The vibes virtuoso keeps us up-to-date while on his latest tour of Western Australia. Day 1: Adelaide to Geraldton The first thing to say is that this mini diary will be full of typos as I’m writing it on my iPhone and my finger-tips seem to be bigger than the letters! So don’t hold the bad grammar against me! Left home this morning to fly Ade-Geraldton (WA). Taxi man was very helpful and even helped me lift my 32kg vibe cases I travel with. Didn’t talk too much, which I always appreciate. Checked in with Qantas and had to explain twice what a vibraphone was to airport staff – received very confused and slightly concerned looks. Then had a 15-minute conversation with a friendly Qantas bloke on whether the musicians allowance gives you 2 or 3 extra pieces of luggage. Apparently it’s 2, except sometimes its 3 in “some circumstances” – clear as mud! Saw Julie my accompanist at the gate – always a relief to know your pianist has made the flight!  The long flight gave me a chance to look over the music for the first half of the programme. Had a long 3-hour stop over in Perth…

Is Nannerl Mozart a simple case of Viennese whispers? I’ve had a generally excellent week, full of interesting and stimulating chats with the likes of Geoffrey Rush, Audra McDonald, Kristian Bezhuidenhout and the extraordinary Menahem Pressler – a 92-year-old legend who knew Alma Mahler and Thomas Mann and whose unorthodox tempo for the final movement of the Ravel Piano Trio was approved by Ravel himself. It’s not often you get to hear anecdotes about what Fauré said to one of your colleagues! I got to chat to Lieven Bertels about the 40th Sydney Festival, and although my lips are sealed for a few weeks, I think it’s fair to say that there are some real gems coming our way in January. I even got to sit in on a recording session for Nicole Car’s debut recital on ABC Classics, which I’d say was sounding pretty remarkable. It’s good sometimes to share some of the joys of a job that I consider damn near ideal as it saves these editorials from becoming simply an opportunity for me let my inner ‘Angry of Mayfair’ out. This weeks big classical music story (well, it lit up the internet and twittersphere at least) was…

Making a hullabaloo over Miriam Hyde's music for flute and piano.

Soprano Jane Sheldon on Helmut Lachenmann's colourful and virtuosic Got Lost.

There’s enough bad things going on in the world today without music inciting us to worse.  I was intrigued this week to read a pair of scientific studies claiming that enjoyment of our favourite music might well have an insidious side effect – the power to make us do something just a little bit wrong.  One paper suggested that music makes us more inclined to take risks, and in particular to gamble. The only upside of this report is that it apparently needs to be music that we like, and so the chance of a pokie lounge or casino taking a chunk out of my pay check by popping on Bach’s B Minor Mass or a quick burst of the Ring Cycle seems a fairly remote possibility.  The other more curious study claims that, subjected to our top tunes, we become considerably more likely to lie, cheat and generally do someone else’s dirty work. This is more insidious. As I sat back and enjoyed Paul Lewis’s Beethoven or the Australian String Quartet premiering a new Matthew Hindson work, I couldn’t help feeling vulnerable. Was I being lulled into a suggestible state of mind where I would willingly say yes to an embezzlement scam or…

A musician’s plan to raise awareness of suicide prevention. Three years ago my godson Alex took his own life, aged 24. He was a wonderful young man who had so much to give and so much still to experience. Along with all his friends and family I was left wondering what I could have done to help prevent his death. I started to read about suicide and was shocked at the statistics; suicide is the biggest cause of death for people aged 15-45 and accounts for twice the number of deaths as road accidents. Deaths by suicide have reached a ten-year peak; this equates to almost 7 deaths by suicide every day in Australia, and it is estimated that for every completed suicide as many as 30 people attempt. These are our friends, our colleagues, our neighbours, people from literally all walks of life. So many lives are wasted. I realised we need to start talking about suicide much more openly, and learn how to better support those at risk. Concert for Life from ∑ ∞ on Vimeo. I hatched a plan. September 10, 2015 is World Suicide Prevention Day so I decided to organise a concert on this day to…

In defence of artists. You know those mornings after the night before when you wake up with a warm glow? God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world – and then someone dumps in your cornflakes. That happened to me today. Last night I sat through a couple of hours of unalloyed pleasure. Tim Minchin’s award-winning musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Matilda has landed in Sydney, and the opening night crowd were treated to a cast of hard-working, multi skilled artists (some of them giving every appearance of being shy of ten years-old and quite a few under four feet tall). My face has only just recovered from the effort of maintaining a permanent grin for such a stretch. And then I checked the Daily Telegraph… It turns out that Sydney Theatre Company and Sydney Dance Company are losing their parking spaces on The Wharf down at Walsh Bay. Hold the front page I hear you say! Why I should let myself be annoyed by a total non-story I don’t know, but it isn’t what it says, it’s the way that it says it. In a ridiculously over-sensationalised account, Miles Godfrey (apparently a State Political Reporter, for God’s sake) writes how…

It may not be Christmas just yet, but presents are definitely in the air. No, it’s not Christmas just yet, but while most of us are to be found hunkering down against the winter blasts, presents are definitely in the air. Yes, it’s the time of year when PRs lose what little hair they have left and arts companies across Australia are to be found frantically wrapping up their next year’s seasons before gifting them to a culture-hungry public. And although noticeably fewer organisations this year are launching with a champagne-popping, canapé guzzling media bash (a sign of small annual surpluses and cash-strapped, Brandis-threatened times), there’s still plenty of optimism in the air. Last week saw the Sydney Symphony Orchestra first out of the traps waving Lang Lang, Ashkenazy’s Beethoven and a concert version of Porgy and Bess under our noses. In a nicely curated programme their was a strong sense of commitment to new music and the announcement of Brett Dean as Artist in Residence was the icing on the cake. This week the Queensland Symphony Orchestra are dangling not just Lang Lang in front of us but a second helping of Maxim Vengerov, as well as an impressive line up……

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…