“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……

I’m beginning to think that Mahler’s First Symphony is conductor-proof. Almost every version I’ve heard lately has merit and Marin Alsop’s with the Baltimore Symphony is no exception, despite an overall restraint. The opening of the first movement, surely one of the most magical of any symphony, is very slow until the explosion in the coda. In fact, the first three movements are all slightly slower than usual, whereas the final one is slightly swifter. Perhaps the second Scherzo/Ländler movement lacks the last ounce of what Germans call schwung – bounce or swing – but the central section doesn’t sound too inebriated, as it sometime can. I wondered whether or not it was just me who thought that the third-movement funeral march (Frère Jacques in a minor key) seemed to have been recorded at a higher level than the rest, and I’ve since discovered another review which garnered the same reaction. Another unwelcome development is the double bass melody, which forms the backbone of the movement, being played by the entire section, not a solo. The same reviewer who noticed the disparate recording levels also points out, helpfully, that the Jewish klezmer music in the trio is conducted with what……

The excellent British outfit The Nash Ensemble have released an important and superbly recorded new album of works by four Jewish Czech composers – Pavel Haas, Viktor Ullman, Hans Krása and Gideon Klein – who were all killed in Nazi concentration camps. They were part of the rich cultural life of the Theresienstadt ghetto, an old garrison from the Hapsburg Empire created as a way station for Jews being sent on to the death camps. Although the listener will be appalled by what happened to these four Czechs, all of whom were sent on to Auschwitz on the same transport, the music itself is curiously free of the poignancy and despair of their situation.
 As Ullman said of that time: “Theresienstadt has served to enhance, not impede, my musical activities, that by no means did we sit weeping by the waters of Babylon and our will to create was equal to our will to survive.” Krása’s suite from his delightful children’s opera Brundibar (Bumblebee) is given its first performance here in David Matthews’ version for string quartet, piano, flute, clarinet, trumpet and percussion. Its mood varies between the magic of Ravel and sparkling humour of Poulenc. Ullman studied with Schoenberg……

Ravel is often described as an Impressionist. While this is an erroneous label overall, he is at his most impressionistic in the piano cycles Miroirs and Gaspard de la nuit. There are two schools of Ravel pianists: those who create a dreamy, soft-centred sound picture (usually old-school, like Walter Gieseking) and those who seek
out the sharp edges and go for clarity like Alexandre Tharaud. The young Russian Anna Vinnitskaya amalgamates both worlds. In her reading of Une barque sur 
l’océan from Miroirs, the opening arpeggios have a chiseled quality – no blurry wash here – yet her subtle way of emphasising single notes in the right hand suggests sparkles 
of sunlight on the water. Similarly in Noctuelles, Ravel’s depiction of moths at night, Vinnitskaya vividly plots the haphazard flight of these nocturnal creatures. She is less successful at evoking humans. Her Alborada del grazioso is too brisk to capture the braggadocio character of the serenade. It is highly impressive as pianism, as is her Scarbo from Gaspard de la nuit, but the latter reading underplays the piece’s unique grotesquerie. On the basis of her nuanced performance of the Pavane, I rather wish she had ditched Gaspard and recorded Le Tombeau…

The salons of 19th-century Vienna come dancing back to life in this collection of vocal duets, trios
 and quartets, written for the famous Schubertiades, many of which, while he lived, boasted the composer himself at the piano. Lovers of the dark, complex Schubert of Winterreise will look in vain for him here; this is, for the most part, light and undemanding fare, meant more to entertain than to penetrate the soul. A sprightly vocal quartet enters heartily into the spirit of the thing, sympathetically balanced voices separately and together. Marlis Petersen’s glistening soprano sits sweetly atop the ensemble, while Anke Vondung sings with a soulful glow which keeps her sometimes sugary music from cloying: the strophic, sentimental Die Unterscheidung is a notable example. Tenor Werner Güra can’t quite match the ladies for beauty of tone, but his forthright, if slightly grainy tone blends touchingly with Vondung’s in Licht und Liebe, the lilting duet from which the album takes its title, and both he and bass Konrad Jarnot make colourful turns in the amorous wranglings of Der Hochzeitsbraten, a comic, almost Mozartian scene which also features a delightfully soubrettish Petersen as the love interest. The disc concludes with a series of…

I was impressed with the whimsicality Alice Sara Ott displayed in early Beethoven on a disc I reviewed last year, so I was surprised by her ponderous approach to Pictures from an Exhibition. Several of Mussorgsky’s impressions of his artist friend Hartmann’s work have a scherzando quality: the children playing at the Tuileries garden, the bustling market place at Limoges, and of course the ballet of the unhatched chicks. Ott’s pianism is meticulous and well prepared however some careful tempos and overemphatic dynamics rob her performance of character. She stretches out The Great Gate at Kiev considerably and, generally speaking, she fails to treat these pictures with enough visual imagination. As this is a live performance from the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg it is quite possible that Ott needed to project and underline the music more than she would in a recording studio. Even so, it’s bad luck for her that a performance by Stephen Osbourne recently appeared on Hyperion that supplies some of the telling detail and subtlety that Ott misses, and I would recommend his in preference to this one. The unusual coupling of Schubert’s Piano Sonata Op 53 is more successful. Here Ott’s poise is an…

Perennially young at heart, the ACO has 
just the right touch with these two works written while Mendelssohn was in his teenage years.

