One of the best things about being a student, according to many, is the excessive amount of holidays – particularly over the summer. For me, that means an opportunity to finally work on a piece for submission to one of the many calls-for-works that come to my student email inbox, but which I flag for later action. At least, that’s the theory. In reality, however, I allow the majority of the deadlines to pass and, sometime mid-January, realise that I’ve wasted the majority of the break and must immediately begin work on something (simply to appease my guilt). So, last week I perused a few of the aforementioned emails and found one that appealed. There was, however, something in there that very nearly turned me off: the specification that the ensemble was “up for adventurous works which included extended techniques”. Call me old-fashioned, but those two words, “extended techniques”, immediately make me uncomfortable. Whenever I see a pianist stand and reach for the strings, or a clarinetist free their instrument of its mouthpiece and prepare to palm-slap it, I start looking at my watch. I am genuinely surprised by the number of composers who employ these methods. My first thought…

If I’ve learnt one thing in the last two-and-a-half weeks, it’s that – provided you have the clothes and stomach for cold weather – winter is an excellent time for touristing in Europe. Having previously only come to London in busy, overpopulated summer, it’s been a delight to find the city so free of queues and crowds. And our four days in Salzburg also benefited nicely from the near-complete lack of people. Oh, there were a few. But tourism in Salzburg is almost entirely about the Festival, and we, of course, weren’t there for that; we weren’t even in time for Mozart-Woche. So even the oldest, prettiest and Mozartiest bits of town were quiet and walkable, and it’s such a picturesque place that even the cold and wet can’t make it miserable – although it was nicer still when the rain let up on Day #3. We even took a carriage ride through the Altstadt, which naturally put Fiakermilli’s aria in my head. I resisted the souvenir shops, with their cornucopia of Mozart tat, and limited myself instead to a visit to this house. Not a great photo but the sign above the door says “Mozart Wohnhaus”. These are the…

In a sense, having written a column for Limelight for the past three years I have already been blogging, but a column is more like an old steam driven blog, as opposed to this new bullet-train Limelight website, where one can react more quickly to events. For instance, I had already written my column when we heard that Joan Sutherland had passed away. I didn’t know her at all as well as the many singers and colleagues she sang with over the years, but our paths did cross a number of times. I played for a National Vocal Symposium where she and Luigi Alva were the star tutors. Then later I hosted a discussion with her and Richard Bonynge at a lunch. Each time she was delightful to be around. The last time I saw her was when I was hosting a big do that Opera Australia put on for her at the Opera House – a celebration of their 50th wedding anniversary. It was also the night that Australia Post was unveiling their Legends stamp, with Dame Joan on her very own piece of Australia. At the end of the concert, which included many of Australia’s finest singers and…

As a student of composition at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, I am fortunate enough to be exposed continuously to the latest musical offerings from both Australian and international composers. I also enjoy the luxury of having an excuse to spend countless hours analysing and discussing a huge variety of works, predominantly composed in the past half-century or so. It is these experiences that I intend to share each week and I hope that you will help me make sense of this modern musical world in which we live. Today, however, I’d like to share my thoughts on a slightly more mundane topic. The Christmas/New Year period has, as usual, provided me with a number of  opportunities to catch up with some people I don’t often see throughout the year. Something you should know about me is that, in spite of the fact that I’ve taken on this blog, I don’t really like to talk about myself. On these annual catch-ups, however, the time inevitably comes when I have to explain what I’ve been doing for the past 12 months. And then, the dreaded question: “What style of music do you compose?” Now, I’m not a fan of labels. It…

I have just come from my third experience of watching productions from London’s Royal National Theatre, screened more or less live to cinemas around the world. This time it was Haytner’s new production of Hamlet – a work that has been in the repertoire now for over 400 years, like much of the repertoire I perform regularly with orchestras and singers. Next door, a performance of Verdi’s Don Carlos was being shown from New York’s Metropolitan Opera. What interests me is the appeal of this way of seeing theatre, or should I say live performance, not live. Both my partner and I agreed that it was a superlative production with a fine Hamlet and a particularly fine Gertrude (my favourite role) but it did in the end leave us cold. We were not involved with the production because we were not physically in the same space as the actors. Audiences make theatre work, and the coughing, rustling of lolly wrappers and collective laughter, shock, applause and disappointment are what drive the experience.  Every performance is dangerous and different, and this is what creates the buzz as the lights dim and the first words are spoken or the first notes are…

