★★★★☆ Clarity, cohesion and exuberance make for a beguiling afternoon of chamber music. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Decibel new music ensemble’s Artistic Director gives insight into an electro-acoustic-inspired programme. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The Marsyas Trio’s A Triple Portrait presents the haunting chamber music of Russian composer Elena Firsova (b. 1950). Firsova, a student of Aleksandr Pirumov and (unofficially) Edison Denisov, moved from Moscow to London just before the fall of the Soviet Union. This disc is the first dedicated to her introspective, personal chamber music. The Marsyas Trio – named for the musical satyr – consists of Australian flute player Helen Vidovich, Canadian cellist Valerie Welbanks and New Zealand pianist Fei Ren. The album opens with the rich sound of Welbanks’ cello in Homage to Canisy, a work inspired by the French castle, Chateau de Canisy, where the composer visits each year, and where the work had its premiere performance in 2010. The centre-piece of the album, A Triple Portrait Op. 132 – from which the disc takes its name – was commissioned by the trio in 2012. The first movement Andante rubato is purely solo flute, the Adagio a short, eloquent trickle of piano notes and the third movement opens with cello and piano, before the flute rejoins to complete the trio. A plucked, walking bass line from the cello gives the movement a smear of blues. Vidovich and Welbanks are…

American foursome proves opposites attract from Broadstock to Ginastera.

Why Johannes wasn’t ready for the pipe and slippers.

★★★½☆ HIP skills and an air of camaraderie capture the Schubertiade spirit. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The Quartet tour Australia in June for Musica Viva. Limelight caught up with cellist Richard Belcher. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Friends President and Artistic Director are among those choosing the 2016 Competition running order.

If the prospect of a whole disc of wind quintets by Antoine Reicha – whose biggest claim to fame was his friendship with Beethoven – hardly sets pulses racing then the actuality proves more enchanting. The Thalia Ensemble performs on period instruments – no valves on Hylke Rozema’s gamey natural horn – which lifts the soundworld of Reicha’s music out from that rather antiseptic sheen I associate  (unfairly perhaps) with modern instrument wind quintets. Each of Reicha’s 24 wind quintets conforms to the standard four-movement mould as handed down from Haydn and Mozart, and revolutionised by his friend Ludvig van B. Of the two quintets on offer here, the earlier G Major Quintet, Op. 88 embeds the sound of surprise into its form most effectively. Harmonic tricks of the light and rarefied timbres are deployed to spice up the formula. Reicha’s Lento prologue stumbles into existence: a questioning opening chord catches the clarinettist mid-phrase before the music slithers chromatically towards the Allegro main event. Reicha was a flautist and his flute writing is correspondingly athletic, defined by “here’s me”. But my ear was as captivated by his bassoon parts, which dramatically break free from the ensemble, gurgling and turning like water……

Five world premieres of Australian works presented by Plexus ensemble.

The Doric Quartet, operating out of London, challenge all our assumptions about Papa Joe’s string quartets, telling us, “We know Haydn can sound like this, but have you ever considered it could sound like that too?” Haydn’s Opus 76 was the last extended set of string quartets he wrote, contemporary in his output with The Creation and the London Symphonies, music that would distil an entire lifetime of creative discovery into structures where the genuinely sublime felt at ease with the authentically bawdy. If you prefer your Haydn performed within carefully delineated ‘Classical’ limits, then the Doric’s re-examination of the DNA of these late-period scores might represent too much of a walk on the wild side. The quartet splash around wideband dynamics and proto-expressionistic timbres with such obvious abandon we are reminded that Haydn would not only provide a seedbed of ideas for Mozart and Beethoven, but that stirrings of Schubert, Bruckner and Second Viennese School thinking, too, are to be found within the thrusting loins of this music. Op. 76, No 1 gives notice of how every detail will be up for renegotiation. Notice cellist John Myerscough’s free-spirited phrasing during the first movement’s opening theme; but also how the…

Australia’s Seraphim Trio contrasts early Beethoven – the genial G Major Trio – with the later Ghost Sonata (No 5), so named because of the eerily troubled scene conjured up in its central movement. No 4, is sometimes known as Gassenhauer after the popular tune by Joseph Weigl that forms the basis of Beethoven’s variations in the finale. The Seraphim captures the light-heartedness of the early trio with style. Goldsworthy’s delicate piano figuration in the final movement is delightful, and all three musicians display subtle shading throughout, not least in the darker slow movement. In the Op. 70, Nankervis’s cello is eloquent in bringing out a strain of melancholy in the ‘ghostly’ movement, but it is pointless to single out individual performers because unanimity of vision is the Seraphim’s strength. How well they judge the arpeggio passage just before this movement’s close. The robust variations in Op. 11 are lots of fun, and I hear the subtlest sense of ‘heart on sleeve’ in the preceding lyrical Adagio movement. These musicians are clearly enjoying themselves in this lighter side of Beethoven. By comparison, Trio Wanderer on Harmonia Mundi takes a more straightforward approach. Their performances do not remind… Continue reading Get…