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.

ARCAM (RDAC WIRELESS) PRICE: $775 ★★★★★ For a while, Arcam had the “affordable-DAC-by-a-venerable-hi-fi-brand” sector all to itself with its 2010 rDAC. As this test shows, it’s now under pressure, but it’s a measure of just how right Arcam got the original that this wireless variant is still up there. This sturdy little box features the most important connections: optical and coaxial digital and asynchronous USB inputs, plus stereo RCA output. Wireless connection requires an rWave or rWand streaming dongle. Build quality is impeccable. Hard-wired preference The wireless aspect will appeal, but there’s no denying the rDAC sounds its most effective when hard-wired to a source. We used a MacBook for the bulk of our listening and for every genre of music, at every file size, the Arcam proved an adaptable and likeable device. A 24/192 file of REM’s Country Feedback reveals everything that’s admirable about the rDAC. It’s a punchy, dynamic listen, with an emphasis on excitement. That’s not to suggest it’s short on detail, but its real strengths concern scale, soundstaging and separation. Listening to the other units, however, highlights the rDAC’s relative lack of low-frequency finesse. Extension is impressive, and there’s admirable tonal variation, but where the leading…

Avi Avital is a young man from Be’er Sheva determined (we are told) to bring the mandolin and its repertoire to a wider audience. Trained in Israel and Italy and backed by the Deutsche Grammophon marketing machine (it’s hard to see how he can be ‘the instrument’s first international superstar’ on his debut album!), this disc eschews the traditional Vivaldis and Hummels in favour of Avital’s own arrangements of Bach concerti. There’s a good precedent for such treatment, as both the harpsichord concerti presented here are thought to have started life as works for other instruments. Avital is at his most convincing in the works originally for keyboard (a mandolin being not that different from the ‘plucked’ strings of a harpsichord). The opening D Minor concerto goes with a great swing and sense of joie de vivre. The Largo of the G Minor concerto is positively enchanting, with a sound world close to Vivaldi’s. The A Minor violin concerto can feel a bit Spartan, missing the longer-held notes, as can the E Minor flute sonata, but these are minor quibbles. Needless to say, Avital’s technique is excellent and given the tiny fret board of his instrument, his playing is impressively…

Whoever said grand sweeping melodies were a thing of the past? Grant Foster clearly has a penchant for the archetype of the brooding Russian virtuoso pianist-composer, despite being based in Bowral. You may remember Foster from his in-depth Limelight interview a few months back. After initially studying in Sydney he set off for Paris and London, where he built up a solid reputation as a pianist and composer before returning to Australia to settle in rural NSW. This CD is a follow up to The Music of Grant Foster and features two main works: the Russian-inspired The Pearl of Dubai suite for piano, cello and orchestra, and a setting of Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol for tenor and piano. As a bonus there is a DVD of the Ballad and part of the suite played live in concert. The overall impression of Foster’s orchestral music is that of a stirring and decadent black-and-white film score, albeit with super-smooth edges and superior sound quality. The pieces are unashamedly Romantic, as if Rachmaninov had been cryogenically frozen and thawed out in the 21st century. The Pearl of Dubai is the most ambitious work here, a set of mini tone poems…

A virtuosic collection of new Aussie works for sax and piano.