Years ago I remember sitting in the Sydney studio of the ABC Classic FM playing a recording of Beethoven’s late String Quartet in A minor Op 132. I think it was around 4am that I was playing the piece and the 20-minute slow movement suddenly got to me as I lay on the studio floor, exhausted and emotional, listening to this music that Beethoven had written and dedicated to his God after achieving a recovery from a terrible few months of ill health. He entitled the movement Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit (A Convalescent’s Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Divinity) and the music is so plaintive, you can really hear the direct thoughts of someone who is just grateful to be alive.  If I had one shred of Beethoven’s genius I would have written my own Heiliger Dankgesang as I recovered recently from my annual summer flu. I’m generally a pretty healthy person and usually only have one burst of illness at the end of the year when my system is so obviously run down that when you make the mistake of actually relaxing the germs promptly swarm in like Visigoths at the gates of Rome. It says a lot for the power of the…

Last year I got a free ticket to see Plácido Domingo at Olympic Park in Sydney. The venue was so large that when the star came on stage he was about as far away as Alpha Centauri. His voice was still great through the massive sound system, but there was about as much atmosphere in the place as at my local 7 Eleven. The experience led me to ponder how the venue for classical music can be almost as important as the music itself. Our modern-day concert halls are vastly bigger than the spaces for which the music was originally conceived. In 1800 Beethoven hired the Burgtheater in Vienna to premiere his First Symphony. The theatre has been rebuilt over the years, but you can tell from paintings of the time that it had stalls of only 17 rows of 20 seats and four tiers of boxes in a horseshow shape around the sides. The sound of Beethoven’s first symphonic attempt would have filled the space, vibrating even to those in the back row. Fast-forward to modern times, and if you take yourself off to hear the Sydney Symphony play the same piece, you are hearing it in the 2500-seat cavern of the……

On October 22 the musical world celebrates the bicentenary of the birth of Franz Liszt, a musician who left the world a staggering musical legacy. His work list in the 2000 edition of Grove – just the list of titles – runs to more than 86 pages. The Hyperion recordings of his complete piano works, played by Leslie Howard, runs to 99 CDs. And composing wasn’t even the main thrust of Liszt’s life. He was the greatest piano virtuoso of the 19th century, the first real performing superstar. He was committed to music of the past, and to new music written by composers largely shunned by the mainstream. He was a man of contradictions, a man of strong religious devotion, yet also a man who loved women passionately and was a party to two celebrated and scandalous relationships, among other liaisons. The young Liszt was taken to Vienna to study with Czerny in 1822. In April 1823 he met Beethoven. By December 1823 he was living in Paris, his base for some years, although he toured widely. After the death of his father in August 1827, Liszt entered a dark period. Grief, and the fallout of a thwarted love affair, led to…

In December 1839, Schumann arranged the first performance of Schubert’s Great C major Symphony, which had been gathering dust since the composer’s death in 1828. Hearing it turned Schumann’s mind to writing one of his own. It’s not as if he hadn’t thought about it before; he’d had some success with an unfinished symphony in G minor in the early 1830s. But in January 1841 Schumann finally sat down to write and within just four days he had finished sketching what we now know as his First Symphony. The orchestration took another few weeks but was complete by February. By any stretch of the imagination, this is extraordinary. With its completion, Schumann was only just getting started in his “symphonic year” of 1841. In April and May he composed the Overture, Scherzo and Finale. As soon as it was finished, he embarked on another symphony, this time in D minor. This occupied him from May to October and was his most radical achievement of the symphonic year. The movements are interconnected by a network of themes, which are adapted and developed across the whole piece, not just within movements. The D minor symphony of 1841 is rarely heard today because it was a…

Last night I was sitting in front of the TV and Macavity, the younger of our two tabby cats, jumped up on my lap and proceeded to purr loudly, nestled with his little nose in my armpit. What a delicious life of small needs a cat enjoys – food, an opportunity to hunt the odd lizard, and the warmth and comfort of his family are the only requirements. I don’t think little Macavity has ever felt the need to compose a symphony or play the violin sonatas of Johann Sebastian Bach and as far as I’m aware he’s never put paw to paper to write a novel nor paint a picture. Listening to him purring away like a small tractor, I wonder what made his brain so different from mine. Why do I feel the need to write an article for Limelight about his cat-mind, when all he does is lie about the house as if it were a five-star resort where the bill never comes? We humans have an insatiable need to express ourselves. We compose music, we write words, we paint, we act, we play instruments and sing and talk and make films about our feelings, and then other humans come……

