David Robertson, Chief Conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, is our Guest Editor. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Watch Matthew Hindson’s explosive marimba showpiece in an exclusive recording for Limelight Magazine.

The award-winning London-based Australian pianist will record three albums for ABC Classics. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Effortless virtuoso in complete command of this (quite literally) electrifying modern repertoire. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Minimalism and complexity rub shoulders in a celebration of contemporary music.

In an increasingly conservative music landscape, pianist Zubin Kanga is a champion of the modern. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

A birthday salute to the great Romantic icon expertly captures the spirit of the composer’s music.

This combination is even more bizarre than when Klemperer and Barenboim teamed up to record the Beethoven Piano Concertos almost 50 years ago. Any initial misgivings back then were quickly dispelled: the cycle was a triumph. Lang Lang, by contrast, provided one of the most scarifying musical experiences of my life at a 2011 recital in Sydney (complete with mewling infant) with his clueless Beethoven and Albéniz so unidiomatic I gazed up at the ceiling and thought of Larrocha and Rubenstein. These CDs are mainly a pleasant surprise. Harnoncourt, whose Mozart I generally revere, (although I was bemused to read one blog that said he seemed “out of his depth here”) also has irritating tics (not to mention his “concepts”) but the collaboration works. I hope it doesn’t sound patronising to say Lang Lang is on his best behaviour and his Mozart sounds endearingly old-fashioned and elegant rather than just careful. There’s not much sturm und drang in the C Minor Concerto and it’s a universe away from what we routinely hear from, say, Brautigam and Levin, but the Vienna Philharmonic’s winds are gorgeous in their exchanges in the… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe…

Grey skies the perfect backdrop for this Venezuelan’s prodigious talents. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Talented 23-year-old French harpsichordist Jean Rondeau’s debut recording follows his signing to Erato last year. That he has chosen to focus on arrangements of some of JS Bach’s best-known works for other solo instruments comes as no surprise. Rondeau is a keen chamber musician and jazz improviser, and one gets the impression he admires Bach’s legendary facility as arranger and extemporiser. There are six works here: the Lute Suite No 3 arranged by Rondeau; the Violin Sonata No 3 arranged by WF Bach; Brahms’ arrangement, for piano left-hand of the D Minor Chaconne; the A Minor Flute Partita arranged by Stéphane Delplace; the Italian Concerto; and the Adagio from the Violin Sonata in C, arranged by WF Bach. JS Bach wrote the lute suites on a harpsichord-like instrument designed to imitate the sound of the lute, so they’re perfectly at home here. Rondeau’s playing is full and spacious in the slower movements, clean and energetic in the faster ones; in both cases there is a judicious application of rubato, detaché, style brisé and other forms of ornamentation. The works for solo violin and solo flute gain more from the harpsichord’s sonority… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month…

By refusing to ally himself to the received wisdom that Bach always sounds best on an ocean-going modern grand piano, John Butt gives us a Well-Tempered Clavier performed on harpsichord and instantly we’re teleported back to an ancient, shady world of tuning that feels as alien to our modern experience as water divining, those harmonic ripples causing the basics of familiar musical gesture to flow in ways which are utterly unexpected, but that also feel instinctively right as Bach swims in appropriate waters again. When performed on the sort of grand piano that does Brahms or Rachmaninov favours, the Well-Tempered Clavier becomes frozen in time, like an adjunct to Classicism or Romanticism, more a hook for our convenience as it turns out because that is the historical prism through which we’re most comfortable hearing anything vaguely ‘Classical’. Bach, though, had precisely nothing to do with that Classical milieu, and Butt, playing on a facsimile of a harpsichord built during the first decade of the 1700s, plugs us back into the archaic world into which this music was actually born. Which is a bracingly radical, forward-thinking stance for a Bach interpreter to take. Even something as glaringly familiar as the Prelude…

Theory versus practice? Sally Whitwell weighs in on what exactly being a composer is all about. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in