Kaufmann, four Strauss operas, 12 unknown operatic gems and Philip Glass's minimalist answer to the Ring Cycle.

Paul Stanhope turns Indigenous legend into choral hero. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The most famous scion of a legendary guitar dynasty talks fathers and sons, working with Joaquín Rodrigo and his proudest moment.

25 years after the death of Herbert von Karajan, we examine the man who came to define classical music.

Orchestra celebrates their old maestro in the Digital Concert Hall for the 25th anniversary of his death.

Brisbane orchestra follows the world’s lead, signing up the Israeli violinist for next year's season.

Adelaide to see premiere of iconic Chinese composer’s exploration of the secret songs of women.

Festival of Voices “slightly unusual concert,” proves to be just that. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

European tour program to surely bring the house down at the Albert Hall. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

How the Principal Conductor of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra hopes to perform 'forbidden' Wagner operas.

This set is a cornucopia of glorious conducting and orchestral playing. While it’s impossible to generalise about works as gargantuan as Wagnerian melodramas, I can’t help thinking, having soaked up this set over a period of weeks, that people who find the contemporary interpretations of Levine, Barenboim & Thielemann faceless, may be onto something. The recordings range from Hans Knappertsbusch with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1927 or 1928, to his Munich recordings of 1962. The sound ranges from the just acceptable to the relatively modern. Knappertsbusch was famously – or notoriously – slow, depending on your point of view, in Wagner. However, there was never any dissent about his unique ability to preserve a line or arc, gradually and convincingly accumulating tension. When it came to architectural grandeur, no one could top “Kna” in these excerpts from Rienzi, Die Fliegender Höllander, the Lohengrin Act 1 Prelude (aptly described by the liner note writer as Wagner’s first piece of truly transcendent music) Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg Overture and Parsifal Prelude in Munich and another Meistersinger Overture coupled with extracts from Die Walküre, Parsifal & Tannhäuser in Berlin. Intriguingly, the Meistersinger Overture in 1928 took 8’34. By the 1962 Munich performance, it……

Messiaen described his ten-movement Turangalîla Symphonie (1947-1949) as a song of love, a hymn to joy. Yet a bitter history informs the piece. Fierce irony shapes and drives a startling barrage of traditional and exotic instruments, creating images in the manner of medieval carnival with its mockery of prevailing social orders where comic forms took new and often sinister meanings. In this charged performance with Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor Juanjo Mena captures the agitation in the work, even catching a sardonic gleam in the composer’s eye. At times, Turangalîla weaves covertly through aggressive forces manoeuvring for narrative dominance. At others it is barefaced, springing from memories of unimaginable horrors the composer endured in a German concentration camp a few years earlier. Mena’s vision of this music is sharp; familiar emotional territory for a conductor born in Vitoria, in northern Spain’s fiercely independent Basque country. With his team of Nordic musicians, he unleashes a phantasmagoric cacophony of jeering whistles, wails and screams. British pianist Steven Osborne is ferociously focused as a major and constant solo voice threading through the drama of contrasting cycles, by turns frenzied and gentle. It is relieved by plaintive, otherworldly cries of anguished love from the ondes…