A pearl on Sydney Harbour, the Sydney Opera House was loathed during the time of its construction for lengthy delays and enormous cost blowouts. The Opera House today however is still marvelled for its architectural significance and beauty. It has become a landmark for Sydney and a landmark for the arts. Perhaps this is a broader metaphor for the arts that are too often critisised for costs, and in years to come eventually marvelled at for their brilliance. The Sydney Opera House is not alone in its ability to raise controversy during construction. I've come across a few concert halls lately that to me stand out as architectural masterpieces that are fortunate enough today to have acoustics that match the brilliance of the exterior. Despite being a precarious time for many orchestras, particularly in the USA, this seems to have had little effect on the number of new and renovated concert halls under construction. Perhaps the importance of a venue has never been more important in performing arts organisations attempting to attract new audiences. Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg, Germany) Incorporates a 2150-seat Grand Hall, 550-seat recital hall, 150-seat experimental music room and a 37 meter high public plaza overlooking the harbour Completion…

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was one of the 18th century’s great musical rebels, working in a revolutionary and transitional period but destined to be overshadowed by others. History has a way of doing that to composers who don’t fit neatly into boxes. His father Johann Sebastian Bach and Mozart, geniuses both, perfectly reflect their times. Emanuel Bach may have been just as gifted, but he is neither Baroque fish nor Classical fowl and only now, it seems, are we really beginning to recognise his unique talents. Eschewing the single-emotion-per-movement model of his father’s generation, he revels in veering from one mood to another, juxtaposing introspection with temperamental outbursts and exploring divergent rhythms and quirky harmonies. Revered by Mozart, this is music that at times reaches beyond Classicism into the turbulence of Beethoven and the Romantic period. In short, CPE Bach was quite a visionary. There are four Sonatas here, the first dating from 1744 (Emanuel’s most radical period) while the latest work, a Fantasie, dates from 1787, the year before he died. The early F-Sharp Minor Sonata begins with a highly unsettling movement, playing off an unstable rhythmic motive against an endearing gallant tune. His kaleidoscopic treatment of… Continue reading…

As far as I could tell, during our music, plans for new cities were being mapped out, generational feuds were coming to their messy conclusions, and all manner of Serious Things were vigorously discussed, most of it on phones. But it’s charming! As it turns out, they were discussing the music and some of our weird noises, which seemed to really strike a hexachord (ouch – sorry for the nerdiness!) They even sang along to a folk song they recognized. Their applause, rather than arriving in discrete bell-shaped packets between the works, was distributed evenly throughout the music (circus-style) as the sine wave.      a = 1 + sin t     (where a = Approval and t = Time). As long as it takes for me to lower my hands at the end of a piece and quickly turn around to grab a bow – that’s how long they clapped, in Shanghai at the Lyceum.  Curiously, it’s the more adventurous, complex and strange music that they really respond to. Already I’m considering repertoire for the next tour: maybe a Liza Lim, or an Elliot Gyger? In Nicholas Ng’s Stellar Mansions (a “meditation on Tao, Life and the Universe”) we lie…

The Contemporary Piano Faces Festival 2012 has come to a resounding close, with two Beethoven concertos (Nos 1 and 4) performed by Valery Afanassiev, a Russian pianist and polymath (he’s written several novels) who famously defected to the West in the early 1970s. My complete interview with this fascinating Renaissance man will be online in the next few days. But let’s rewind to Friday night in St Petersburg, and a program that must have seemed a complete oddity to the Mariinsky concertgoers… Nonetheless, they braved a blizzard and gridlocked traffic to hear Mira Yevtich and tenor Andrew Goodwin perform The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a setting of the Oscar Wilde poem by Australian composer Grant Foster. After a very satisfying first half of Frank and Beethoven courtesy of Yevtich, the art of accompaniment came on display (an astute idea for a piano festival), and one of Australia’s finest voices stood centre stage. Yevtich and Goodwin have pioneered Foster’s Ballad, and the pair interacted with an ease of understanding that speaks to their long history together. Yevtich was Goodwin’s piano teacher when he was a teenager in Sydney, and it was she who had the inspired notion that he might do…

Keyboard dreams: Contemporary Piano Faces Festival in St Petersburg   So here I am in piano heaven in St Petersburg, Russia as a guest of the Contemporary Piano Faces festival. As the snow buckets down and the temperature plunges below zero, the action has been red-hot at this week-long jamboree organised by Mira Yevtich, a Serbian pianist who trained in Moscow, taught in Australia, and now tours the world as a concert performer. All the concerts are all held at the Mariinsky Theatre’s acoustically superb new concert hall, and much of the brawn behind the festival is provided by powerhouse conductor Valery Gergiev, the chief of the Mariinsky Opera and Ballet and of the London Symphony. Known for his boundless energy and hectic schedule (does the guy ever sleep?), Gergiev kicked off the festival in typical style with a musical marathon – three Beethoven concertos (Nos 2, 3 and 5) with the Mariinsky Orchestra. The pianist: US-born Nicholas Angelich, who delivered an electrifying rendition of the three works. Most impressive is how each work, played consecutively, was presented in its own distinct soundworld, from the slightly kooky Classicism of the Second to the stormy rhetoric of the Third through to…

