A formidable team to tackle Schubert’s Everest of the lieder genre.

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Mozart reminds us that nothing in life should be taken too seriously.

String quartet strikes chords with Romero, Pujol, Grigoryan and co. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Kaufmann, four Strauss operas, 12 unknown operatic gems and Philip Glass's minimalist answer to the Ring Cycle.

Eclectic line-up gives 2014 Festival a dazzling opening night.

The Australian Haydn Ensemble’s program of lesser-known, and even slightly odd works are no laughing matter.

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Lyle Chan celebrates 90s life-saving HIV activism in 90-minutes of music.

Contemporary music’s equivalent of a Heston Blumenthal tasting plate. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

American indie rock band guitarist Bryce Dessner’s debut classical recording comes with excellent credentials. Dessner is a Yale graduate who studied classical guitar, flute and composition and who has worked with some of the best in the business including Reich, Glass and David Lang. While his style leans towards a minimalist aesthetic he’s open to and range of influences, from early music through to rock and pop. Aheym – “homeward” in Yiddish – immediately grabs the ear with its sharp, unanimous rhythms before opening out into hypnotic ostinati and a multitude of dazzling timbres and colours. Little Blue Something is more restrained, intimate, even melancholy. Tenebre takes its inspiration from the Holy Week office of tenebrae, for which Renaissance composers in particular wrote such dazzling music. Dessner achieves extraordinary sonic effects here, with ghostly passages recalling the sound of a glass harmonica. This is aural chiaroscuro at its most compelling, made even more so by a multi-tracked Kronos Quartet (times three) and vocalist Sufjan Stevens (times eight). Dessner himself appears as guitarist on Tour Eiffel, which was commissioned by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. This is exciting, visceral and at times deeply moving music, with a thorough awareness of the interplay…

It’s tempting to think of John Cage as the dangerous, if smiling, radical. After all, he did pioneer the prepared piano, welcomed turntables and radios into the concert hall, and scored the most famous four-and-a-half minutes of silence in history. Unlike his close colleague Morton Feldman, however, the musicality of his work is easily overlooked. This haunting recording from ECM reminds us of the colour, precision and sheer beauty of his compositions. The pieces are mostly from Cage’s early rhythmic period, the 1930s and ‘40s, and are for solo piano or prepared piano with occasional voice. Pianist Alexei Lubimov is a significant proponent of 20th-century music in Russia, giving premieres of pieces by Boulez, Stockhausen and Ligeti; by the time he met Cage in 1988, he had been playing this music for decades. He is also known for his Haydn and Mozart, and to that end brings a considered, even classical approach to Cage’s work. The opening Dream of 1948 sets a tone of hypnotising reverie. By contrast, the chiming pieces for prepared piano, such as the buoyant The Unavailable Memory Of, are rhythmically repetitive; other works are a little more astringent and evoke Cage’s teacher Schoenberg and the ghost…