Hosted by APRA AMCOS and the Australian Music Centre, the awards recognise excellence in new Australian music. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Distinguished Service to Australian Music Award recognises the composer for his major musical achievements. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Throughout his long pianistic career, Vladimir Ashkenazy has made celebrated recordings of the music of Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915). Most notable are those of the Piano Concerto and Prometheus (with Maazel), plus his recording of the Piano Sonatas. All date from the 1980s or earlier. This new recital, made up of sets of etudes, mazurkas, poémes and various other groups of short pieces, was recorded as recently as December 2014. The works span the short-lived composer’s entire career. Although Ashkenazy is still in good shape, I find him too heavy-handed in this repertoire. The early works are modelled on Chopin and require polish, while the harmonically diffuse and mysterious late works need delicacy, which they certainly get from Horowitz or Sofronitsky. Ashkenazy shines when Scriabin comes closest to his contemporary Rachmaninov, as in the Eight Etudes, Opus 42. Barnstorming does not seem out of place here. The pianist is clearly engaged in the few miniatures that are specifically pictorial, such as the depiction of birds in the second of the Three Pieces, Opus 45. The late Vers la Flamme, in its harmonic restlessness and improvisatory form, sounds uncannily like modern jazz (no surprise that Bill Evans played Scriabin for practice). Ashkenazy…

Hyperion’s third instalment in their survey of Hungarian Ernö Dohnányi’s solo piano music explores the composer’s period of increasing professional establishment. Dohnányi’s language may be less familiar than contemporaries like Rachmaninov, Ravel, or even Scriabin, but share that early-20th-century strain of romanticism, sparkling impressionism, and the strong influence of folk music. The real treasure here is Ruralia Hungarica, a multi-movement work exploring folk material from Dohnányi’s homeland, including songs for minstrels, children and soldiers, and an energetic csárdás. Some movements feature songlike phrase structures with splashes of Debussian colour. Others adopt an almost Rachmaninov-like sense of power, with incessant chords in parallel fifths and rich dissonances. In contrast, the Three Pieces (Aria, Valse Impromptu and Capriccio) have a Chopinesque feel. The Gavotte and Musette are cute divertissements, though lacking ingenuity next to Ruralia Hungarica. The album is rounded out with virtuoso waltz arrangements of Delibes’ Nalia Waltz, and Strauss’s Schatz-Walzer and Du und Du. Martin Roscoe captures every nuance with consummate virtuosity and a flair for negotiating the shifts in mood that characterise Dohnányi’s style. The interpretation is romantic but never overdone, painting in shades that one moment suggest drama, the next serenity. A fine performance of captivating music. Continue…

The prodigiously talented Jiang Yi Lin began studies at age six, won his first competition the next year, and made his orchestral debut at ten. He’s now 27, and for his first recording has chosen a selection of works united by the concept of that which is hidden or concealed. Three Masques by Szymanowski are each named for literary figures who hid their true intentions behind literal or figurative masks. These vivid, electrifying pieces are constantly shifting, polyrhythmic studies in tonal nuance, and push the performer to “the limits of pianistic possibilities,” as Jiang puts it. Two complementary early-20th-century pieces follow: a Masque by Scriabin, which ripples and flashes for barely a minute, and a longer Masque by Debussy, a complex rendering of conflicting positions. Schubert’s Drei Klavierstücke, D946 function as a mirror to the Szymanowski, with Jiang equally at home exploring his dancing mask of sorrowful concealment. Jiang returns to the early 20th century to conclude with a piece by Cantonese composer Lü Wencheng, the title of which translates as Autumn Moon over the Calm Lake. The inspiration is West Lake in Hangzhou, near Jiang’s hometown of Shanghai, and here, he says, it’s possible to drop “one’s personal mask…

It’s reassuring that music critics wrote drivel 200 years ago. Wilhelm von Lenz, one of Beethoven’s early biographers, described the Waldstein Sonata as the pianistic equivalent of the Eroica Symphony. It gets worse: he described the Appassionata Sonata as “undoubtedly Beethoven’s darkest and most aggressive work.” Jumppanen’s readings of both are unexceptional and unexceptionable, though the finale of the Appassionata is a great deal more aggressive than that of Arrau or Barenboim. What interested me more was the Opus 10 trilogy of early sonatas, which are frequently overshadowed by the middle and late period masterpieces. Both the first and second in this opus are, on the face of it, backward-looking works, the first minus a minuet the second lacking a slow movement but, nevertheless, containing a myriad of suggestions that something marvelous is afoot. Jumppanen captures the kaleidoscopic moods of both these works, especially the Haydnesque presto of the Second. It’s in the four movement Third Sonata that we see the huge strides Beethoven had taken even within the same opus: the Largo e mesto, surely the most tragic and heartfelt of all his ‘early’ works. Jumppanen spins out the final bars here into a passage of exquisite agony, itself…

Angela Hewitt, as they used to say in old-school classical CD reviews, is currently at the peak of her pianistic powers, and having just released a well-upholstered and characteristically thoughtful recording of Bach’s The Art of Fugue now turns her attention to Franz Liszt – his sempiternal B Minor Sonata placed alongside the earlier Dante Sonata and Petrarca Sonnets. B Minor was a significant key for both Bach and Liszt, and Liszt’s mass of sound integrates fugal grandeur within a narrative framework that delights in extreme shifts of mood; harmonic non sequiturs and melodic flashbacks are glued together by rhythmic markers in the sand. With fingers expertly primed to unpick the inner workings of Liszt’s fugal writing, Hewitt is also on top of the overall trajectory of Liszt’s large-scale dramatics. Never ostentatious or showy, her mission, apparently, is to show that the B Minor Sonata adds up to more than a sequence of grandstanding set pieces. Hewitt fesses up in her booklet notes that when, in her teens, she first encountered the Sonata she came away thinking “what an awful piece,” but she enters its world with the zeal of a reformed smoker. Could some of the descending passagework near…

Future Makers claims to be “Australia’s most holistic artist development initiative for professional musicians today.” Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The annual APRA AMCOS Awards celebrating “diversity and vibrancy” sees increase to first time nominees this year. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Baroque specialist, harpsichordist and pioneering conductor of Handel opera passes at 80. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

From Scriabin to Chopin, Wang dazzles with poetry, musicianship and bags of ‘wow’ factor.

★★★★★ When I hear Dutch pianist Ronald Brautigam play Beethoven on period fortepianos I think that, quite honestly, performing the great man’s music on a modern grand piano is an aesthetic crime of some magnitude – right up there with colourised Laurel & Hardy films and microwaving chicken. Elsewhere in this issue, it’s true, I lavish praise on the fourth instalment of Jonathan Biss’s ongoing cycle of Beethoven Piano Sonatas, praise that is sincere and unquestionably deserved. But Brautigam’s attention to historical form is such that three separate fortepianos have been recalled from the subs’ benches in order to trace the evolution of the instrumental hardware with which Beethoven himself necessarily wrestled. Paul McNulty’s copy of an 1802 fortepiano serves Sonatas 1 through 18, its timbral delicacies and coarse-grained tuning temperament representing a complete game changer. Take, for example, the Moonlight, Beethoven’s most used and abused sonata, lacquered often with cod-Romantic rubato. In Brautigam’s hands we’re reconnected with its eerie oddities – when… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in