitar-driven grunge rock of Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins et al, with the occasional dose of Lloyd-Webber, Claude-Michel Schönberg et al. It would have been around this time (my late teens) that I saw the film Gattaca. It would be a stretch to say that the film changed my life, but there was definitely something special about the soundtrack. If you’re unfamiliar, here’s a taste: I spent years passively seeking out a recording of the Gattaca soundtrack (if I found myself walking past the soundtrack stand in a record store, I’d have a quick peek under “G”). Eventually, bored with the latest offerings from the alternative rock world, I went to the trouble of ordering it. A week or so, and $9.95, later I had a new favourite CD. But, who was this composer? I decided to look into what else this Michael Nyman fellow had written. My first port of call was the store responsible for reuniting me with the music from Gattaca,…

All I knew of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades before last night were Lisa’s and Pauline’s reasonably famous numbers (I’m a soprano recital disc fanatic, so this not an entirely new situation for me) and, somewhere in the dark baritonal recesses of my mind, fragments of Yeletsky’s. I certainly didn’t know how long it went on. And on. AND ON. I’m being mean, and I perhaps I shouldn’t, because there’s a lot of gorgeous music in this opera, and I was only fleetingly bored. The story certainly lends itself well to operatic treatment: it just needed someone with, say, Janácek’s gift of concision to write its libretto. Tchaikovsky’s brother’s effort, meanwhile, lingers where it should but also where it shouldn’t, and just when you think a quick, punchy ending is what’s called for, the curtains open on a gambling table and it’s turned into La Traviata. Before that, it’s a Russian Werther. At least, that’s what I kept thinking. Tortured tenor with stalkerish tendencies, object-of-affection who loves him back but is promised to a sensible, rich and frankly preferable baritone, and a miserable ending for everyone. Funnily enough, the Met’s production is an Elijah Moshinsky, and so was the only Werther…

Sitting here on a plane on my way to Melbourne as the sun rises in the east, I muse this morning on the excellent playing of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra. Last night was the second Symphony in The Park – held on Stage 88 – a free event that showcases the orchestra. The first year was a classical affair and last night was a Broadway night with singers Peter Cousens and Trisha Crowe, and yours truly waving the stick. The CSO is in fine form these days. With Nicholas Milton as chief conductor and the wonderful Barbara Jane Gilby as leader, it plays with real energy. I am always interested in the internal energy of an orchestra. The best ones are like well-groomed race horses, you only need to turn them in the right direction and they’ll glide down the track doing all the hard work themselves, without needing to crack the whip that much. Canberra is in that league, I think, and certainly improving every year. The orchestra gets most of its funding from a very supportive ACT government, and very little from a less supportive Federal Government. The Canberra Symphony is incredible bang for buck, because as it’s…

I will begin by describing my two most recent musical experiences. Last night, I attended a performance of Jersey Boys at the Theatre Royal. For those unfamiliar with the musical, Jersey Boys tracks the formation, successes and ultimate disbanding of 60s pop group The Four Seasons. It is interspersed with various bits and pieces of the band’s hits – another of those “Jukebox musicals”. While I probably don’t fall into the production’s target audience, I did enjoy it. This was my pop music experience. This morning, in a composition analysis class, we listened to and analysed Iannis Xenakis‘ 1961 solo piano work Herma. For those unfamiliar with the piece, Herma is as much an exercise in mathematical set theory as it is a composition. Xenakis divides the 88 notes on a piano into a few different pitch sets. He then bases sections of the piece on pitches obtained through various set operations. The processes are fairly straightforward, but to apply them to music is… very Xenakis. He was, after all, a mathematician and qualified architect – something which heavily influenced other works such as Metastasis. This was my art music experience. As you can imagine, these two heavily contrasting listening…