If there’s anyone in the modern era who can channel the spirit of Robert Schumann’s wife, muse and principal performer Clara Wieck, then it’s Angela Hewitt. The Canadian pianist is no “personality-player” loading idiosyncrasies into music that in the wrong hands can sometimes seem obscure, self-indulgent or even a tad disturbing. As she demonstrated in her previous recordings of Schumann’s solo piano music, Hewitt identifies deeply with the great German Romantic’s lyricism, and loses herself, and the listener, in its beauty, getting inside the music as if she were Clara herself (for whom it was written), and expanding it outwards. But the difference in this new Schumann release is that in Hannu Lintu and the Deutsche Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, she’s now found collaborators who are willing to be similarly open to the music’s subtleties. Everyone will comment on the singularity of their reading of the famous A-Minor Concerto’s finale, played at a gentler tempo than usual and with a real lilt, in the spirit of the dance. But it’s in the Intermezzo middle movement that the supreme artistry is most evident, as Hewitt weaves a filigree around the orchestra, a kind of now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t interaction between piano line and the ensemble texture. You’d…

It’s Friday night as I type this – though it won’t be when you’re reading it – and if you’re a Twitter person, you know what happens today: Follow Friday, or FF, a chance to recommend new tweeters to your own followers, and thereby give those people a vote of confidence and admiration. I confess I don’t often do it, mostly through sheer indecision (You’re All My Favourites!) but tonight I thought I might make up for that in an extended way. You may have read my recent opera column in the September issue of Limelight, all about opera singers and Twitter. I only managed to namecheck a few obvious superstars in that article, but there are so many more I could have mentioned – so here I am, on Follow Friday, with ten tweeting singers who I think are among the best. So if Twitter’s your thing, please read on, and maybe find a few new voices to enliven your feed. You can also follow me @primalamusica and Limelight @limelighted. Barry Banks @belcantobhoy     Fans of bel canto, and particularly of Opera Rara’s pioneering efforts, will know Barry’s voice – and virtuosity – very… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from…

It’s the night of January 15, 1941, and at Stalag VIII – a prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz in Silesia – a few hundred prisoners and a small number of guards are gathering in Barrack 27. It’s freezing cold. There is no heating. Among the prisoners is a famous composer; also a French soldier. One of the guards, Karl-Albert Brüll, loved music and knew who he was. Brüll was a German patriot with anti-Nazi sympathies and he provided music paper, pencils and solitude for the composer to work. Now they were going to hear what he’d written. The composer, the 31-year old Olivier Messiaen, prefaced his score with an image from the New Testament’s Book of Revelation: “In homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who lifts his hand toward heaven, saying, ‘There shall be time no longer’”. This haunting expression gives to Messiaen’s work its haunting title: Quartet for the End of Time. Scored for violin, clarinet, cello and piano, Messiaen’s quartet is in eight movements, each bearing apocalyptic, timeless messages for the players and audience. For prisoners hearing a work reflecting on eternity beyond time, men who didn’t know what time they had or what their life would be like in whatever…

Tchaikovsky’s Fourth symphony is among the most popular and most frequently-performed orchestral works in the canon, and it’s fashionable to spend a lot of time and energy trying to describe what it is “about”. During the Soviet era there was an official line which was largely accepted without question in the West. Tchaikovsky was portrayed as a closeted, self-hating homosexual who tried to “go straight” by entering into a marriage with a suicidal nymphomaniac. This official line continues with Tchaikovsky attempting suicide soon after his marriage and pouring out his terror and turmoil in this symphony and the opera Yevgeny Onegin. With the fall of the USSR in 1991 and the opening up of Russian archives to musicologists, not to mention a more humane view of homosexuality, a more accurate picture of Tchaikovsky’s emotional state at the time of the Fourth symphony has emerged. Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality was an open secret in a Russia where attitudes to sexuality were much more relaxed than they were in, say, England at the time. He certainly wasn’t the only known homosexual in the Russian artistic world of his day. The available evidence indicates that Tchaikovsky’s marriage in July 1877 to Antonina Milyukova was not some…

Ever since I appeared in The Pirates of Penzance as a boy, I have had a fascination for Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan. Sullivan’s collaborations with WS Gilbert are still immensely popular – but there’s more to him than that. Sullivan composed numerous “serious” works for the concert hall and was for many years the British musical establishment’s brightest hope for the future. Sullivan was born in London on May 13, 1842. As a boy his fine singing voice gained him a prized place in the choir of the Chapel Royal. In his teens he studied at the Royal Academy of Music. He was the inaugural holder of the Mendelssohn Scholarship, enabling him to study at the Leipzig Conservatory.  Sullivan’s first job in an English theatre was in 1864, when he composed a one-act ballet called The Enchanted Isle. In 1866 his symphony in E major (Irish) was premiered at the Crystal Palace. The Times said it was “the best musical work… for a long time produced by any English composer”. In the same year Sullivan wrote his concert overture In memoriamand his cello concerto.  Following the success of these works, another overture, Marmion, was premiered by the Philharmonic Society in 1867. It was also early in his career that he wrote…

The ABC Classic 100 20th Century countdown seemed to throw up a lot of controversy last year. I must admit that until I was on air for the first session with my partner in crime Marian Arnold, I had no idea who had won. I took a peek down the list, which felt naughty, like looking at the last page of a grand novel to see how the story finishes. There it was: No 1 – the Elgar Cello Concerto. I wished I hadn’t seen it.  There is nothing wrong with the piece – it’s a lovely work – but is such a remnant of the 19th century. It seemed unbelievable that it could have won ahead of all the other magnificent and more modern pieces from the 20th century. Of course there was no point grumbling about the decision; the people voted and they got what they voted for. But it did highlight what I thought was an interesting English bias in the voting, which Julian Day also remarked on in the January issue of Limelight. Of the top five  (Elgar Cello Concerto, Holst’s The Planets, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending and Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No 2) three are English……

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…