Benjamin Northey is expressive and authoritative in superb performances of works by the Finnish master.

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

Formerly known as orchestra seventeen88, young period ensemble ARCO has announced its ambitious 2017 season. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The Swiss-Australian conductor will work with the Tasmanian and West Australian Symphony Orchestras in 2017.

As a contemporary of Strauss and Schoenberg, it was inevitable that Alexander Zemlinsky’s brilliance would be overshadowed.

Find out why the German violinist waited until now to record Mozart’s Concertos. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Isabelle Faust is an exemplar of the new generation of Modern String Players who have assimilated the techniques of Historically Informed Performance with cross-pollination, inspiring a pragmatic hybrid style. The sickly constant vibrato and bland homogenised phrasing of yesteryear is replaced with a clean-cut sound of impeccable intonation and rhythmically alert rhetorical gestures, effortlessly articulated by her phenomenal bowing technique, (as heard in her breathtakingly beautiful performances of the Mendelssohn Concerto on tour in Australia this year). Faust’s self-effacing persona and collaborative spirit is evident from her various partnerships in chamber music, while the breadth of her repertoire choices and her interest in contemporary works reveals a sharp musical intellect. Yet the end results are music-making of a stimulating spontaneity with a complete freedom from stylistic dogma. This latest release is a perhaps surprising collaboration with Il Giardino Armonico, one of the first Italian groups to embrace HIP. Their early recordings of Vivaldi were a shock to the system with their abrasive rustic accents, but in later years, changes of personnel have refined their sound and they are truly magnificent here under long-term director and co-founder Giovanni Antonini. Accents are as crisp as ever but not so grating as to…

Here are two releases, each charting a sea change in the vision of a most singular artist. In three decades, four symphonies and two hours of music, we hear the Danish composer Per Nørgård shift from Apollonian order to Dionysian excess. Nørgård’s Second Symphony, written in 1970, breathes the calm air of Jean Sibelius. A lilting, seemingly infinite melodic thread is spun out unendingly, as if by the Fates themselves. The line flows throughout the orchestra, changing colour and character, from pastoral to threatening to mysterious, a calm forest stream that ripples and eddies, twists and turns. In the late 1970s Nørgård came upon the obsessive, hallucinatory visions of outsider artist Adolf Wölfli, whose paintings, writings and musical thoughts were a decisive influence on the composer. Wölfli’s work doused Nørgård’s music with fuel, lending it danger, terror, heat and violence. The composer recently approvingly quoted a listener’s comment, that hearing his music is like taking “a walk with a fire-breathing dragon”. The Fourth Symphony accordingly shimmers with a strange beauty, lingering on horrifying and grotesque apparitions, flying into a heavy-footed dance of death. The Fifth is positively unhinged: overstuffed, overlong, full to the brim with climactic moments. There is a…

It was the famous gift of 20,000 francs from the aging Paganini that allowed Berlioz to take time out from the drudgery of music journalism in 1839 and devote himself to a new work. Romeo and Juliet had been close to his heart since his then muse and now wife had played the heroine a decade earlier – but Berlioz was never one to choose the obvious. Shakespeare was too sublime to risk throwing it away on the Opéra (who had recently massacred his Benvenuto Cellini), so the French maverick embarked upon his third, and most unusual symphony to date. The result was a unique hybrid that even now struggles to find a home in the concert hall. A pity, as with a little imagination (and enough money for the substantial forces), it is full of drama, poetry and intensely original orchestral passages. In short, a masterpiece. Robin Ticciati has proven himself heir to Colin Davis with his Berlioz series on Linn (a fresh Fantastique, a moving L’Enfance du Christ and a very special Nuits d’Été) and this last instalment is, if anything, even finer. The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra plays superbly and the Linn engineers achieve a fine separation…

The French conductor (and close associate of Maria Callas), who thought of himself as Viennese, has passed away at 92.

The Finnish composer shocked many in the establishment when he embraced a popular mysticism with his musical angels.

From Hobart to Berlin, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra Principal shares her hopes, inspirations and passions. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in