The other night my wife and I decided to abandon the children and go out. As there was no concert or play of interest to us in the entire Sydney basin, I suggested we go on a restaurant crawl instead. We drove to Balmain and stopped in at a swank Thai restaurant and had delicious duck pancakes, salt and pepper squid and prawns, then drove down to Glebe to an upmarket diner where we had lamb cutlets with a tasty salsa of mint, jalapenos, coriander and chilli and shared a pork rack in a red wine sauce. As we sat nursing our delightfully deep glasses of Argentinian malbec, I pondered on variety, the spice of life, and how we need more of it in concerts, many of which have acquired a stodgy meat and two veg flavour.  Alex Ross wrote a wonderful article recently in The New Yorker on two books that investigated the development of the modern concert. In After the Golden Age, Kenneth Hamilton writes that Franz Liszt used to bring an urn on to the stage containing slips of paper the audience had written with the titles of pieces upon which he would improvise. “On turning out…

In 1993 I taught for three months at the James Cook University in Townsville. The degree was full of delightful middle-aged women who were local piano teachers taking the opportunity to refresh their teaching skills. Because it was a Bachelor of Performance, these women found themselves in the terrifying position of having to perform as part of the course.  To their credit got up and performed – but it was a daunting experience. Afterwards the staff had to sit down and mark them. In many ways the students were nowhere near the standard of other music institutions and there was much discussion about whether they should be failed at the end of second year. Some of the talk was about the effect on the student, but most of it was about the effect their failure would have on the course – they needed to keep the numbers up to bring in the government dollars. These ladies were being used as cannon fodder. They filled up the course in its early stages, and as younger students arrived, the older ones would be failed, having served their purpose. I found this very dispiriting. We were expected to ditch any idea of musical…

I had an Amish day recently. I’d been spending too much time in front of my various screens, editing music and speech on my various electronic devices, doing the company tax, emails, watching videos on YouTube, filling in spreadsheets, reading books, watching ABC iview and SBS On Demand, listening to radio and writing Soapboxes for Limelight. After all this my mind was a blur of digits and pixels and I needed a break.  I went for a walk and listened to the sounds of the neighbourhood. I heard birds and crying babies and bad piano practice. I was at one with my environment, attuned to the physical world. For all our obsession with the digital age, we aren’t digital. We are made up of blood and bone and we eat food not bytes.  Music, like digital information, is totally ephemeral. Sometimes when I pre-construct a radio program and download it onto a memory stick, it feels like a lot of time and effort has been spent with nothing to show for it. Three hours of stereo radio is about 1.37 gigabytes of information, but for all the impressive sound of that number, there’s no extra weight on the memory stick….

I was staying in a hotel recently in Adelaide, while conducting the Adelaide Symphony, and the walls of the lobby were scrawled with handwritten aphorisms. I will enjoy a belly laugh. I will have my cake and eat it too. I will be honest. I will play. I will make love not war. I will unlock my potential. I will believe anything is possible. I will swap worry for wonder. I will promise not to throw a bucket of white paint over this drivel. Sorry, that last one was mine, but really, what is this nonsense? It is verbal pollution and our lives are full of it. Everywhere you go these days modern corporations are bombarding us with little messages that are supposed to make us feel better about ourselves and as a consequence feel better about the products of these companies and then presumably buy more of them. But they just make me mad.  The strapline of the ANZ Bank is We live in your world. Well unless the bank had its headquarters in Alpha Centauri, we can safely assume we already know that. So what is it meant to be telling us, that the bank is not a vast…

How good it is to have such excellent accounts of two major works for voice and orchestra by Holst. The first, dating from 1904 (and revised eight years later) is The Mystic Trumpeter, a setting of Walt Whitman featuring a soprano solo, and the second is the First Choral Symphony, a four-movement work with texts by Keats for soprano, chorus and orchestra. This recording might have come to light some years ago were it not for the untimely death of Richard Hickox in 2008, who passed away just as the project was beginning. Andrew Davis has more than ably assumed Hickox’s mantle and with Susan Gritton (who had begun work with the late conductor) he invests these works with all the colour and drama they demand. In The Mystic Trumpeter the overtly musical references of Whitman’s text help give shape and coherence to Holst’s musical language, allowing the composer to distance himself further from the Wagnerian idioms of which he was overly fond and edge closer to a unique personal style. The varied and often delicate nature of the orchestration allows a clear and effective presentation of Whitman’s paean to love, freedom and joy. Lasting just under 20 minutes, the…

Hearing Beethoven’s piano works played on instruments he would have known was an exciting novelty 40 years ago thanks to the early experiments by Paul Badura-Skoda and Jörg Demus (on not-terribly-well restored Conrad Grafs and Broadwoods), which despite their jangling tone and rattly action gave us the startling revelation of the true “una corda” pedal and the sensation of the wild composer-pianist stretching the possibilities of the instrument to near breaking point. Thanks to the advances in sensitive restoration, and some marvellous craftsmen building impeccable copies, we now have more sense of the peculiar characteristic beauties that were lost in the search for improvements in volume and evenly graduated tone while the more polished results carry their own musical validity. Ronald Brautigam has proven this with his marvellous survey of the complete works played on superb sounding copies by Paul McNulty. With the masterworks now all dealt with we are coming to the fag end of the series, but there are still plenty of delights revealed in fresh colours and the particular tonal qualities and domestic nature of the fortepiano elevates the most slight of Beethoven’s scribblings. This volume might seem a mere completist appendix but makes a delightful 68-minute…

