Once considered something of a ratbag, Samuel Sebastian Wesley is now regarded as a rather quaint figure, remembered for a handful of popular choral and organ works that make an occasional appearance with Anglican choirs. History reveals him to have been a colourful character. Despite being the nephew of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, he was born of his father’s teenage housemaid and after a childhood stint in the Chapel Royal, he spent a lot of his early career as a musician for the theatre. Wesley’s penchant for the theatrical was reflected both in his music and in his life. His tenure in various church music jobs was never overly long and his music often attracted trenchant criticism because of its mould-breaking style and form. While it is good to hear such evergreens as Blessed be the God and Father, Wash me throughly and Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace sung so beautifully, the real contribution of this disc is the opportunity to hear some neglected works in tasteful and disciplined performances. Ascribe unto the Lord, O give thanks unto the Lord and The wilderness and the solitary place are cast as minioratorios featuring soloists and an orchestral…

One of music’s most widely travelled explorers and an indefatigable advocate for intercultural understanding and world peace, Jordi Savall here returns with another extraordinarily rich multicultural musical offering: the music of the Balkans. As Savall writes in an introductory booklet note, he and his fellow musicians from different cultures “have delved into this extraordinary historical, traditional and even modern musical heritage to study, select and perform it, thereby creating a genuine intercultural dialogue between the different cultures that have so often been torn apart by dramatic, age-old conflicts.” The result is a vivid collection of traditional (instrumental) folk songs and dances – some joyful, some melancholy – largely drawn from Ottoman and Sephardic repertories. Five different ensembles have been configured for the different yet interrelated styles and traditions: Bulgarian and Macedonian, Gypsy and Hungarian, Serbian and Romanian, Turkish and Greek and Bosnian and Sephardic. The instrumentation is equally rich and includes accordions, violins, viols, lyres, guitars, ouds, a psaltery, percussion, ney and kaval flutes and a qanun (zither). A lively ‘Balkan Prelude’ from Serbia but with Turkish elements opens the disc, with some dazzling accordion and percussion work especially. What follows is a veritable crosscultural smorgasbord, including a soulful Romanian…

Shostakovich’s Ninth and Tenth symphonies have for me always represented the composer at his best. The Ninth is wonderfully uplifting, a light touch not shared by the other symphonies. The Tenth is its alter ego, dark and serious. Only in the closing pages and the dazzling scherzo does the mood lift. The latter, with its whirling woodwind, comes straight after the long first, in which gloom is unrelieved; a musical wasteland, the only light coming from the freezing gloom of a Russian winter. I had expected this new recording, with the remarkable Concertgebouw under the equally remarkable Mariss Jansons (due here in November), to walk away with the line honours. I’m not sure why I expected this, I suppose because of the double reputations and the fact that it’s probably my favourite orchestra. It is a brilliant performance, but there so are many other great versions of this demanding work. Every conductor worth his salt has recorded it, usually well, and there were well over 40 versions when I last looked. My main quibble is with Jansons’ reading of the scherzo. It has lead, not wings on its feet; the side drum is not prominent enough in the ensemble. After…

Hugh Laurie stars as inspirational teacher turning on his pupils to the joys of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations.

We are all familiar with the disappointment when an eagerlyanticipated full-price CD turns out to be a pretentious lemon. The converse also (if more rarely) occurs: a full-price CD which one inserts into the player with limited enthusiasm, but which turns out to be most enjoyable. So here. Many of us will greet such a release by recourse to Britney Spears’ lexicon: “I am sooooooo not a clavichord expert.” And 79 minutes of clavichord is a lot of clavichord. But what threatened to be a chore proved revelatory. While CPE Bach’s oft-recorded 1773 symphonies deserve the rebuke uttered years ago by English broadcaster Basil Lam – “the too-easy surprises of a style where anything may happen” – the present keyboard sonatas, mostly dating from the 1760s, are much more coherent works. Gone are the symphonies’ improvisatory flourishes, their stop-start approach to modulation, their general sense of attention deficit disorder. In their place is a firm, Haydn-like approach to structure, though with no shortage of inventiveness. One curiosity is the appearance of various sonatas’ slow movements in several different versions, varying according to the amount of ornamentation (which CPE himself wrote down). Clearly CPE was an inveterate reviser. Incidentally this production……

Jacques Ibert (1890-1962) is from that long list of prolific French composers known for one or two familiar if slight works (Divertissement and Escales) but who’s more serious output has been ignored. This selection of chamber works (a cost effective genre) seeks to redress that neglect but falls short of its aim. The String Quartet composed between 1937 and 1941 then premiered soon after the liberation of Paris in 1944 is a weighty work that bears witness to troubled times. Its first movement is a cogent argument of obsessive motives but with characteristic urbane turns of phrase followed by a slow movement of lamentation and bleak sonority. The scherzo is a playful pizzicato movement while the finale bustles along with Hindemithian counterpoint; its syncopations reminding us of the lighter Ibert we know. The Trio for violin, cello and harp from 1944 is a good-humoured romp of fine craftsmanship and integrity: its Andante sostenuto a lyrical idyll. The programme is filled out with other short instrumental works such as the strange Ghirlarzana for solo cello and an early work; the enjoyable if inconsequential Souvenir for string quartet and double bass, here receiving its premiere recording. Unfortunately the good intentions are scuppered…

