This all-Haydn finale to its 2015 season shows why this group is one of Australia's finest period ensembles.

Violinist Susanna Ogata is a tenured member of the Handel and Haydn Society. Keyboard player Ian Watson has had a long and distinguished career as an organist, conductor and as a director of early music, recently working with Harry Christophers and The Sixteen on a new edition of Bach’s St Mark Passion. In that same year, Watson and Ogata embarked on a project to record all ten of Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas on period instruments, and this release on The Sixteen’s Coro label is the first recording. First up: Sonata No 4 in A Minor, Op. 23 (1801), and Sonata No 9 in A, Op. 47, the famous ‘Kreutzer’ from 1803. Watson plays a replica of an Anton Walter (1752-1826) Viennese fortepiano (both Mozart and Beethoven played Walters) while Ogata performs on a Joseph Klotz violin from 1772. It’s a remarkable sound world into which the listener is plunged and, given Watson and Ogata’s rigorous research, it is one we can assume to be similar to that inhabited by the composer himself. The sinewy violin lines are transformed by the deeper but slightly coarser and more nasal tone… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a…

This CD marks the recording debut for Australian performer/composer collective, Sideband. The brainchild of composers Tristan Coelho, Brad Gill and Peter McNamara, it features visceral performances by high calibre musicians. The Sideband composers are joined by emerging composer Chris Williams, and guest Slovenian-Australian Bozidar Kos. In Kos’s Modulations, solo flute is set twisting and writhing in a turbulent sea of percussion, at the same time being warped and transposed by live electronics. Brad Gill conjures a haunting atmosphere in Crickets for baritone and small ensemble, while his complex piano solo, Light, Snow, Suicide, presents a restless tapestry of melodic and chordal fragments. Chris Williams’ work for soprano and percussion, of silence into silence has a strong dramatic presence. Tristan Coelho commands attention: his 2011 As the Dust Settles for bass recorder and vibraphone presents one of the most engaging soundworlds in the programme. Alicia Crossley’s playing is wildly virtuosic, engaging in erratic dialogue with Gill’s vibraphone. In The Writer’s Hand, Coelho fragments three female voices, creating a maddening counterpoint that pits spitting consonants against a strange lyricism. Peter McNamara’s Cadenza II for cello is another highlight, Julia Ryder… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

French pianistic powerhouses Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and François-Frédéric Guy have teamed up to deliver a mega programme of works originally intended for orchestra. First premiered in 1913, all three are heard in piano form, with the shift in perspective providing new insights into the music while testing pianistic skills. The first of Bartók’s Two Pictures sees washes of lush, whole-tone harmony and strangely winding melodies, conjuring a gorgeous, almost Debussian dream world.  The reverie is over in the second picture, Village Dance. Here, Bartók indulges in heavy harmonic dissonance and exuberant folk-like melody, delivered with full force. The tone colour of Debussy’s Jeux comes as a soothing and gentle contrast. Bavouzet and Guy manage to make their instruments sound as colourful as Debussy’s orchestra. The opening is so delicately rendered you’re left questioning if it is indeed a piano you’re hearing. Bavouzet’s transcription is an intelligent and elegant reimagining of the original. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is the best-known work on the disc, and hence its transcription is perhaps the hardest sell. Piano four hands necessarily restrains the score’s savagery and contrapuntal melodic webs. While it might not best the… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe…

Since graduating from the Tasmanian Conservatorium in 1987, reed-playing multi-instrumentalist Paul Cutlan has worked in a wide variety of styles from contemporary classical to jazz and world music. The central work on this disc, the Across the Top suite, is inspired by his work with world music ensemble MARA! on their Musica Viva tour for schools and Indiginous groups across the North of Australia in 2007. All four works on this Tall Poppies disc are influenced by folk music, filtered through composers like Bartók, Britten, Stravinsky and Sculthorpe, and melded with the ideas and practices of jazz improvisation. This never meanders, however, but is all tightly structured and highly approachable, and is, when all’s said and done, best described as chamber music of deep purpose and clarity. Improvisation and world music, when they do occur, are used to enhance Cutlan’s compositional ideas, and his sense of tonal colour and instrumental textures are indeed highly alluring. Those who are familiar with the NOISE string quartet’s recent set of improvised works on two CDs will have some idea of what to expect from their contributions. With Balkan specialists Llew… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a…