Osmo Vänskä’s “trim, taut and terrific” approach to Sibelius survives into his second cycle where the First Symphony, at just 34 minutes, almost manages to efface completely the traditional Tchaikovskian breadth. Fortunately, we still hear plenty of harp throughout, especially in my favourite passage, the exquisitely delicate section of the slow movement where the woodwinds and triangle are quite magic. If symphonies were people, Sibelius’s Fourth would be the ultimate anti-hero. Here, tempi
 are much more conventional
 and Vänskä moulds the music superbly in the opening movement where the fusion of bleakness and inscrutability as they materialise out of Stygian gloom is strangely beautiful and moving. The second- movement Scherzo peters out in a strange, almost sinister, ellipsis, but it is in the slow movement – the emotional core of the work – where the particles simply stop vibrating as the temperature reaches absolute zero and Vänskä plumbs the depths with the best of them. In the final movement Sibelius, seemingly perversely, introduces glockenspiel and tubular bells, of all instruments. Most conductors opt for one or the other. (In one recording, Ormandy uses both,
 but not together.) Vänskä, wisely I think, uses the former, as tubular bells always sound to……

It seems apt to be listening to jazz singer-songwriter Nicola Milan at this time of year. As the mercury drops, her second studio album Forbidden Moments begs to be enjoyed on a lazy Sunday afternoon, glass of red in hand. Produced with a $9,765 grant awarded by Arts WA and the Department of Culture, these ten original pieces move between bluesy swing, Latin, and folk to convey the emotional versatility and complexities of a talented and promising songstress. A WAAPA graduate and award winning songwriter, Milan’s vocals are warm, effortless and chocolaty, and occasionally spiked with a hint of something stronger. The Scent of Her Perfume is pure drama. Sensual and passionate, Milan’s voice flirts with violinist Ashley Arbuckle’s sexy melodic passages in this bold tango. Arbuckle, former co-leader of the London Symphony Orchestra is joined by a series of distinguished jazz musicians including double bassist Pete Jeavons, guitarist Rick Webster and drummer Michael Perkins. Together they form a tight ensemble and Milan provides ample opportunities for each performer to shine. Their experience shows. The final track on the album, Latin inspired The Lonely Flute, brilliantly showcases flautist and saxophonist Michael Collinson, and pianist and accordionist Ben Clarke – a……

Joaquin Turina took on the advice as well as the example of his older compatriots Albeníz and Falla, and wrote works influenced by the fiery gypsy music of Andalusia. His output consists mainly of piano music, songs, chamber music and a handful of dazzling orchestral works which show him to be second only to Ravel in orchestral wizardry. In all the music on this well-filled disc you will hear a style of Impressionism that is not cool and misty but ablaze with heat and light. The BBC Philharmonic relish Turina’s textures under Mena’s idiomatic direction, and typically rich Chandos sound is everything one could wish. This is well worth collecting alongside Mena’s previous discs of music by Falla and Montsalvatge. If I have a quibble, perhaps a degree of earthiness is missing in these lush performances. In the Danzas Fantásticas some of Mena’s predecessors point more clearly to the gypsy origins. Try the
old Ansermet/Suisse Romande recording on Eloquence to hear what I mean. Clara Mouritz’s vibrant mezzo- soprano voice is perfect for the heartfelt Saeta, but I feel the five Poema en forma de canciones lie too high for her. A true soprano is needed, the likes of Los Angeles,…

Just as flamenco guitarists Paco Peña and Paco di Lucía have stretched the boundaries of what constitutes flamenco, so too does Barcelona-born José Luis Montón draw on “new characters in the alphabet of flamenco” in his inspired, impassioned creations, while introducing a few of his own. As Montón writes in his brief booklet note: “In this music I have tried to translate all the sincerity and love of art that I appreciate so much when I encounter it.” Thus most of the pieces start
from a traditional base – bulería, tango, soleá, seguirilla and so forth – before pushing off from the shore in search of new horizons. Works such as the opening Rota (farruca) and the percussive Al oído (cantiñas) combine sweetly ornamented melodies with flurries of punteado and machine-gun bursts of rasgueado, while rhythms and harmonies take unexpected twists and turns. One of the biggest, and most enjoyable, of those twists is Montón’s beautiful, flamenco- inflected arrangement of JS Bach’s Air from the Orchestral Suite No 3 in D. Here, as in many other pieces on this recording, the main melody sneaks up on you amid a fresh, lyrical introduction. Other highlights include the intense Altolaguirre (tango), the exciting……