Why, oh why, aren’t Peter Philips and his music better known? As a committed English Catholic he spent his working life abroad. His first sojourn abroad was to Rome, where he fell under the spell of the Italian madrigal, but he soon settled in the Low Countries, working for the Archduke Albert in Brussels. In 1622 Henry Peacham wrote that Philips was “one of the greatest masters of Musicke in Europe”, and everything so far committed to disc from his melodious and engaging oeuvre supports that claim. The present disc explores his eight-part motets, written for two choirs and intended to celebrate major feast days of the Church year. The musical language avoids the harmonic extremes of a Gesualdo or even a Monteverdi, but Philips shows his Italianate leanings with colourful effects illustrating text. Changes of speed and metre abound, and there is much passing of phrases from one chorus to the other. Rupert Gough and his excellent Royal Holloway choir have been recorded in the warmly resonant acoustic of St Alban’s Church, Holborn, and these lively, committed performances have great bloom. Sackbuts and cornetts enhance the richness of some of the motets, adding additional lustre to what is a……

How to breathe new life into works as familiar and well covered as Bach’s violin concertos? The answer, seemingly, is to change the usual batting order and to reinvent a fourth concerto that gives depth to your line-up, something which is sorely lacking in our Baggy Greens at the moment. Most recordings start off with the two famous solo concertos – the E Major BWV1042 and the A Minor BWV1041 – and end with the double concerto. They may throw in the less familiar G-Minor transcription from the BWV1056 harpsichord concerto to give full value for money. This lovely recording by Freiburger Barockorchester starts with the double, perhaps to showcase its two equally talented concertmasters Petra Müllejans and Gottfried von der Goltz, but then puts the cream on the cake with its reconstructed version of the concerto for three harpsichords BWV1064. Anna Katharina Schreiber is the third soloist in a work that requires a high degree of virtuosity from all three players, especially in the outer movements. It’s generally believed that the work was originally composed for violins, and it certainly suits the instrument with some exciting overlapping runs in the outer movements. The orchestra all play on period instruments…

Chausson’s all too brief life (he died in a bicycling accident, aged 44) produced more than its fair share of memorable music, including much fine chamber music. The Concert scored for violin, piano and string quartet, Op 21, is a gorgeously ripe example of über-romanticism and it is given an appropriately impassioned performance by the Doric String Quartet with violinist Jennifer Pike and pianist Tom Poster. It’s wonderful to be swept
 away by the group’s collective emotional sense; whether in the mercurial closing pages of the first movement or the dramatic menace of the slow, third movement or the truly grand finale (with its Franckian return to the very opening of the work). The hefty piano part is well handled by Poster, who knows when to throw caution to the wind and live in the musical moment. Pike matches his intensity well. The Dorics display fine ensemble and the excellent intonation that 
is so essential in French romantic chamber music where parts so often have to play in octaves. While the ebullient Concert makes a triumphant conclusion 
to the disc, Chausson’s String Quartet, Op 35, is a more sombre curtain-raiser. The third was completed after the composer’s death by his…

This DVD, recorded at a concert in Singapore’s Esplanade Hall as part of the Orchestra’s 2010 Southeast Asian Australasian tour, brought back fond memories of the same program – Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances and Mahler’s First Symphony – of the Berlin Philharmonic’s appearance at the Sydney Opera House, in a what-are-we-going-to-do-with-the-rest-of-our-lives experience. The Rachmaninov work, his 
last orchestral score, has always 
been an enigma, part Slavic
 nostalgia and part darkly sinister 
glamour, with a dash of Hollywood
 glitz. Rattle’s tempo for the juddering introduction is the most dangerously slow I’ve ever heard. In Sydney, I was still so overwhelmed by the sensation of actually having heard them tuning (almost worth 
the ticket price in itself) just a few yards away, that I failed to notice just how slow 
it was, but what better way to experience simultaneously its unique fusion of heft
and finesse? The saxophone solo is just
 the first of countless wonderful moments throughout the spectral waltz and the
 driven finale, where almost any other orchestra would feel pushed to the point of disintegration, instead of simply heightening the tension with complete control and rock-solid ensemble. Herbert von Karajan, chief conductor of the Orchestra for more than 30 years, resisted……

