The Shock of the New I’ve just returned from Townsville where I spent a very pleasant four days at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, and I’d like to share a secret with you – an aging audience isn’t always a bad thing. An issue that crops up in conversations all the time these days seems to be the million dollar question of how do we get a new audience for classical music? Arts organisations all over the world seem fixated on finding the silver bullet that will rejuvenate their patrons (if I may muddle my metaphors). There’s often an assumption that an older audience is a crusty one, set in its ways and only interested in ‘the three Bs’. A day in Townsville, however, is enough to put you right. Here are a crowd of mostly self-funding retirees (and you need to have the time and a little bit of spare cash to commit to this kind of event) who are up for a challenge. For three sessions a day they eagerly embrace the obscure, the new, and will even listen intently to the downright demanding. During my time up north, Piers Lane and his team offered us everything…

On being reminded of the brilliance of Australian artists. This week we’ve been reminded of the brilliance of Australian artists, not once, but twice. Firstly on Monday the 15th annual Helpmann Awards recognised the achievements of the past year’s best performing arts events. As expected many of the biggest companies took home the top gongs, with Cameron Mackintosh, Sydney Dance Company and Sydney Theatre Company all taking home multiple laurels. However perhaps the most interesting success of the night was that of Leo Schofield’s Brisbane Baroque, which swept the opera categories winning five bobbys for its production of Handel’s Faramondo. This must surely have been a moment of blissful validation for Schofield, who after resurrecting his Hobart-based festival in Queensland in response to inadequate state funding from the Tasmanian Government, managed to dominate the goliath competition of Opera Australia in just about every category; a demonstration that big budgets and abundant funding are not the only paths to achieving great art. On Wednesday night, the Sydney Opera House’s concert hall welcomed an astonishing legion of Australia’s most talented orchestral players, united under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle for the Australian World Orchestra’s 2015 season. The tangible electricity of the audience’s……

Closing the ABC Shops is putting profits before people.

Now an educator and Artistic Director of Tanya Pearson Classical Coaching Academy, retired Principal Dancer of the Australian Ballet and Sydney Eisteddfod Alumna, Lucinda Dunn ponders her dance beginnings and the unheralded but important role Sydney Eisteddfod competition played when as a young girl she learnt to tie her ballet shoes… As I look back on my days as a young girl dreaming to be ‘a ballerina’, I realise that my ‘City Of Sydney Eisteddfod’ experience, as it was called in the 80’s, was a really positive tool in my training and a very useful step towards a professional career. In many instances as I moved through the professional ranks I found myself reliving my Eisteddfod experience as I waited in the wings anticipating my entrance at the end of a solo, minus the bell! Funny how the memory of that bell – signalling my turn in the competition – stuck with me over the years… I competed in a variety of sections during the ‘City Of Sydney’ seasons over many years, groups and solos, in classical ballet, demi, jazz and lyrical. Australia has so much talent in the arts, and specifically the very competitive dance field. For an aspiring…

David Briggs on transcribing Mahler 2 for the organ. David Briggs transcribes and plays Mahler’s Second Symphony on the Grand Organ of St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, featuring the St Mary’s Singers.  Several important ingredients go into both the making and the performance of successful organ transcriptions. I always start from the full orchestral score and not a piano reduction. It’s perhaps surprising that, with Mahler’s symphonies, it’s not necessary to reduce too much, or to leave too much out. If you look at the sketches, things are often quite clear (and written for piano over three staves). The magic with Mahler comes, of course, from the subtlety of the orchestral color, but with modern organ console technology and a degree of imagination it’s possible to replicate (or more accurately translate) this in a new medium. It’s important, too, not to make the transcription unplayable… I tend to find ways, through octave transpositions, reorganising of the voicing of the harmony, and so on, to make the music lie well under the hands and both feet. Processing each note is a very time-consuming (and rather therapeutic) exercise – each bar requires a large amount of thought and this is a perfect way…

Demystifying the compositional process.

A personal recount from one of Australia’s leading piano technicians. The Tchaikovsky International Competition is held every 4 years in Moscow and is considered to be one of the most prestigious competitions in the world.  There are 4 sections: Piano, Violin, Cello and Voice. The competition is held over a gruelling 3 weeks with participants firstly performing in a preliminary round. 30 are then chosen to perform in round 1, but due to many arguments amongst the jury this year, 36 were chosen to go through. 12 are chosen for round 2 and then 6 for the finals where they perform with an orchestra. The piano section is a major television production with over a dozen professional cameras, OB van and expert commentators – much akin to what we would see in a sporting final. There is a separate media centre at the Conservatorium where the competition is also streamed. The world media is in attendance with reporters, camera and audio operators scrumming for the best grab and shot. The competition is broadcast live on both television and the Internet with over 5 million viewers worldwide in over… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

