Fifteen of Australia’s rising classical music stars will participate in the orchestra’s intensive training programme.

Since he picked up his father's synth and fell in love with music, the Russian's rise has been meteoric. How does he handle it all?

A trip to Tasmania’s Bathurst Harbour with environmentalist Bob Brown inspired the composer’s piece for Diana Doherty. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Tan Dun's celebration included a phoenix, a mandarin and the secrets of Chinese women.

The line between high falutin’ art and down and dirty folk has always been porous, says the SSO Chief. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

In a night of juxtapositions, the ACO moves in for the kill with a rapturous array of music from Heaven and Earth.

The Australian period ensemble brings its expertise to Baroque, Classical and Romantic repertoire. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Conductor Christoph von Dohnányi warns against the dangers posed by Trump’s presidency in a personal statement.

The great English clarinettist, conductor and founding member of the Melos Ensemble, has passed away aged 90.

The ne plus ultra of Mozart boxes: with curation like this, Amadeus’s 225th death-day box will be hard to surpass.

Ever the perfectionist, Bruckner left two versions of his Eighth Symphony – the last symphony he completed. After his “artistic father” Hermann Levi rejected the first version, Bruckner spent three years revising the work. In this performance by the Australian World Orchestra, recorded live in the Sydney Opera House’s Concert Hall in 2015, Sir Simon Rattle uses Robert Haas’s 1939 edition – a hybrid that incorporates elements from both of Bruckner’s versions. The Haas version has remained popular, conductors like Karajan and Haitink continuing to use it even after Leopold Nowak released his more authentic scholarly editions of the symphony in 1972. From the shimmering violins and brooding basses of the opening, Rattle leads the AWO through a mammoth symphony, which has attracted the nickname Apocalyptic – a moniker that captures the scope if not quite the atmosphere of the work. The two-plus-three “Bruckner rhythm” – given so much motivic weight in the composer’s Seventh – sweeps through the strings in the first movement while the descending figures, like pealing-bells in the Scherzo are flowing and expansive under magically shimmering strings. The AWO’s brass and timpani conjure vast landscapes that fade away again into solitude. The Adagio… Continue reading Get…

This second volume of British overtures is a cracker and full of vibrant charm. Much of the content has a distinctly nautical feel like William Walton’s Portsmouth Point, played decently here but without the snap that the ‘old’ Philharmonia in its heyday brought to this notoriously tricky score with its constant syncopations and kaleidoscopically fluctuating time signatures. Then there is The Boatswain’s Mate by Ethel Smyth (photographed in what Barry Humphries would call a “Hampstead lady novelist get-up”) and John Ansell’s Plymouth Ho. Even more impressive are the tragically short-lived Walter Leigh’s heraldic Agincourt, in the same mould as Elgar’s Froissart and Walton’s Henry V incidental music, and Sir Alexander Campbell Mackenzie’s A Nautical Overture, bizarrely dedicated to the Duke of Coburg and Gotha, a sinister German relative of the pre-Windsor British Royal Family, whose own title was then (1895) the same. Parry’s Overture to an Uunwritten Tragedy introduces a darker note (the “unwritten” tragedy turns out to be Shakespeare’s Othello… go figure!)  My three favourite pieces are Roger Quilter’s Children’s Overture, which features a sequence of nursery rhymes, John Foulds’ Le Cabaret, inspired by a French play  but sounding rather like Poulenc in the home counties, and Eric Coates’…