On the eve of his Australian tour, the controversial violinist talks about his greatest musical influences and standing up Yehudi.

A “stunning” hoard of gold artefacts has been discovered in Shropshire. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Newly recovered and recorded, the composer whose life was cut short at the Somme is assuming his rightful place.

The Taiwanese-Australian violinist, formerly part of Sony’s stable, celebrates a new contract with a comical video. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

A powerful, immersive soundscape that harnesses the resonant space of the Sydney Town Hall.

German virtuoso thereminist Carolina Eyck made her debut with the Berlin Philharmonic at the age of 15 and never looked back. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Following on from her superb 2008 recording of Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin, harpsichordist Winsome Evans also follows in the footsteps of Bach and his contemporaries by devising “keyboard transcriptions of all these solo works emulating Bach’s stylistic textural idioms, compositional procedures and performance practices.” Evans’ copious liner notes demonstrate an extraordinary erudition, an absolute fidelity to Bach’s musical language and an uncompromising attitude towards surmounting every difficulty. She has availed herself of as many 18th-century compositional and performing techniques as she thought necessary to produce a convincing, historically informed realisation of these masterworks, including frequent sharing of melodies “across and between the hands”, composing new bass lines and countermelodies, filling out harmonies and, of course, extensive ornamentation, more often written-out rather than extemporised. And the performances? They are sublime: intimate and urgently expressive, with tasteful use of rubato and colour changes, in the slower movements such as the allemandes and sarabandes; joyful and exuberant in the faster dances such as the courantes and gigues. Together with the performing scores, both sets of recordings comprise a major contribution not just to contemporary Bach scholarship and performance, but to the enjoyment of lovers of Bach’s music everywhere. Continue reading…

Maria Razumovskaya is a London-based pianist who thinks deeply about the music she performs. As well as pursuing a performing career, she has a PhD in the life and work of Heinrich Neuhaus. Her veneration of such Russian giants influences her performance style and programming. This disc gives us two Bach transcriptions by Busoni: Chaconne in D Minor and Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ; Busoni’s own Fantasia in the style of Bach; Liszt’s Vallée d’Obermann and Funérailles; an Elegy by Rachmaninov, and a Fantasia by CPE Bach. They are all predominantly slow, minor-key pieces, either monumental or melancholy and often both. Razumovskaya’s polished technique is big enough to encompass the bell-suffused climax of Vallée d’Obermann, but she tends to approach every piece in the same ultra-Romantic way. CPE calls for spontaneity and unpredictability, qualities her carefully considered reading negates. Her most satisfying interpretation is of Busoni’s arrangement of the Chaconne from Bach’s Violin Partita No 2. Busoni completely reconceived it in pianistic terms, and the result is as solid as a set of variations by Brahms. Razumovskaya has the work’s measure and it encourages greater light and shade in her playing, but as a whole this recital is… Continue reading Get…

For many people, Bach’s solo violin works are the most remarkable works he ever composed. Personally, I suspect the title could be narrowed down further to the Chaconne from the Partita No 2 in D Minor! In any case, the fact that a solitary string instrument must showcase Bach’s profound musical thinking while playing several lines of music simultaneously means that these pieces are an extraordinary challenge to perform, let alone perform well. Rachel Barton Pine has been playing the music of Bach for most of her life, first encountering his music in St. Paul’s Church in Chicago. She gave her first performance, aged four, of Bach in this church, and played Bach in orchestral format there as well. She writes that she keeps the acoustics of the church in mind wherever she plays Bach, so it’s appropriate that it’s in that very same location that this disc was recorded. Players tend to emphasise Bach’s music in one of two ways. They either accentuate the rigorous intellectual side, or the dance-like nature of many of these pieces. Pine splits the difference neatly and leans more to one side or the other depending on the piece. For example,… Continue reading Get…

Orchestras around the country celebrate the Year of the Rooster as Tan Dun tours Australia.

Jayson Gillham is a 30-year-old pianist, originally from Queensland, who is now based in London. He has won several prizes, and his career is progressing nicely as he performs solo recitals, concertos and works with various chamber groups including the Jerusalem Quartet. He won the 2014 Montreal International Music Competition with a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 4, a work he recently played in Sydney as part of a national tour. Two previous solo discs are available on his website. At the 2016 Perth International Festival, a reviewer remarked on Gillham’s “bell-like tone and… sense of expressive lyricism”. The former is certainly in evidence in this recital from ABC Classics. It informs the final Allegro movement of Schubert’s A Major Sonata, D664, giving the music a fresh and unbridled pastoral feeling. Gillham captures the improvisatory style of Bach’s Toccata, BWV911, and once the work is fully underway his playing has real sinew and finely controlled momentum. Young pianists today (unless they are geniuses like Trifonov) fall into one of two broad approaches: either they attack music in a deconstructive way to make it sound newly minted, or they see themselves as part of a long concertising… Continue reading Get…

What do you get when you place nuts and bolts on the keys of an organ (apart from a smack on the wrist from the organist)? Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in