In the same month as this disc was recorded Harmonia Mundi were adding the finishing touches to an eagerly awaited complete recording of the Beethoven Piano Trios by Trio Wanderer – a magnificent achievement that went straight to the top of the list of complete sets. Apart from explaining the delay issuing the disc under review, I wonder whether the conflict of repertoire influenced the decision to record in period style with an original fortepiano or if it was a purely artistic decision, either way I’m not sure the choice was 100% right. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not averse to period instrument performance in this repertoire and the players here are three of the finest of their generation. A few years ago Melnikov and Faust recorded a stunning set of Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas on modern instruments, performed with incredible expressive intensity and hyper-alert intelligence, with Melnikov’s transcendental virtuosity allowing him free reign to colour and shape each note. Here his voice is muted by the dynamic restrictions of the fortepiano and one gets a sense that Faust and Queyras are constantly having to pull back to blend. That said, the fortepiano, a restored Alois Graf from 1828,……

Anyone expecting the chromatic, expressionist post-Mahlerian idiom of Zemlinsky’s mature works will be surprised. As Fiona Maddox wrote in The Guardian: “At the stage when these early works were composed, Zemlinsky occupied a crevice between Brahms and Mahler.” He never crossed the musical Rubicon into atonality like Schoenberg (his brother-in-law) or Berg and Webern, but here the “Brahmsian” influence is more apparent than any nod to modernity. Both works were composed in the 1890s but the conservatism of both is in striking contrast to the sheer genius of Mahler’s First Symphony, written years earlier. Both symphonies are essentially genial and life-affirming and seem to lack any sense of struggle between orthodoxy and radicalism, personal or creative. With the First, you’d think you were listening to Max Bruch or Stanford/Parry. The Second is the longer and more ambitious, with a sprawling first movement that, like the scherzo, slightly outstays its welcome. Its coda is reminiscent of middle period Dvorák. The slow movement is charming rather than dramatic and the finale is simply too discursive to have any real effect, with none of the drama of Brahms symphonic finales, especially the awesome passacaglia of the Fourth. These works are not tepid and…

The initial reviews of this final installment in David Zinman’s Mahler cycle with the Tonhalle Orchestra haven’t exactly been effusive, but they are wrong. From that hypnotic opening oboe melody through to the heartbreaking final bars, this is a reading of Mahler’s last-will-and-testament in vocal music whose understatement should never be misinterpreted as lack of engagement. True, it doesn’t have the overt gnashing of teeth and beating of breast that Bernstein brings to it in his Desert Island classic, but it has something almost as good – a stillness and a poise suggestive of a composer on his way to the other side, delaying and delaying the inevitable, almost as if trying to change the subject. And when the big tuttis are required, as they are for the first time in the second song (Der Einsame im Herbst), there’s plenty in reserve, both vocally with Susan Graham whose restraint up to that point is exemplary, and with the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra who are surely now approaching the top echelons in European music-making. If there are quibbles to be had, they probably lie in the third song (Von der Jugend) where tenor Christian Elsner interprets the text’s pin-point specific imagery of…

French producer, Alain Lanceron’s decision to bring together Julia Lezhneva and Philippe Jaroussky in a recording of Pergolesi seems like a match made in heaven. Both singers have wowed Australian audiences in recent times: Jaroussky with his voice of velvet and dashing good looks, and Lezhneva with her range, technical prowess and elegance. The pair work particularly well together in the Stabat Mater where there are frequent opportunities to match vocal colour and intensity. They are well supported by Diego Fasolis and his band who reinforce the varying moods of the plangent text without taking away from the distinguished vocal contributions. Grander in scale are the two psalm settings, Laudate pueri and Confitebor. These festive works with their writing for chorus and larger orchestra allow the soloists to present their more operatic credentials. The Laudate is a well chosen vehicle for Lezhneva’s talents, allowing her to display her skill in coloratura runs and ornamentation over a fairly wide vocal range. Her delicate but expressive instrument is still in an early stage of development, and I look forward to hearing her in these works as her career progresses and her voice matures. The Confitebor provides a jolly conclusion to this enjoyable…

This is volume four in Joseph Nolan’s widely acclaimed journey through the complete organ works of Charles-Marie Widor. The Perth organist’s high standards show no signs of slipping, with magnificent accounts of Symphonies Nos 7 and 8. Widor wrote these two symphonies between 1886 and 1887. These and the previous two (published 1879) comprise the composer’s Opus 42, which after its initial publication in 1887 was to go through a further five editions. Massive in their structure and conception, 7 and 8 are more consciously symphonic in a late-Romantic sense and less suite-like than some of the earlier symphonies. Nolan, formerly of Her Majesty’s Chapels Royal, St. James’ Palace and, Master of Music at St. George’s Cathedral Perth, was recently made Associate Conductor and Head of Chorus at WA Opera. It’s an appointment that will not only further his development, but allow him to exercise an aural imagination which thrives on maximising colour and texture in order to elucidate line and form – as he does here. Again playing the superb organ of La Madeleine in Paris, which has no less than 60 stops and 4426 pipes, Nolan bathes the dramatic opening Moderato of the A Minor Symphony No 7 in a stained…

Making a debut playing the music of a relatively obscure composer is a brave move. That said, who could resist the music of Anton Arensky?