In a career that’s lasted more than half a century, Pepe Romero has proven himself to be an important part of the classical guitar’s 20th-century revival. With a prodigious, flamenco-based technique, his intense and raw performances are celebrated here in a generous 11CD box set, covering the greater part of the Spanish guitar repertoire. If you’re looking for the less Spanish-influenced music that was to appear in the guitar repertoire in the 1960s and 70s (Britten’s Nocturnal, perhaps?), then this definitely isn’t the place. A solid five CDs here are devoted to the guitar repertoire from Spain, but then again Romero’s at his very best in repertoire that’s written in a modern, yet lyrical style. He particularly shines here in performances of the music of Joaquín Rodrigo and Federico Moreno-Torroba, and it’s refreshing that it’s not only these composers’ big hits that are included. Of especial note is Rodrigo’s Invocación y Danza, perhaps his greatest composition. It’s written in an entirely different style to his sunny concertos, and is instead a dark and almost destructively powerful rumination on the music of fellow Spaniard Manuel de Falla. Romero’s performance here is stirring stuff indeed, showing the guitar in its best light. Other…

Opera in a boundless landscape I’m in “The Isa” for the last hurrah of the crazy-brave adventure that has been OperaQ’s Project Puccini, and I’m thrilled to crow that our improbably ambitious journey across regional Queensland, incorporating a total of 384 local choristers into our beautiful new production of Puccini’s La bohème, has been an unqualified success Like the extraordinary team of people who will bring the performance to life tonight, I’m simultaneously relieved and sad that it’s over, but the overwhelming emotion is the thrill of achieving a seemingly impossible goal. From its planning phases two years ago until the final strains of Puccini’s achingly sad Act 4 silence at the Mt Isa Civic Centre tonight, this project has been special, and ensuring its success will continue to focus the minds of everyone involved With Project Puccini ‘everyone involved’ means literally hundreds of people across thousands of kilometres: the army of locals who participated or worked on the show; the touring company of stage technicians; wardrobe/wigs; tour and stage management; principal singers; QSO musicians; the show’s assistant director and conductor; and the OperaQ support team in our South Bank HQ. Every one of them has contributed to the project heart…

And just what kind of music lover should be chosen to colonise the Red Planet? Apparently 43 Australians are in the running for a position on Mars One – the plan to put humans on Mars in the year 2024. I’m glad to say I’m not one of them, as this is a one-way mission. No return is possible. Every year or so, Mars One will send more supplies and more Martians. Some 200,000 people around the world applied and now they have selected 1,000 to undergo training and psychometric testing. (I’m a great believer in psychometric testing by the way. This is the same system that determined Jonathan Shier would be an excellent managing director of the ABC, and we all remember how well that worked out.)  Eventually four Marstronauts will blast off on a one-way ride to the Red Planet.  What criteria might you use to select four people to leave Earth forever? They’d have to be healthy, but musical compatibility must be up there. Imagine being a string quartet lover and having a country and western fanatic in the next bunk – your Grosse Fuge interrupted by the strains of Keith Urban. Musical tension… Continue reading Get unlimited…

Mendelssohn’s six string quartets don’t get the airplay they deserve, being overshadowed by Beethoven and Schubert’s. There are plenty of recordings out there, but few to rival this new double disc from Berlin’s Artemis Quartet, which has established itself as a leader among the new generation of ensembles. Formed 18 years ago, they have built a strong following wherever they’ve played – including tours here with Musica Viva. Natalia Prischepenko left last year and this is our first chance to hear the Artemis with their new leader, Latvian violinist Vineta Sareika. I can tell you that this stunningly good band – Gregor Sigl, violin, Friedemann Weigle, viola, and Eckart Runge, cello – has lost nothing in the transition. Their authority and musicality are intact and they still have that chemistry that makes them so special. They’ve chosen works from three periods of Mendelssohn’s short career. The Op 13, his second quartet, was written in 1827 when he was 18 and is a memorial to Beethoven, being inspired by the great Op 135 “muss es sein? (must it be?)”. Mendelssohn’s third quartet, is the composer at his sunniest and its blue skies first movement makes the perfect opening. The final quartet is a grief-stricken…