Michielotto’s new staging of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell raised plenty of hackles in London, but will it here? This week, social media pundits, the Twittersphere and even the venerable BBC have been abuzz with the latest operatic hiatus at the Royal Opera House. It seems the opening night audience for c new staging of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell raised plenty of hackles along with some unprecedented heckles during a graphic act of sexual violence during the Act III ballet. Yes, they booed DURING the performance, not just at the end as seems to be increasingly the case at the traditionally sedate London venue. The leadership team of Kasper Holten and Sir Antonio Pappano have, to my mind, offered a speedy and dignified defence of their artistic choices but that doesn’t seem to have extinguished the ardour of the UK’s anti-‘Regie’ brigade (for those new to the term: Regietheater is German for director’s theatre and is a term that refers to the modern practice of allowing a director freedom in devising the way a given opera or play is staged so that the creator’s original, specific intentions or stage directions be changed, together with major elements of geographical location, chronological situation, casting and plot). As it happens,…

★★★★☆ Grieg marked the score of his G Minor Symphony (composed when he was 20 in 1863), “Must never be performed”. This was honoured for 113 years (though individual movements were performed in the 1860s) but after much discussion, it was played in Bergen in 1981 and recorded by Decca under Karsten Andersen. It’s hard to understand Grieg’s attitude, as, for an apprentice work, it’s rather good. Certainly, it has the generic Romantic rhetoric, the stuttering Schumannesque syncopations in the first movement for instance, but it’s also thematically interesting and full of ideas, proving that, even this young, Grieg could think effectively in symphonic paragraphs. The Adagio is especially winsome. Grieg regarded the work as “insufficiently Norwegian”, whatever that means, but the scherzo-like third movement sounded very ‘Norwegian’ to me. I’ve raved about Eivind Aadland’s recordings with the excellent West Deutsche Rundfunk Orchestra in his Grieg cycle and this vivid performance and lovely recording maintain the standard. The soloist in the Piano Concerto is Rumanian-born Herbert Schuch, whose debut disc caused quite a stir a few years ago. Here, his reading is alive to every nuance of what… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

The satisfaction of rediscovering old favourites. One of the great joys of the arts is that it is a perpetual journey of discovery, but there is also great satisfaction to be had by rediscovering old favourites. This week I stumbled upon a wonderful recording of a piece I played as a young music student: Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in D Minor BWV 1052, performed here by the extraordinary Maria João Pires. Aside from Pires’ astonishingly disciplined and crisp execution, hearing this piece for the first time in perhaps 10 years vividly took me back to a period of my life when I was still discovering all this wonderful music for the first time. It’s this ineffable power to transport us, back in time and space, that makes music such a necessary part of the human experience. Enjoy!

Ahead of their anniversary concert, Nicholas Routley shares the choir’s history. In July 1975, four students from the Music Department at the University of Sydney asked me if I would like to form a small, specialist choir. I had only just arrived in Australia to take up a lecturing position in that Department, and although I’d trained as an orchestral conductor I couldn’t refuse them. Our early progress was coloured by my memories of the Choir of St John’s, Cambridge, which I used to hear regularly as a student (which then wasn’t all that long ago). So I auditioned more students, and in November 1975 the Sydney University Chamber Choir gave its first concert. It included Mille Regretz, a short piece by Josquin des Prés. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that both I and the choir fell in love with Josquin. This began our journey into 15th-century music, including many masses and motets by Josquin, his teacher Ockeghem, and their predecessor Dufay, which brought the attention of Sydney listeners to these composers for the first time. We will be performing a work by each of these composers in our 40th anniversary concert this weekend. In…

The 2015 AusNZ Festival brings Aussie music to London audiences. The 2015 AusNZ Festival served as a great celebration of Australian and New Zealand musical talent; both from a performance and compositional point of view. With twenty-eight musicians performing, seventeen Aus/NZ composers performed, and three world premieres delivered over two days, the sometimes forgotten output of Aus/NZ contemporary musicians was placed directly in the spotlight; through a variety of unique and innovative performance and programming methods, ensuring maximum visibility throughout the Festival Events included a discussion on Collaboration in Contemporary Music with pianist Zubin Kanga, conductor Kelly Lovelady, NZ composer Lyell Cresswell, and chaired by Chris Lloyd:pianist; a Pop-Up Music Mini-Festival which featured a host of upcoming professional musicians performing within the public areas of the Festival in impromptu and surprising circumstances; a showcase of young musicians supported by the Tait Memorial Trust; two World Premieres commissioned and performed by NZ tenor Christopher Bowen and pianist Lindy Tennent-Brown in conjunction with the centenary of NZ poet Douglas Lilburn; four collaborations between Aus/NZ poets and musicians (featuring another world premiere composed by pianist Joseph Havlat for the Festival and performed again last week with Ensemble x.y); and a double-bill concert of Australian music by Jayson Gillham and the Australian Piano Quartet, in conjunction with the Tait Memorial…