With time, the venture grew, and I found both a voice and a readership: first in New Zealand, where I’d begun, and in Sydney, where I moved back in 2006. That blog, as at least some of you will already know, goes by the mildly pretentious (hey, I was 19 when I named it) title of Prima la musica, and while regular readers of said blog will know I’ve neglected it somewhat of late, it nevertheless remains, for the time being, a going concern. But Limelight, having already let me loose upon its printed pages, has now kindly offered me my own little sliver of its new-and-shiny online presence, too – an offer too providential to refuse. One of the reasons for the aforementioned blog-neglect has been a drastic (positive!) change in my own circumstances. In brief: as of 2011, I’ve left Sydney for life on the road with the Heldentenor in my life. A big change, as you can imagine, and one full of possibilities for opera fanaticism – which is, after all, what I do best. But it has also shut off a possibility or two; in particular, it means I can’t function as a critic any more,…

Hi there. My name is Matt Siegel and what I don’t know about classical music could fill a medium-sized concert hall.  I am not an expert like the other contributors on this website; I couldn’t tell you the difference between Brahms and Beethoven if there was a gun to my head, and my musical taste tacks more towards the Ramones than Ravel. So, what am I doing here? Well, it hasn’t always been this way. As an upper-middle class kid growing up on Central Park West, I had no shortage of exposure to world-class music. My mother would drag me kicking and screaming to the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall, hoping that her love affair with the arts would, perhaps by osmosis, be absorbed by her only son. But somewhere along the way my musical training got a bit off track. I ended up repaying her generosity by learning the bare minimum about classical music (namedropping a couple of relatively obscure composers) needed to impress girls who knew (hopefully) even less about it than I did, and spending a decade playing the guitar and bass in art-rock bands whose work could charitably be called “atonal”. Then, for some reason that…

As any musician will agree, the chance to collaborate with gifted musicians can be an inspiring experience that in turn can shape your own creativity. In the third week of my residency at The Banff Centre I was delighted to take up the opportunity to work with bassist Edgar Meyer. The previous weekend I had been blown away by his performance with mandolinist Mike Marshall and was only too eager to meet this musical legend. A virtuoso performer and innovative composer, Meyer is a three-time Grammy Award-winner renowned for his work in a wide range of styles… Oh, and he also happens to have mastered the piano, banjo and dobro.   I was also delighted to collaborate once again with an old friend from Australia, violinist Christina Katsimbardis. In addition to rehearsing Kodály’s Duo for Violin and Cello and the Handel-Halvorsen Passacaglia, I spent what remaining hours I had in the week workshopping JS Bach’s Gamba Sonata No 1 with Christina and Edgar. Ordinarily one might expect a gamba sonata to be performed on a gamba and harpsichord; however, we extracted each line of the music with the gamba part performed on the cello, right-hand keyboard on violin and left-hand…

That was quick. 2011 has been and gone and we’re already halfway through January. The time for year-in-review blog posts has probably passed – and I’ve already written one elsewhere anyway – but I think 2012 is still new enough for me to sneak a year-ahead post in. Not my year, per se; I’ll probably bore you enough with that as it actually progresses. No, in the time honoured operatic tradition of Performance Envy, I thought I’d look instead at what I won’t get to see: all the brilliant performances happening in Australia. As it happens, I’ll actually be in Australia quite a bit next year, and because the opera gods love me – or, at least, because the global conspiracy against me has subsided – I will in fact manage to see some of the performances which would otherwise have been on this list. Cheryl Barker in Die Tote Stadt, for instance. And of course, some of the other obvious highlights – the Adelaide Symphony’s Das Lied von der Erde, Act I of Die Walküre in Melbourne, Pique Dame at the SSO – are the very reason I’ll be in town, so I’ve left those off as well. Here,…

This time last year, hundreds of Brisbane musicians were wading through murky musical waters in front of a documentary crew for a performance of a “cursed” symphony. This November, they finally get to see themselves on the big screen when The Curse of the Gothic Symphony comes to the  Brisbane International Film Festival. Sniggering allowed! A flock of fruit bats are making evil, conniving squeals outside my window. It’s the perfect soundtrack to what I’m about to write: a blog of a black magic, symphonic, nature. Mwahaha. My previous contribution to Limelight was written days before the start of the Melbourne International Film Festival. The festival was about to host the world premiere of the documentary The Curse of the Gothic Symphony. Seven years in the making, it followed a team of obsessive event producers and hundreds of nerdy classical musicians as they set out to achieve a near-impossible task. They were trying to stage a performance of Havergal Brian’s allegedly cursed Gothic Symphony – a work so complex, so obscure, so sonically ghastly that no-one on the planet had touched it for 30 years. And, they were trying to stage it in Brisbane. Why not just try to build an…