Having landed from Hong Kong at 8am Monday morning, I had time to taxi home and spend a few hours with my family before heading to ANAM in South Melbourne for the first rehearsal of the Lutosławski Cello Concerto. The Artistic Director of ANAM is Paul Dean, a clarinetist and composer of the highest order, and also one of the greatest people in the business despite stubbornly supporting the Brisbane Lions. Paul had approached me late last year about this concert and mentioned the Lutosławski concerto. The soloist was to be the brilliant Johannes Moser who is lighting up concert stages around the globe. Needless to say I jumped at the chance. The concerto is notorious for being one of the hardest to conduct (let alone play) given the aleatoric construction, with many elements left to chance, and its fiendish rhythmic complexity. I remember colleagues of mine at the Sibelius Academy lamenting having come to grief on this work, so I was certainly keen to make sure I was as well prepared as possible. I purchased a copy of the score and began my study process. I was very fortunate to meet the British conductor Ed Gardner in New York…

It started with three first years of the Queensland Conservatorium wanting an opportunity to play baroque music and, finding no platform for it in Brisbane, having that fantastical notion to make their own. Myself, Michael and Philip Poulton were just some eager kids, still in our teens, still making pub visits between classes and spending weekends watching movies and dancing in bars. We gathered some friends together, lured a harpsichordist out of the shadows with an ad seeking baroque enthusiasts, talked a professional into tutoring us gratis, and unceremoniously dubbed ourselves the “Brisbane Baroque Players”. By the following year we were holding regular rehearsals under the direction of QSO violinist Wayne Brennan (our ever-generous and brilliant Baroque guru). We’d travelled to Canada as a trio in June, studying with the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra at their summer institute. Their influence and support fed greatly into our motivation. Three months later, we’d got what we’d set out for: we took to the stage with a 12-piece ensemble of our own on September 30th, 2011 – gold coin entry, church venue, program all of our own choosing. The estimated audience of 120 attending our premiere was a success we had not predicted. We…

It is hard to believe that the dynamic principal conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra has had a 50-year recording career (and ongoing). The bulk of Ashkenazy’s work in the studio has been for Decca, and this box dips into his extensive discography with the label. It begins with the Rachmaninov Second and Third Piano Concertos from the
early 1960s, when young Vladimir
 was still a Soviet Award-winner,
and concludes with his 2007 
recording of Beethoven’s Diabelli
 Variations. In between are many 
examples of his work as a pianist 
and conductor, although the
 selection is by no means complete. 
(What’s missing? Previn’s mellifluous Piano Concerto, and all the Stravinsky recordings.) As with most prolific recording artists, Ashkenazy has his detractors and is often taken for granted, but at the very least he is reliable. None of these performances strikes me as eccentric, wrong-headed or self- promoting; nor are they boring. At his best he has produced readings of works such as the Prokofiev and Rachmaninov concertos that have held their own in a competitive field for decades. The secret of his success is the music.
 He puts the composer first. You can hear that as early as the 1963 Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto…

Aboriginal poet Samuel Wagan Watson first became aware of segregation when, as a young boy standing on the “steamy Bjelke- Petersen plateau”, he saw the black and white smoke rising from Brisbane below – black from the blue-collar battlers in their fibros and white from the white-collar class with their European cars and “chez nouveau’’ fireplaces. The metaphor permeates the 23 short poems Smoke Encrypted Whispers, which won him the Book of the Year award and Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in 2005. The beautifully crafted miniatures evoke childhood memories, fear of the dark, unforgettable descriptions of places like Tigerland and Boundary Street – named to mark the Brisbane curfew zone for Aborigines in his grandparents’ time – and visits from uncles 
who taught him traditional 
ways. Watson also gives some fascinating insights into his writing process as well as musing on visits to Berlin and a Maori marae in Wellington. Brevity is the source of wit for Watson, and also for Queensland- based Southern Cross Soloists
led by clarinetist Paul Dean,
who commissioned 23 Brisbane composers to write two-minute pieces to respond to the poems. The result is stunningly good. At the heart of this handsomely produced 80-minute album are five…

