Rush, Russell Beale, Salminen & Skovhus: four Lears on tackling Shakespeare’s tortured monarch. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The eminent violinist cut his first disc in the USSR aged ten, but now he believes the labels are letting artists down. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

This latest album of Philip Glass piano music is a desperately poor effort from a pianist who apparently thinks that pressing down notes in the right order constitutes an interpretation. Never mind the specifics of the cultural milieu that helped create this music. Don’t bother listening to other pianists – musicians who have worked with Glass or indeed the composer’s own recordings. People who know stuff? What have they got to say that might be remotely useful? As in her earlier album of music by the British composer Michael Nyman, Valentina Lisitsa has assembled a grab-bag of Glass film scores – from The Truman Show, The Hours, Mishima and The Olympian – and her strategy is to wrap these already candy-sweet scores inside a lasagne of tinsel. Which is not to say that she puts a technical finger wrong. Inner parts are balanced; harmonic ambiguities are allowed to speak. No, the problem lies in her decorative and ambient touch, which reduces the music to inert patterning. The brief spans of most of these picture-postcard vignettes means that your irritation is generally only momentary. But her hapless attempt to sustain the 30-minute generative structure of Glass’s 1968 How Now – one of his trail-blazing,…

Javad Maroufi is credited as one of the first composers of piano music in Persia and is renowned for his significant contribution to Persian classical music. Inspired by their common heritage, Australian-Persian pianist Amir Farid has long been familiar with the composer’s work – indeed, Maroufi’s compositions were some of the first that Farid performed in public as a child. It’s fitting then that Maroufi’s body of work forms the basis of his wonderful second solo album. The pieces on this disc fuse the Western language of Chopin with the modal folk melodies of Persia, resulting in a journey through a collection of deceptively simple piano works. The Preludes in particular pay homage to Maroufi’s Polish counterpart. Farid is the perfect interpreter of these tiny gems. One technical trial is the use of a rapid right-hand tremolo, imitating the sound of the Santur, a Persian dulcimer. Farid sustains these rollicking repeated notes with an almost vocal quality. The melodic lines require rapid embellishments, which Maroufi allows the performer to add at their discretion. It’s through these subtle inferences that Farid demonstrates his intimate understanding while getting a chance to show his virtuosic chops in the demanding Charagh-e-Esfahan. If there is…

Paganimania is a collection of newly commissioned works for piano by seven contemporary composers. Their brief? Take Paganini’s 24th Caprice for solo violin and use it as the basis of a new composition. This project was the brainchild of Christopher Janwong McKiggan, an English-born pianist currently resident in the US and completing a doctorate at Rice University, Texas. It has produced some spectacular results, and McKiggan’s playing is uniformly commanding. Robert Beaser’s Pag Rag teases out American Rag-influences with lyrical and rhythmic panache, while James Mobberley’s Capricious Invariance gently unfolds into cascades of colour with hints of fugues. Scène V by Moon Young Ha is meditative and expansive, allowing the resonant qualities of each note/chord to radiate outward in space. On this topic, it’s a good point at which to note that Paganimania is particularly well-recorded with the rich, warm tones of McKiggan’s piano hanging reverberantly in the air. Other highlights include Zhou Jing’s Jade Clappers, a meditation on cross-cultural intersections between China and Europe through the Tai Ping Ge Ci music that, to her ears, is reminiscent of Paganini’s Caprice. Thai composer Narong Prangcharoen’s Pact Ink is fast, furious and captivating. As a pianist actively commissioning new works McKiggan…

Music inspired by the atrocities of the 20th century perhaps took a while to reach their peak with Britten’s magisterial War Requiem in the early 1960s, but with the centenary of the battle of Gallipoli this year, there has been a plethora of recordings of music inspired by the horrors of World War I. Some have been more successful than others but I’m glad to state that this new Melba release by the very fine Melbourne-raised and Juiliard-trained pianist Benjamin Martin, must immediately take its place at the top of the pile. There is something quite unique about this disc, which presents a well selected programme of solo piano music by a group of fine orchestral English composers whom we we do not initially associate with the solo keyboard (Bax, Vaughan Williams, Bridge and Delius), immaculately played and intimately performed by Martin. All of this music ranks amongst the earliest inspired by the Great War – all of it being written during the 1920s and all of it is as equally affecting as the best of the period’s song cycles. Perhaps the finest work lies with Vaughan Williams’ Prelude after a piece by Orlando Gibbons, dovetailing English music across the…

How can a miniaturist have delusions of grandeur? The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) showed the way. Overwhelmingly a writer for the piano, Scriabin modeled his early works on Chopin, and adopted the Polish master’s forms: etudes, preludes, nocturnes, scherzos, waltzes and mazurkas. He also wrote ten piano sonatas, along with three symphonies and a few other orchestral works, but no opera and very little vocal or chamber music. As he matured, Scriabin stretched the boundaries of chromatic harmony. His late miniatures such as the ‘poème’ Vers la Flamme of 1914 are practically atonal. In his final years he assumed a messianic self-regard, conceiving of a vast musical event complete with light shows and massed choirs. For a short time Scriabin was thought to represent the future of serious music. He certainly thought so, but did not live long enough to see the post-war abandonment of Romanticism. A hundred years after his death we are in a position to revisit his work without the mystical-philosophical baggage, and to appreciate its exquisite craftsmanship. These 18 discs cover everything: all the piano music from a Waltz Op. 1 to Five Preludes Op. 74, and many works without opus numbers. Vladimir Ashkenazy, who…

With LP nostalgia now playing a major role in classical music purchases, we open our ears to a blast from the past.

Despite a predilection for jellybeans, even a piano genius and expert on Liszt can forget his trousers! Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Has classical lost its power to protest? Or was Bernstein at the Berlin Wall, music’s last stand? Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Symphony Australia and ABC name the 12 Finalists in the prestigious Australia Young Performers Awards. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

A few of the thoughts that flash through the pianist's consciousness strolling through Mussorgsky’s great exhibition.