From the greats like Washington and Lincoln to the murkier Nixons and Clintons, music has added spice to the White House.

Sydney-based composer Ian Whitney has been crunching the numbers for 2017 flagship seasons on his blog. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Opera Australia's Artistic Director explains why art and music in our modern society are more important than ever.

As Melbourne goes Ring crazy, Limelight celebrates with its annual opera special. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

For the first time in nearly 30 years, Sir Neville Marriner’s chamber orchestra will tour nationally in 2017. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The cellist is playing Dvořák with the MSO, but consider him as dwelling in the past at your peril. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

★★★★☆ Tate and Gillham make a memorable evening for an orchestra celebrating 80 years of music making. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The Dutch brothers are royal favourites and have collaborated with Sir Neville Marriner. Now they’re coming to Australia. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Nicola Benedetti scales the heights from Tzarist charm to Stalinist menace.

Lionel Bringuier’s recordings of Ravel’s piano concertos with Yuja Wang were issued last year, and a second listening confirms the Wang approach has much going for it.

This latest volume in Ronald Brautigam’s consistently brilliant survey of Mozart’s works for piano and orchestra finds the Dutch fortepianist in fine fettle in some of the early concertos. Joined by superb German period-instrument band Die Kölner Akademie under Juilliard-trained director Michael Alexander Willens, Brautigam raises the curtain with the main attraction, so to speak. Written in 1773, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 5 was his first original piano concerto, the previous being arrangements of other composers’ music. It’s a thrilling work, with a grand opening Allegro replete with trumpets and timpani, a delicate Cantabile slow movement and a punchy, exciting concluding Rondo. All of which contrasts nicely with Mozart’s sweeter, more delicate Piano Concerto No 6 in B Flat (1776). Gone are the martial effects; instead the main attraction is a stately, delicious Andante where flutes replace oboes, upper strings play on the bridge and lower strings are for the most part plucked. More contrasting again are the Three Concertos for keyboard, two violins and basso arranged around 1772 by Mozart fils and père after JC Bach’s keyboard sonatas of 1766. With Brautigam joined only by violinists Peter Hanson and Marie-Luise Hartmann and cellist Albert Brüggen, these are… Continue reading…

I write this review on the exact centenary of the Battle of the Somme, which is being appropriately (and heart-rendingly) commemorated, and in which this composer died, at 31. I’m surprised how deeply affected I am hearing this exquisite CD. The very mention of Butterworth’s name induces a pang in many people. He was the archetypally gallant yet reticent Edwardian hero, a fine Etonian scholar and musician (and revered by the men he led into battle) and this marvellous music rekindles the pain at the loss of someone cruelly extinguished on the cusp of probable greatness. All the orchestral pieces (some arranged and developed by the conductor) are radiantly preformed and perfectly convey the haunting, dappled beauty of Edwardian summers – great houses, croquet lawns and languid figures in muslin and linen, but not without a hint of mystery. The texts of the song cycle A Shropshire Lad were composed by AE Housman and these renditions by James Rutherford are in the same league as those of Sir Thomas Allen. The singing is hearty, direct, innocently patriotic and occasionally suffused with an almost Mahlerian melancholy. The CD contains a premiere recording of the previously unfinished Orchestral Fantasia developed from a 92-bar…