Finnish maestro Sakari Oramo 
is no stranger to the music of Elgar, having been at the helm
 of the City of Birmingham Symphony for ten years, where he played a leading role in the Elgar sesquicentenary celebrations in 2007. He was subsequently awarded the Elgar Medal in 2008 for his efforts as a non-British musician in advancing Elgar’s music. The Second Symphony 
is prefaced with a quote from Shelley: “Rarely, rarely, comest thou Spirit of Delight!” Oramo captures the ebullient mood of the “Spirit of Delight” which permeates the opening, but is also responsive to the darker, more troubled music in the haunting slow movement that emphasises “Rarely, rarely, comest thou”. BIS’s super-audio engineering shows the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic to be a well-oiled machine, the brass responding magnificently to Elgar’s many musical and technical challenges, especially in the opening movement and the brilliant Scherzo. The strings are well disciplined throughout, but could have been encouraged to even greater pathos in the slow movement. Oramo’s speeds are comparable to those set by Sir John Barbirolli in his 1964 recording, but there were occasional moments when I felt that Barbirolli was freer with the music and able to wring greater expressiveness and…

It’s the story of a lovely lady, who was bringing up just one boy on her own … Well, not really. The story of Rose Grainger and her precocious son Percy has more in common with Fifty Shades of Grey than The Brady Bunch. Abandoned by a drunken, syphilitic husband, the domineering mother home-schooled her son, introducing him to a wide range of literature, including the Nordic legends that influenced his music so deeply. By age 16, it appears that Percy had developed a taste for sadomasochism and as he grew
 up his mother did her best to stymie her son’s budding romantic relationships. The suggestion that she was incestuously involved with her son played tragically with her already fragile mental health and
 she jumped to her death out an office block window. It’s no surprise,
then, that Grainger 
remained obsessed
 with his mother for the
 rest of his life. The works recorded here (most for the first time) bear her imprint. Marching Song of Democracy is dedicated to her and celebrates their “adoration” of Walt Whitman, while Thanksgiving Song extols “womankind’s contribution to terrestrial immortality”. Scored for wordless chorus and large orchestra, these works reveal Grainger’s masterly orchestration and questing……

“I’m looking forward to singing in Westminster Abbey” “I want to see what movies they have on the plane”. “I’m a little nervous about not being able to speak French to my host families” “I’m really excited about seeing Paris” These were just some of the voices of excitement at one of our final rehearsals before the Sydney Children’s Choir leaves for their tenth and longest tour next week. As the choristers count down the days, hours, minutes and even seconds before our departure, they are very busy. Bags are being packed, teddies are being briefed on touring duties, and concert uniforms are being ironed. Most importantly, the choristers are ensuring that they have memorised every note, word, dynamic marking and articulation of the touring repertoire we will take to Europe. And of course, this all is happening in between wrapping up the end of their second school term. At first glance, touring internationally with 41 young people between the ages of 11 and 16 can seem a little daunting. However, I can safely say that tours have been one of the greatest pleasures and privileges of my life as Artistic Director of Gondwana Choirs. The level of detailed planning…

I was really looking forward to returning to the Hong Kong Philharmonic after last working with them in 2011. It’s such a fascinating place to travel to, so full of energy and the orchestra and I get on very well. This visit was no exception as the concerts featured the talents of Australian icon and all-round genius James Morrison. He isn’t perhaps as well known in Hong Kong as in other places around the globe (when I was living in Salzburg he was often the first Australian mentioned in conversation with other musicians) although the brass section all knew of him and were excited to work with him. James and I have shared the stage many times and I am always inspired by his extraordinary musicianship and positive attitude to life. Apart from his mind-boggling ability to play so many different instruments equally well – his soprano sax playing for example is outstanding – he is also very active in the community, particularly in Queensland where he runs the Queensland Music Festival. During a previous visit to London a supporter of mine had bought me two really high quality fabrics from Saville Row to be made into suits. They had……