On the steps of Parliament House in Adelaide on Saturday morning, there will be lots of rabbits. Well, children dressed up as rabbits, protesting against the recent news of the imminent closure of the much loved youth theatre company, Urban Myth.  For over 30 years Urban Myth has seen thousands of young people come through its doors. Although many do go onto the country’s leading drama schools, the company isn’t just about turning children into actors; it’s about nurturing imagination, shaping characters, developing confidence and helping many make great friendships too. Through theatre, all are encouraged to play, act, dream and be whatever they want to be. However, despite valiant attempts to manage the company, major funding cuts over the last few years have made sustaining itself impossible. It needed $250,000 to continue for another year but, as of Monday, they had nothing. The announcement of its demise has come as a devastating blow to the community. Funding of the arts is an ongoing issue. In a world where financial accountability is king and box ticking a must, justifying tangible benefits to suit the required terminology is hard. How do you possibly quantify the joy a child can get from…

Prokofiev’s rarely performed Third Symphony (Mackerras performed it with the Sydney Symphony in 1977) is the symphonic equivalent of Almodóvar’s Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown. I enjoyed it more than I expected to. Based on ideas from his opera The Fiery Angel, about religious hysteria, it’s nowhere near as maniacal as the Second Symphony but the frenzy is still just beneath the surface. It’s a tour de force the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra carry off with aplomb under their Ukrainian chief Kirill Karabits, illustrating the galvanic effect he’s having in that haven of gentility on England’s South Coast. The Seventh Symphony (Prokofiev’s swansong) Karabits describes as “tragic”. I think his conducting is more convincing than his commentary, as the work was composed for young audiences! It’s cool, enigmatic, almost elegant in parts, “late night” Prokofiev, if you like, occupying the same sound world as Cinderella. His reading is certainly darker than either André Previn’s 1970s LSO one, or Nicolai Malko’s pioneering Philharmonia recording made a few years after the composer’s death in 1953. Karabits solves the “problem” of the alternative endings by recording both: the original was a subdued “leave taking” but the ever vigilant “authorities” demanded something…

Classical music promoter Albert Imperato engages Steven with his ‘20 Questions’ treatment. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

It wasn’t until the 1940s when émigré composers from Central Europe began working in the UK and Hollywood, that film music came of age. Top of the heap, alongside Korngold, was the Hungarian, Miklós Rózsa. The oriental element that assisted the exotic flavour in his music, comes from his Magyar heritage. It came naturally to him (as it did his colleagues, Bartók and Kodály) and didn’t have to be concocted. The Jungle Book and The Thief of Bagdad both benefit from this influence. These scores for Alexander Korda set him on the road to fortune, especially when war broke out in 1939 and Korda decided to finish The Thief of Bagdad in Hollywood. Rózsa never went back. Sahara was made for David O. Selznick during a time when the composer was freelancing and deals with a tank chase across the Sahara. The late Christopher Palmer made this arrangement of the score. Rózsa’s music for Ben Hur is generally regarded as his magnum opus; the lavish and hugely impressive score developed a life of its own shortly after the film was released in 1959. Rumba Gamba has been making some excellent recordings in recent years. Although well played, this recording is…

