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…

In 1910, the Band of the Grenadier Guards serenaded Her Majesty with a selection from Elektra. (George V promptly sent down a message saying he didn’t know what it was that they had just played, but it was never to be played again!) Despite the royal vote of no confidence, the opera has become a modern classic and a classic of modernism, in which Strauss went further harmonically than he would ever again.  In this live 2010 recording, the LSO’s principal conductor shows not only that he appreciates Strauss’s daring orchestrations, but also that he’s a master of the dramatic pacing in Hofmannsthal’s gripping Sophocles adaptation. The members of the orchestra play their hearts out in a finely engineered recording that, thanks to Gergiev, is frequently revelatory. Sadly, this recording has a massive drawback in the Elektra of Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet. A pronnounced vibrato across the entire range is the first problem to beset the ear. Coupled with a tendency to fall flat at the top or miss certain key notes altogether, her performance is a bit of a roadcrash. The rest of the cast ranges from superb (Dame Felicity Palmer’s baleful Clytemnestra steals the show)… Continue reading Get unlimited digital…

For the past four years I have worked at Victorian Opera in various capacities, progressing from a repetiteur for Youth Opera productions to a Developing Artist and Assistant Conductor, where my role involved playing the piano, coaching singers, assisting music director Richard Gill and generally learning as much as I could about the craft of producing an opera. In mid-2011, I was told that these years of support and guidance from the people at Victorian Opera would lead to my debut as a mainstage conductor, in a double bill of Falla’s one-act puppet opera El Retablo de Maese Pedro (Master Peter’s Puppet Show) and the Australian premiere of Elliott Carter’s only opera, What Next?. After all that time, during my training, that I had spent imagining how I would go about interpreting an opera to take on this extraordinary opportunity. The question at the forefront of my mind: given the fact that in opera everyone must know the music and all its details before arriving at the first rehearsal, how does one prepare for such an experience? During my preparation for the darkly comic, musically challenging opera What Next?, written when Carter was already in his nineties, my request to meet with…

Following on from yesterday’s focus on the piano, and in particular some specific thoughts  from Kathryn Stott, today as promised I’m focusing on the Festival’s other British pianistic lynchpin. The man in question is the prodigiously talented Jonathan Plowright.  Like Stott, he is a northerner (although from the other side of the Pennines) and like her, he’s an engaging storyteller albeit with quite a different story to tell.  Brought up in a Yorkshire mining community, Plowright recalls playing in pubs as a young lad while his parents, both amateur musicians, coaxed him along to competitions with the lure of bonus trips to the seaside.  Alexander Kelly, his influential teacher at the RCM, never criticised him for lack of practise, but encouraged him with four hour lessons that frequently digressed into lengthy abstract discussions.  Something of a original, Jonathan recalls Kelly once illustrating a dance figure by standing on the piano lid  and performing an Irish jig!  Kelly, by the way, was the connection between Plowright and Piers Lane, ultimately leading to his first visit to Townsville. An enthusiastic talker, I was lucky enough to collar Jonathan for a chat between rehearsals.  His Festival survival technique is clearly ‘heads down, don’t…

As we are nearing the end of the Townsville part of this year’s Festival (there are still two days in ahead Cairns for some), I thought it was worth focusing on the piano, in some respects the mainstay of procedings over the last week.  The pianists somehow maintain a lower profile, perhaps it’s because they aren’t dashing around with their instruments under their arms or because they can’t be heard though the walls of the hotel.  Anyway, I tracked down two of them, Kathryn Stott and Jonathan Plowright for some insight into their Festival goings on.  I’ll focus on Kathryn today and take a look at Jonathan tomorrow. The first thing I discovered was that Kathryn Stott is in the room next to mine!  Unlike her duet partner, Norwegian violinist Atle Sponberg, whose delightful tones waft through my other adjoining wall, I’ve not heard a peep out of Ms Stott.  She is quick to reassure me that practice is very much a part of her daily routine.  All the pianists have keyboards in their rooms – they are, however, kitted out with headphones, hence the relative peace and quiet.  I, of course, will spend the next few days trying to……

