Jonathan Holloway looks to “the bigger picture” with Taylor Mac, Under Siege and a Requiem for Cambodia on the bill. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Barrie Kosky's Saul and Leah Purcell's The Drover's Wife win big at this year's awards for live performance in Australia.

Hyperion’s admirable Romantic Piano Concerto series has been running for over 25 years. It would be easy to be exercised by the fact that it has taken until now, Volume 70, to arrive at a concerto by a female composer. Easy, but not entirely fair. Male dominance in the genre is almost total – even today – and perhaps more interesting than wrangling over quotas is the question of why. It’s a question this disc answers with vehement clarity. You only have to read the contemporary response to Amy Beach’s concerto – critics reading autobiographical significance into the lone voice of the piano crying out against the oppressive orchestra – to understand that a woman could never inhabit this most combative of musical forms on the same terms as a man. It’s interesting that both other concertos here eschew the traditional three-movement form – an attempt, perhaps, to reclaim and redefine their musical territory. Dorothy Howell’s 1923 Piano Concerto stretches the definition of “Romantic” to its limit. Filmic in scope, an abstract tone-poem drawing heavily on Debussy and Strauss, this single-movement work is the weakest of the… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a…

Recorded live in Sydney’s City Recital Hall last year, this disc takes the listener from the beautifully spare, intertwining lines of JS Bach’s The Art of Fugue to the lush complexity of Beethoven’s Opus 130 Quartet. Tognetti and the ACO merely dip their toes into Bach’s contrapuntal water, offering the first four movements of the collection as a kind of musical primer for the Beethoven. The first Contrapunctus presents Bach’s subject before it’s accompanied by lively dotted rhythms in the second and inverted in the third, the ACO’s weaving voices lilting conversationally. The fourth Contrapunctus is all pizzicato, a motif from the subject’s tail brought to soft, haunting life by the voices of the instrumentalists – a quirky touch that, while effective, might scare off traditionalists. From the clean lines of the Bach, the ACO blossoms into the warmer – if no less cerebral – textures of Beethoven’s String Quartet in B Flat, the orchestra off-leash in the first movement, singing in the lyrical moments. The Presto is taken at a gallop while the Alla Danza Tedesca: Allegro Assai has a sweet naivety. The Cavatina throbs with expression before the climax: the Große Fuge, which the ACO… Continue reading Get…

Jonathan Henderson will premiere the Australian composer’s new work with the Brisbane Philharmonic Orchestra. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

David Robertson’s beautifully-paced reading opens a doorway to heaven.

Igor Levit and Daniel Barenboim have each made an appeal to European unity at the music festival. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Fierce fiddling, and a lovely neo-romantic blend.

Sauvageot’s Grand Ensemble: Dialogue Between an Apartment Building and a Symphony Orchestra performed in Paris. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

DG continues to releases live recordings of Grigory Sokolov. His mastery is unquestionable but he is famously enigmatic. He refuses all interviews, will not record in a studio, and as of 2005 stopped performing with orchestras. The Mozart concerto comes from January of that year. Was it the straw that broke the pianist’s back? The legend of the reclusive artist is rejected by many but not by DG, who enclose a documentary entitled Grigory Sokolov: A Conversation That Never Was. In it, friends and colleagues praise Sokolov extravagantly, although he himself is absent. One viewing suffices. Despite Pinnock at the helm, the Mozart is given an old-school reading. Poetry abounds in the first movement, while the Adagio builds to a climax of cinematic proportions. Sokolov expends more energy in the finale than other pianists do in Brahms. He is more suited to the Rachmaninov, where his innate mastery of the music’s ebb and flow is on the highest level. As in his solo recitals he is fond of extremes. He thunders through the cadenza of the first movement (a passage where I feel less is usually more), but the section immediately following is beautifully delicate. As a live recording (from…

These recordings are not without poetry – it’s just that there’s not enough of it.

In 1761, at the age of 29, Haydn joined the household of the Esterházy family as Vice-Kapellmeister and set to work proving his worth by writing the three symphonies we know as Le Matin, Le Midi and Le Soir; his only true cycle and the most programmatic of his symphonies. The idea for illustrating the times of the day was suggested by Prince Paul Anton but the only truly explicit passages are the sunrise opening of Le Matin and the storm of the conclusion to Le Soir – the flute’s forked-lightning motif Haydn would re-use some 40 years later in The Seasons. The cycle harks back to the concerto grosso style with concertante intrumentation displaying the individual talents of his front-desk players to win over his new workmates – everybody gets a turn in the spotlight, even the double-bass during the trios; that of Le Matin hints at Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. Seven years later on the death of his superior, Haydn assumed the full position as Kapellmeister so took on responsibilities for writing church music while churning out reams of chamber music including numerous baryton trios for the voracious musical appetite of Prince Nikolaus. Despite the workload, Haydn produced… Continue reading…