The youthful conductor István Kertész had worked mainly in provincial Hungary when he made his first recording for Decca in 1961, but his reputation was rising rapidly. Everyone responded to the freshness of his music making. His musical memory was acute: he was reputed to learn scores for the first time on the plane on his way to rehearsal. He was booked to do Elgar’s First Symphony for his recording debut with the London Symphony Orchestra, but on the strength of his success in a concert with Dvorák’s Eighth, the plans changed. Eventually he recorded all of Dvorák’s symphonies, and much else, with the LSO. Kertész would have cemented his international standing but for the intervention of fate: he drowned in the Mediterranean while on holiday in 1973, at the age of 43. The recordings with the London Symphony form the bulk of his legacy, and many of the best are included here. Dvorák is represented by the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, some tone poems and the Requiem. A great recording of Bartók’s dark and gloomy opera Bluebeard’s Castle with Christa Ludwig and Walter Berry is also here (sung in Hungarian). One of his most exciting early recordings was of…

It’s always a burning question. When the performer walks back on stage, what encore will she play? Something slow and meditative, like Bach, or maybe flashy Paganini at breakneck speed? Encore pieces are a revered repertory, which according to Hilary Hahn were “shaped by the performers who preceded us”. So, this stellar violin virtuoso has asked a different question: what should today’s encores sound like? Her answer came in an ambitious project: commissioning 26 composers to write encore pieces, plus holding an open competition to find a 27th. The result is a ripper, two-disc compilation with one of the most profoundly contrasting arrays of compositional style and language you could imagine. You’ll find older, more established writers, like Finnish master Einojuhani Rautavaara, with newer voices thrown into the mix. Each piece explores a different sound world, and posits a unique idea of what an encore should do. Some works are slow, lyrical and open, others fast, dissonant, and impossibly demanding when it comes to technique and flair. Everyone will have a favourite, but Israeli composer Avner Dorman’s Memory Games is an outright thrill to listen to. Hahn’s performance is stunning in every encore. She is often lauded for her rich tone…

Kent Nagano’s ongoing Beethoven recording project is one of the most underrated cycles in the current catalogue and this latest release of Symphonies Nos 1 and 7 again proves the point. As with the previous symphonies (Nos 3, 5, 6, 8 and 9), this ‘Departure – Utopia’ (each installment bears a literary title) has all the dynamic contrasts and tempo changes that one would expect from a project that aims to reveal Beethoven the Revolutionary. But unlike so many other Beethoven re-interpreters who accentuate dynamic contrasts and tempo changes, Nagano never lapses into affectation or sensationalism. Instead, he gets his Montreal Orchestra up on its toes, like a middleweight ducking and weaving while unleashing rat-a-tat volleys that rarely miss. Take the finale of No 1, for instance, which starts so hesitantly that you think it’s a mistake, before that blisteringly quick tempo of the main theme suddenly takes off with such precision of articulation that you have to marvel that somehow it’s completely virtuosic without ever drawing obvious attention to that fact. The reason is that there’s deep thought behind it all, the intellectual rigour never weighing it down but only serving to heighten the musical assurance – the sure-footedness…

Another dose of what I’ve come to regard as high altitude kitsch, with Strauss marking time until the next good idea. Ho hum! Richard Strauss’s most grandiose, final tone poem, An Alpine Symphony, celebrates its centenary this year. The Saito Kinen Orchestra, founded by Seiji Ozawa, is a Japanese  equivalent of Abbado’s Lucerne Festival Orchestra, or for that matter, the Australian World Orchestra, drawing Japanese players from the world’s most prestigious ensembles. Daniel Harding and his forces enter a crowded field, up against Previn, Welser-Möst, Thielemann and, naturally Karajan. Harding’s orchestra plays well, although the strings lack the last ounce of sheen. Woodwind and brass are distinguished (although the great burst of 12 horns representing the first rays of the sun always reminds me of Caro mio ben). Also, I found the very opening a little lacking in mystery and tension. The incidents, which take place during the hike are also well handled – these climbers are granite-jawed blue-eyed Aryans, not day-trippers in sensible shoes worrying about whether they’ve remembered to pack the thermos. The glacier episode exudes a real sense of danger. The ending is well handled, not drawn out too agonizingly (it’s not Mahler Nine). Mehta indulges more…