Once considered something of a ratbag, Samuel Sebastian Wesley is now regarded as a rather quaint figure, remembered for a handful of popular choral and organ works that make an occasional appearance with Anglican choirs. History reveals him to have been a colourful character. Despite being the nephew of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, he was born of his father’s teenage housemaid and after a childhood stint in the Chapel Royal, he spent a lot of his early career as a musician for the theatre. Wesley’s penchant for the theatrical was reflected both in his music and in his life. His tenure in various church music jobs was never overly long and his music often attracted trenchant criticism because of its mould-breaking style and form. While it is good to hear such evergreens as Blessed be the God and Father, Wash me throughly and Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace sung so beautifully, the real contribution of this disc is the opportunity to hear some neglected works in tasteful and disciplined performances. Ascribe unto the Lord, O give thanks unto the Lord and The wilderness and the solitary place are cast as mini- oratorios featuring soloists and an……

Certain conductors have become synonymous with particular composers. One thinks of Beethoven/Klemperer or Mahler/Bernstein. In the case of Elgar, the conductor who most often comes to mind is Sir Adrian Boult. He conducted and recorded Elgar’s music repeatedly over a period of 60 years, although when he first heard The Dream of Gerontius he predicted it wouldn’t last! This box contains all his Elgar recordings for EMI. There are others: Boult famously recorded the symphonies for the small company Lyrita in 1968. But this collection contains practically all Elgar’s orchestral works, many obscure or secondary, usually in multiple performances. The only substantial work missing is the song cycle Sea Pictures, probably because Barbirolli’s EMI recording with Janet Baker swept the board.  Timings vary – Boult’s Enigma Variations runs 26:21 in 1936, 31:03 in 1953. Occasionally he rethinks his approach. The Shakespearean tone-poem Falstaff is mellow and its climaxes more triumphal in a late performance from 1973. In 1950, the piece sounds mercurial, lively and even comic…. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

When you see it from the air, it’s a lot smaller than you expect. More cratery and corroded. More mound than monolith. But when I finally make it to the foot of Ayers Rock, I feel like one of those gorillas in 2001: A Space Odyssey, staring up in dumb simian wonder at a phenomenon far beyond my understanding. Whoa… So that’s why Ayers Rock is one of Australia’s icons – because it’s really, really big and impressive.   I’m in Australia’s red centre on a junket kindly arranged by Northern Territory Tourism. And a very nice junket it is so far, with shuttle buses, chilled water, indigenous dancing and handicrafts, hors-d’oeuvres sculpted from local flora and fauna, and lots of smiley people wearing lanyards. But I must admit to feeling like something of a fraud in their midst. I’m not really here for the touristy stuff – but for the music. Tonight at 7pm will be the first symphony concert ever held at Ayers Rock. The band: the Darwin Symphony; the music: a Verdi gala conducted by Matthew Wood; the soloists: soprano Emma Matthews and tenor James Egglestone.   It’s an evening of firsts for me as well. It’s…

In my teaching, I aim to break the mould of String Education and bring it to the 21st century. Embarking on an Australian first, I decided to team up with legendary American electric violinist Mark Wood and put on an Electrify Your Strings concert at the Athenaeum Theatre in Melbourne’s CBD. It took about a year from the idea's initial inception, from when Mark and I met at the Australian String Association’s (Austa) National Conference last year. We shared the same vision in wanting to see Rock’n’Roll become a strong part of the string teachers curriculum. Our motivation was that our students should learn all styles of music including those of the modern day. 12 months later saw the hard work of 140 St Leonard's students and staff culminate in one huge evening. Complete with live feed screens, electric instruments, amplification and a lighting rig, here is what Year 10 cello student Angus Gray had to say about the evening: “Never let it be said that strings are dull. From the Year 4's dancing in the aisles to the older students rocking it out on stage, the St Leonard's College ‘Electrify Your Strings’ concert at the Athenaeum Theatre was a rock…

This month I’ve been unusually digital, engrossed in editing audio, staring at my laptop screen moving music and speech around, before checking my emails, reading the day’s news and then relaxing with a movie online. I realised I had become fixated on my screen, completely off with the pixels. Then I took more notice of those around me, everywhere on trains and planes and street corners and restaurants, people are off with their own pixels, head down staring at a screen like battery hens waiting for the next pellet, obsessively checking messages and Facebook and Twitter, desperate for contact from anyone else who is trapped in their own bubble of digitised information. There is something empty about digital data. There is no weight to it, nothing tangible, it is all empty calories like eating potato chips all day. After a day of digital activity, I feel faintly queasy, unsatisfied, as if I haven’t actually achieved anything at all. The music I have been editing has been made by humans, but it has no energy, no sense of being real. It is so easy now to find any music or entertainment online, it begs the question why go to all the…

Karl Goldmark creeps into the more expansive music reference works for two reasons: his brief teaching – in Vienna – of Sibelius; and his 1877 Rustic Wedding Symphony, a five-section, 45-minute divertissement which Sir Thomas Beecham enjoyed reviving. Other than that, he seems almost entirely forgotten (though a handful of violinists, including Joshua Bell and the late Nathan Milstein, have recorded his concerto). Most people will have been totally unaware that Goldmark even attempted a Second (i.e. non-Rustic-Wedding) Symphony, but he did, and this is actually its second CD version. The first – a Marco Polo release two decades old – was unavailable for comparative purposes, which is perhaps as well, since the golden-toned new disc surely surpasses it. Singapore can now boast a really effective local orchestra, better than some Australian bands and worthy to rank with all save the topmost American ensembles. Touches of string portamento give a pleasantly old-fashioned atmosphere to various passages. Latter-day Beckmessers might dock points for some slightly crude trombone sounds and for the cornet-like first trumpet that dominates the symphony’s third movement; the rest of… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in