Friends President and Artistic Director are among those choosing the 2016 Competition running order.

This release is consistent with Hyperion’s reputation for creating warm, engaging records matched with exceptional sound. On this fourth volume, Howard Shelley tackles the Opus 35 set of Preludes and Fugues, Mendelssohn’s most substantial opus for solo piano, and pairs it with the popular fifth book of Songs Without Words. Shelley makes a strong case for these Bach-influenced studies. One listen leaves you in no doubt of his musicianship in an album executed with pristine attention to detail – his dexterity is especially on trial in the faster movements. Of particular note is the Prelude in B Minor, while the unpublished  Andante Cantabile and Presto Agitato are something else. Shelley plays with quicksilver speed and agility, but never seems to over-pump the gas. He maintains a reserved, agile, darting sound that dances up and down the keyboard with ease. In the exquisite fifth book of Songs without Words, a lesser pianist might milk phrases or revel in their sentimentality, a tendency that Shelley avoids perfectly. Instead, he marries an understanding of these wonderful Romantic phrases with the clarity that one would expect in Bach. The closing Spring Song is elegant and full of colour. This fine new recording demonstrates why…

The second in our series of interviews with the jurors for the Sydney International Piano Competition of Australia. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The two long-term collaborators take us behind the scenes of their new double disc. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Four hours in a theatre is one of our Editor’s not-so-secret pleasures. But is this becoming an impossible ask for many?

We’ve had “the next Callas”, “the next Sutherland”, “the next Wunderlich”, now, we’re hearing 28-year-old Georgian pianist, Khatia Buniatishvili touted as “the next Argerich”. Not on the strength of this CD, featuring works each of which exists in an orchestral guise (and in which I’d much rather hear all of them)! The Guardian critic unleashed as much bile on Buniatishvili’s Wigmore Hall performance of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition as his feminist colleagues routinely do on signet ring-wearing, old Etonian Tory politicians who ride to hounds. Broadly, I’m forced to agree: the very opening of this recording is promisingly imaginative, with the Promenade played tentatively – as if the viewer is intimidated by art galleries (though The Promenade connective tissue convincingly becomes bolder as the performance progresses). The Old Castle is hypnotically, but interminably slow. This works, but Bydlo, the ox cart, sounds as though it’s lost a wheel. Other movements – like Baba Yaga (the Hut on Fowl’s Legs) – are dispatched in such a helter-skelter way that they become virtually meaningless. What should be a magical transition between Baba Yaga and the gravity and grandeur of The Great Gate of Kiev is completely botched and goes for nothing….

I’m not sure Charles-Marie Widor would have liked to be remembered simply as the man whose Toccata provides happy couples with the second most popular wedding recessional in history. But there’s not much danger of that with organists the calibre of UK-born Joseph Nolan (currently Organist and Master of the Choristers at St George’s Cathedral, Perth) keeping the sacred flame burning. Nolan here offers the first fruits of seven nocturnal recording sessions in a row, during which he put down all ten of Widor’s organ symphonies at the console of the superb four-manual, 60-stop, 4426-pipe Cavaillé-Coll organ of La Madeleine, Paris. The first two symphonies of Widor’s Opus 42 are grandly Romantic, five-movement behemoths that balance huge multicoloured edifices of devilish complexity with softer-lit landscapes populated by angelic choirs of varying dimensions. Nolan hovers over all like some musical demiurge, fleet of feet and fingers as he negotiates the massive chords and filigree passagework of faster movements such as the closing Vivace of Symphony No 6; thoughtful and sensitive yet smouldering with creative tension in slower movements such as the multi-faceted Andantino quasi allegretto and mellifluous Fifth Symphony Adagio. And “that” Toccata, with which the Fifth Symphony and the disc…

Orchestral Editor’s Choice, December 2013 Those of you who still haven’t cottoned onto the idea that Widor wrote a hell of a lot of brilliant organ music, most of it far superior to that Toccata, really need to hear this third volume in UK-born Perth-based organist Joseph Nolan’s recordings of Widor’s ten organ symphonies, part of his traversal of the composer’s complete works for organ. Like the previous two highly acclaimed volumes, this one’s been recorded on the magnificent Cavaillé-Coll organ of La Madeleine, Paris. Cavaillé-Coll was a friend of Widor’s and the composer’s music is inextricably linked to his instruments, which Widor played throughout his career. The four organ symphonies which comprise Opus 13 were first published in 1872 and later dedicated to Cavaillé-Coll. Taken together, the Symphony No 3 in E Minor and the Symphony No 4 in F Minor form a contrasting diptych, the more overt romanticism of the first contrasting with the neo-Baroque qualities of the second. Both however are equally imbued with delicacy and drama – qualities that are brought to the fore by Nolan with such nuance and insight that you feel you learn more about Widor by listening to these performances than reading…

Zubin Mehta, an outspoken genius among conductors, shares his astonishing life story.

The first in our series of interviews with the jurors for the Sydney International Piano Competition of Australia.

A celebration of listening and a profound meditation upon the power of place.

Perth’s star organist becomes a ‘knight’ in the Order of Arts and Letters.