After a splendid recreational day of isolation and bush walking on nearby Magnetic Island it was back to chamber music business with a vengeance.  This mornings Concert Conversations featured Nigel Westlake, our approachable Composer in Residence and so I thought that I should devote todays blog post to what that means and bring readers up to speed with a few more Festival artistic highlights. I collared Mr Westlake a couple of days ago and asked him a little about what being ‘in residence’ at AFCM is all about.  Although there is no specific commission from the Festival, Nigel was keen that he and Piers should programme some recent work, and in particular, the two guitar version of the 2010 solo sonata especially written for the Grigoryans.  His other main ‘duty’ which he was keen to identify as a privilege is to drop in on rehearsals, and in some cases lend a conductorly hand.  Given that some of his music is quite tricky, no doubt the performers consider it an equal privilege. Westlake has always been a hands on type – the sort of man to go poking around his own home in search of a hungry redback or the odd…

Today’s programme is dominated by strings players: what they have to say followed by what they like to play.  In a typical piece of smart programming by Piers Lane, he and no fewer than eight ‘stringies’ give us a thorough grounding in the teaching and professional habits of this normally shy breed before they run the gamut from A to Z in three separate concerts.  First the chat, and again, I’m impressed by the level at which these platforms are pitched.  A relaxed mood predominates but the topic is allowed to soar when required (though never over our heads) and the audience never feel spoken down to. Brendan Joyce from the impressive Camerata of St. John’s got the ball rolling by talking about the ethos of his conductor-less group.  Apparently, it was a US job satisfaction survey placing orchestral musicians firmly below garbage collectors that persuaded Queensland music educator, Elizabeth Morgan to create this autonomous collective of string players.  Not only do they refuse the tyranny of a conductor, they don’t even have an Artistic Director.  Joyce is keen to point out that as leader, he doesn’t want the pressure of a traditional concert master, preferring directional input to come……

This year marks 150 years since the birth of Claude Debussy and like most musical organisations the AFCM is keen to celebrate.  Most days have a work or two but day 3 is definitely ‘Debussy Day’ with numerous performances as well as a biographic special event. We kicked off with an annual Townsville event, a Reef Talk, where marine scientists are set the challenge of telling us something about the unique aquatic culture of the Coral Sea that links in with an ensuing musical programme.  In this case it was rather an easy one as Debussy’s La Cathédrale Engloutie was pretty much ripe for the picking.  If I had a criticism it was that an informative half an hour on ‘sea mounts’, ‘coral cathedrals’ and the need for conservation could have been enlivened with a few more underwater images, or better still, film. On the musical front, Marshal McGuire gave us a charming little aquatic harp piece entitled La Source (The Well-Spring) by Adolphe Hasselmans.  Friendly and upbeat, McGuire is here for the duration of the festival which contains an impressive array of works that include harp. Nigel Westlake’s Entomology for six players and tape followed, pretty much upstaging everyone…

The morning after the night before has a habit of leaving you wondering whether things to come will live up to memories of what has been. Festivals are no exception and after a terrific opening concert (see separate review online) the devotees turning out at 10.00am had something of a ‘match that’ look about them.  It had been a beautiful Queensland morning – shorts weather on the hotel balcony – and Concert Conversations had a slightly musty sound to it, so I was heartened to discover the secondary space at the Civic Theatre laid out rather like a church hall with tea cups and round tables at the front.  Equally appealing was being sat next to a remarkably chirpy Maggie Beer, a Festival regular and chamber music devotee, whose infectious enthusiasm was spreading like wildfire amongst the ranks of the faithful. On the menu for this morning was Festival Director, Piers Lane in conversation with the Storioni Trio and the Grigorian brothers, followed by performances from each.  In my experience, a relaxed musician can be an entertaining talker, but ‘to the point’ isn’t necessarily in the repertoire.  We needn’t have feared this morning for we were in the… Continue reading…