If there is one nationality who really wrote with hearts on sleeves, it was the Russians. If there is an instrument that can really explore torment, it’s the cello. Russian Cello, is a wonderfully colourful project for Zoe Knighton and Amir Farid who deliver a selection from known masters (Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev) and less-known contemporaries (Glière, Gretchaninov and Sokolov). The duo start with an exquisite rendition of Rachmaninov’s Vocalise that allows Knighton to warm up her thrilling tenor-sound, sensitively accompanied by Farid. The programming continues with other ‘songs without words’, including an enchanting Album Leaf from Glière followed by Stravinsky’s eccentric, folk-inspired Chanson Russe. The playing goes up a gear with a pair of Glazunov items, beginning with Chant du Ménéstrel. Knighton’s portamento is suitably full of woe and in the substantial Elégie she really gets to show much more range, muscling into her lowest register with grit. Farid is an attentive partner in crime. Both are attuned to each other’s subtle musical choices. Gretchaninov’s Sonata is the first long-form piece on the album. With charming interjections from the piano and a pretty melody for the cello it’s… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

Rameau’s oeuvre for harpsichord comprises a mere four dozen pieces from a composing career of nearly six decades so it is not surprising that players have taken to raiding the great tunesmith’s operatic works, citing his transcription of Les Indes Galantes as precedent. The bulk of this recital is Guillermo Brachetta’s transcription for two harpsichords of music from Platée (1745); a scathing satire of fashion and operatic conventions disguised as a comic romp. Poor Platée is a hideously ugly nymph (a tenor in drag) who resides in a swamp but is quite unaware of her uncomeliness. Heartless Jupiter decides to prove his fidelity to Juno by courting such an unlikely conquest just for the fun of it and leaves Platée broken and humiliated to the cruel amusement of the gods. Rameau’s score satirises Italian opera with bizarre vocal gymnastics and is chock full of musical non sequiturs, onomatopoeic effects (a croaking chorus of frogs), startling orchestration and dozens of good tunes. You may wonder if all this comes across with the reduced palate of the harpsichord, but such is the quality of harmonic and melodic invention beneath the… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G Minor first came into the world as his second string quartet. Then he wrote what we now know as his A Major, No 2 and reworked the G Minor piece into a quintet so that he could join the Beethoven Quartet on piano when the two works were premiered. They therefore sit side by side very comfortably on disc, and they could be in no better hands than those of the Takács Quartet and Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin. This excellent Hyperion release marks the Takács’ first recorded venture into Shostakovich territory, and it is most welcome. From the quartet’s densely layered opening moments it’s obvious that the Colorado-based foursome are very much at home here. The Recitative and Romance second movement, which poured out of Shostakovich in a single day and probably with late Beethoven in mind, is perfect for Edward Dusinberre’s distinctive solo violin. The Piano Quintet, on the other hand, gives several nods to JS Bach, especially in the pivotal Fugue. Here Hamelin – a Hyperion regular with 50 albums under his belt – makes an exciting companion for arguably the… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

Girl bands comprising recorder consorts probably aren’t going to catch on anytime soon. But if they do, UK ensemble Consortium5 could lay claim to being supergroup of the recorder world. Not only do they regularly collaborate with contemporary composers and performers in unique and challenging ways; they are also committed to the preservation of earlier music for what was for centuries one of the most popular instruments in Europe. The consort – a set of matched instruments such as viols or, as here, recorders, in different sizes – which flourished in Europe between the late 15th and early 17th centuries, undoubtedly quickened the development of complex instrumental music in its own right. Elizabethan consort music however represents one of the high points of the genre, with the free exchange between transcriptions of vocal polyphonic works, so-called In Nomines, and more abstract fantasias and dances further enlivened by consort songs and broken consorts (usually strings and winds). Performing on a set of 10 Renaissance recorders, this release finds them moving among the In Nomines of Byrd and Tye, the dances of Ferrabosco and Dowland, the madrigalian fantasias of Coperario… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, and “Bah, humbug!” to Il Divo.

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