For some years now I’ve been the host of the Music on Sundays series for the Queensland Symphony. It’s a fun series – the best of classical music, presented at QPAC at the friendly time of 11.30am and lasting for the approximate holding duration of the human bladder – one and a half hours. I look out from the stage and see an audience that undeniably trends towards the grey. At a reception after the last performance in June a woman came up to me and said that we had to get more young people to the concert. I thought, “Why?” I’m quite happy with the older set at Music on Sundays, and they seem to be quite happy coming along for the music and the odd laugh. This argument goes on around the country. Musicians look out and see an older audience and are somehow disappointed (even though they are for the most part playing music that is way older than the audience). I believe that behind this disappointment is nothing but self-centred financial fear. If my audience is old, what’s going to happen to me when they all die? I’ll be playing to an empty auditorium and will…

There is a lot of discussion about arts funding in Australia – our reliance on government largesse as opposed to the American model of support by the wealthy through philanthropy. With the government money pot being spread so thinly across so many worthy recipients, you’d think most arts organisations in Australia would be extremely excited if a private individual walked through the door with a pot of non-refundable money.  Maybe not. I recently met an individual who loves the arts and was quite prepared to give lots of money to various theatre and performance companies, but found it a difficult experience at every turn. As they don’t want to be identified, let’s give them a codename – FAP (Frustrated Arts Philanthropist).  FAP began in a small way by offering to buy a theatre – yes, the whole theatre – on behalf of a company that was in danger of losing its lease on the building. This would have amounted to a $1.7 million grant to buy the building and then rent it back to the company, but the rent would also be donated back to the company to pay for much-needed repairs. The theatre management had… Continue reading Get unlimited…

There is a word that strikes fear and terror into the hearts of most humans.

Back at the beginning of the 21st-century when I presented the Breakfast program on ABC Classic FM, we used to begin each session with the music of JS Bach. Our listeners cited it as a civilising influence, and indeed the order and essential decency of Bach’s music made it a great way to start the day.There are a few other places that could do with the odd Prelude and Fugue in the morning. Let’s start with Federal Parliament. There is a cacophony in the national capital. Our political discourse is like some horrible contemporary work of crashing and snarls, shouting and cat calls; verbal abuse that wouldn’t be tolerated in a school debating competition, yet is witnessed every week in Canberra. We’re not anywhere near the amazing riots and brawls seen in the Taiwanese and Korean parliaments, with shoes flying through the air and elected representatives choking each other, but it will only be a matter of time before the Member for Warringah leaps across the chamber in his bike shorts and has to be restrained by the Treasurer. I blame both sides – and I fear for the Speaker’s health. Harry Jenkins looks like prime cardiac arrest… Continue reading…

It seems that half of Opera Australia’s singers are off to Weight Watchers after the Artistic Director Lyndon Terracini said fat singers need not apply. “If you’re seeing a couple making out and one of them is obese, who wants to watch that?’” he says with a theatrical grimace. “It’s obscene. You just think, ‘Jeez, for Chrissakes, don’t let the children see that’,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald in July. There is no physical reason why opera singers have to be fat – look at Maria Callas, a rotund singer who lost all the weight, looked magnificent and could still fill the Royal Opera House with that distinctive voice, a mix of chainsaw and exotic bird. Mr Terracini is also within his right to tell his employees to shape up or ship out (I personally know of two OA singers who have been warned that the scales are not tipping in their favour). “You go to a movie and you see people who look exactly right for that role. They’re consummate actors and they’re completely involved in what they are doing, so their performance is totally believable,” says Terracini. Well that’s true, but the camera is right up close. Film…

Australian guitar duo Slava and Leonard Grigoryan have always strained against the boundaries of the classical guitar world.

The BBC Proms are a Mecca for classical musicians. If there was any audience in the world I could play for, it would probably be an audience at The Proms. Not only does its home the Royal Albert Hall cater for an audience of over 5,000, but in my experience it’s an audience like no other: a mix of dedicated fans and curious Prommers of all ages. Hundreds stand for the entire performance in the arena, and even more way up in the gallery. Some have season passes, others queue up (“prom”) for hours to snap up £5 tickets on the day! You can imagine my reaction then when I received the good news that I’d have the opportunity to perform here alongside over 100 young musicians in an epic program that included Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring! The month-long project, developed in the small English seaside town home to Benjamin Britten’s legendary classical music festival, was instigated by the Britten-Pears Young Artist Program and appropriately named the Aldeburgh World Orchestra. You can read more about the audition process we went through on my earlier blog. We met only a few weeks prior to our Proms… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access…