The University of Newcastle's International Space Time Concerto Competition attempts to cherish musical tradition whilst celebrating innovation,

Thanks to the wholesale appropriation of popular song by court and church composers, there’s something at once vibrant and austere about the early Baroque music of Spain and Portugal. The program on this new recording by Australian period instrument ensemble La Compañia comprises mostly villancicos (rustic songs) in vocal and instrumental settings by 16th-century Spanish and Portuguese composers such as Pedro de Cristo, Manuel Machado, and Francisco Guerrero. Some travelled to take up positions in churches and cathedrals in the New World, where their music was inflected by indigenous and African rhythms. The anonymous pieces included here are all taken from the Cancioneiro de Paris manuscript of c1523. Under their director Danny Lucin, La Compañia perform these works on period wind instruments such as cornetti, sackbuts and dulcians, as well as the viola da gamba, vihuela, guitar, cavaquinho and percussion. Joining them is young Australian soprano and early music exponent Siobhan Stagg, winner of the 2012 Australian International Opera Award. Throughout, La Compañia’s relaxed and improvisatory yet passionate and precise playing is a delight, recalling the best of Hespèrion XXI, The Harp Consort and L’Arpeggiata in similar repertoire. Listen to the rich textures of De Cristo’s Ay mi Dios,… Continue…

It is the largest box I have ever been sent to review – physically speaking – even bigger than Karajan’s 82-CD collection, though it holds only 12 discs. It also contains a lavish 192-page booklet chock full of colour photographs and articles about the pianist’s inspiration and suchlike. The product’s dimensions reflect the phenomenon of Lang Lang, a young concert pianist whose discs have sold millions of copies in China alone. Lang recently decamped to Sony, announcing his arrival with an excellent Liszt program, so DG have sensibly decided to repackage the recordings he made for them between 2000 and 2009 in a new design splashed liberally with red. No one can say that Lang Lang does not deserve the acclaim. He is a remarkable musician: technically adroit and emotionally involved in the music at all times. In many ways a throwback, he adopts the approach and occasional mannerisms of older pianists like Horowitz and Arrau. He sometimes rolls chords, and has a penchant for emphasising lyrical moments with rubato and a hushed, pearl-like tone. I call this an “18th Variation” approach, because it particularly suits that famous movement from Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Lang is also……

Across its eight movements, this secular mass is a focused refinement of what Westlake does best.

In one of the most singularly gorgeous recordings to have come across my desk in recent months, Zurich-born cellist Christian Poltéra and British pianist Kathryn Stott explore some of Dvořák’s greatest melodies in new transcriptions by Poltéra. Silent Woods was arranged by the composer himself from the original version for piano four hands; in fact, the only compositions originally written for cello here are the Rondo in G Minor and the Polonaise in A. It seems extraordinary now to think that Dvořák wasn’t immediately enamoured of the cello’s sound, finding it “nasal” in the upper register and “grumbling” in the lower, as the booklet notes recall. But how he would have adored the warm, emotionally expansive playing of Poltéra – and Stott for that matter: a superb soloist in her own right and an ever-sensitive accompanist.  The opening Sonatina in G, originally for violin and piano and dedicated to Dvořák’s children, is all brightness shot through with pentatonic flavours; Poltéra and Stott animate the music with the perfect balance of poise and exuberance. And if, in the following Rondo in G, the players seem for the most part simply to be letting… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4…

>Following the success of his English and Spanish albums, Stephen Hough has come up with this thoughtfully planned, beautifully executed French album. Typically for Hough, the repertoire is anything but predictable. It opens with the familiar strains of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. The Gallic connection lies in the transcription by the pianist Alfred Cortot, who was actually Swiss. Hough himself is a transcriber of note (or notes) and so we have his keyboard arrangements of Pizzicati from Delibes’ ballet Sylvia and Massenet’s song Crépuscule. Among the rarely played works are the charming Automne by Cécile Chaminade and Alkan’s quirky La chanson de la folle au bord de la mer. Two popular encores are included: Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso and Debussy’s Clair de lune, the latter sounding not at all hackneyed due to the surrounding context. There are multiple selections by Fauré and Poulenc, and the recital ends with a longer work, Liszt’s Réminiscences of Halévy’s opera La Juive. Hough invariably hones in on the specific quality that defines each piece. In the Ravel, it is humour, an aspect that pianists often neglect in their desire to remind us how difficult this music is to… Continue reading Get…

There are big choices here but crucially, every moment of this intimate collaboration has been thought through.