He’s complex, lengthy and often frustrating. But give Bruckner due attention and he has power to captivate like no one else.

Jaakko Kuusisto is one of those ‘triple threat’ musicians. Accomplished as a violinist, conductor and composer, he has received numerous accolades in his native Finland and around the world. His recordings have mostly featured him as performer or conductor, however this most recent release focuses on the Finnish maestro’s chamber works, performed by a catalogue of exemplary Finnish musos, including Kuusisto himself. Much of the music adopts a language evocative of the early 20th century. Play III sounds like a lost Bartók string quartet, while Valo for piano and violin makes extensive (crossing into exhausted) use of the whole-tone scale in its harmonic and melodic progressions – a favourite device of the so-called musical ‘impressionists’. An ornamented transfiguration of the opening bassoon solo in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring becomes an effective source of material for much of Loisto, also for piano and violin. Play III is a bold opening to the disc. The rich, robust sound of quartet Meta4 sets a strong tone on an album featuring expert musicianship from all featured performers. Kuusisto’s own performances in the two works for violin with piano, and in the central… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

Joyce DiDonato and José Carreras plus a host of festive features. And we ask the question: So you think you know Mozart? Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Mairi Nicolson, Damien Beaumont and Christopher Lawrence will be leading music and opera tours in 2017. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

A study in China used fMRI technology to test this hypothesis on 18 male participants. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

STC’s new AD will direct Britten’s Roman tale for Sydney Chamber Opera as part of Carriagework’s ambitious 2017 season. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Much of his compositional output was written prior to a heart attack in 1918 and remained unperformed until after his death, but American modernist Charles Ives is now well-established as a significant and pioneering composer. Ives’ father George was a bandmaster during the American Civil War, and taught his musically-inclined son skills that included playing the piano in one key while singing in another. In part, as a consequence of this, Ives’ works explored polyrhythms, dissonance, atonality, quarter-tones and other techniques that were to become international staples of experimentalism. Another of Ives’ enduring preoccupations was traditional American hymns and songs, references to which can be heard at various junctures in his Four String Quartets, composed between 1910 and 1917. There have been regular releases of the set since the premiere recording by Rafael Druian (violin) and John Simms (piano) in 1957, but only a handful are currently in print. Welcome then, is this new recording from French violinist Annabelle Berthomé-Reynolds and Belgian pianist Dirk Herten. Berthomé-Reynolds brings a delicate lyricism to these intricate but very accessible works, and the interplay between violin and piano is unified and sympathetic. Ives veers from rousing sprightliness to dreamy pastoral (sometimes within a few…

Now he is thought of as an old Dutch master, but Louis Andriessen a former apostle of Marxist modernism would doubtless shy away from such titles.

British pianist Kathryn Stott will take over in 2018 following Piers Lane’s final year at the helm.

★★★½ ☆ Internationally acclaimed trio delivers stellar Chausson if Beethoven underwhelms. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Julie Kerr has founded Music Love, an online platform to showcase women across all branches of the Australian music industry. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Dutch label Channel Classics has released an attractive box set of the first complete series of Mozart violin sonatas to be performed on period instruments. The albums, featuring English duo violinist Rachel Podger and keyboardist Gary Cooper, were released individually from 2004 to 2009 when they picked up a swag of awards. Now they come in an eight-disc box, giving listeners the chance to appreciate the sweep of the 36 works that covered 25 years of the composer’s life. Cooper performs on a copy of a 1795 Viennese fortepiano by Anton Walter – the maker favoured by Mozart and Beethoven – while Podger plays her 1739 Pesarinius violin, made in Genoa by a student of Stradivari. For the final disc Cooper switches to a 1766 Kirckman harpsichord, exactly the sort of instrument the young Mozart would have used, while the bass line is augmented by cellist Alison McGillivray. As Podger says: “Approaching [Mozart’s] music instinctively comes most naturally to me. It seems so effortlessly composed, and communicates with us directly.” Beautifully recorded, the set would make an ideal companion to the Beethoven sonatas being recorded by US violinist Susanna Ogata and British fortepianist Ian Watson. The Mozart canon, however, is…