At last year’s ARIA Fine Arts nomination ceremony, held at the Sydney Conservatorium’s Verbrugghen Hall, I felt like an alien, even in a roped-off event for “niche” genres like jazz, world music, heavy metal and… Classical. I winced every time a composer or artist’s name was mispronounced (the inevitable “Hey-den” was the first of many faux pas) by a presenter clearly mystified by Aleksandr Tsiboulski’s album of Australian guitar music. When that name was called, my explosive cheer echoed uncomfortably in the otherwise silent auditorium, an aural tumbleweed. All this without even examining the disastrous “genre” mini-ceremonies that followed, held in the muddy Botanical Gardens with a heavily tattooed Ruby Rose again balking at those pesky classical names. That said, the biggest crime against correct pronunciation was Jessica Mauboy’s memorable “dee-butt” blunder (she was trying to say “debut”) at the televised awards show on the Sydney Opera House steps. During this week’s proceedings for the 2011 ARIA Fine Arts and Artisans Awards at the Sydney Theatre, the Australian Record Industry Association CEO Dan Rosen alluded to some of these problems and vowed that the awards’ 25th anniversary would entail a major overhaul. But classical, jazz and world music were still…

Yesterday Sydney Camerata performed at Sydney’s brand new concert hall located in The Concourse complex at Chatswood. Upon arrival we were immediately impressed. The exterior is beautiful and striking, with bold steel and glass panels and a wide staircase leading down to a new, grassy public square and the Chatswood library. The real delights for us, however, revealed themselves once we stepped foot inside the concert hall. Boasting beautiful maple wood panelling and crimson red seating over two levels, the interior was certainly visually appealing, but was the acoustic equally pleasing? In a word, yes! As a 1,000-seat hall inspired by traditional European theatres it offered a clear, crisp response that was neither boomy nor overly generous. From the stage at times, playing Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No 3, it was difficult to hear individual instruments but a bit more time in the venue would have allowed us a greater chance to get accustomed to it. Regardless, I would be intrigued to hear from an audience’s perspective how our sound was received. Overall, we were very pleased with the acoustic and as our soloist in Mozart’s Jeunehomme Piano Concerto Kathryn Selby quite simply said, “they got this one right”. I wonder how…

I think Limelight’s editor Francis Merson is winning the Most Exotic Blogging Locale right now, with his fantastic updates from the Trondheim Festival of Chamber Music in Norway. So, since I can’t hope to compete on quality, I shall have to settle for quantity, and offer you updates from three — count ’em, three — semi-exotic locales instead. And maybe, if I’m really, really subtle about it, nobody will notice that what I’m really doing is making up for my deplorable slackness in updating this blog. I last blogged from Hong Kong, but wrote about Santa Fe. Hong Kong does deserve its own update, though. We were there for the Hong Kong Philharmonic’s season opening concerts of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, which was paired with Mozart’s Symphony No 41 Jupiter. Sydney concertgoers may well have heard The Tenor in My Life sing this with the SSO last year, with Ashkenazy at the helm and Lilli Paasikivi as the alto soloist. This time it was the Dutch conductor Lawrence Renes in charge — a reasonably short notice replacement for Edo de Waart, who had been forced to cancel for health reasons — and the alto was the extraordinary Michelle…

The Trondheim Festival of Chamber Music is now officially øver. The festival’s stand has vanished from the foyer of the Hotel Rica Nidelven, replaced by one advertising a Formidlings Konferansen, whatever that is. Now the hotel, where all the musicians have lived, practised and drunk their way through countless minibars in the past week, has that lonely atmosphere of a concert hall after the crowd has gone home. There’s a lot to catch up on from the last few days. Firstly, the results of the Chamber Music Competition. The number one spot was nabbed by French ensemble Trio Paul Klee, whose cellist Tristan Cornut was the most outstanding musician I heard in the comp – a beautifully free bowing technique and effortless true intonation. Second prize – and audience prize – went to the Fournier Trio, whose Australian cellist Pei-Jee Ng won the Young Performers Award back in 2001. Third was taken by the Atanassov Trio, whose pianist Pierre-Kaloyann Atanassov was another standout, with wonderful perlé (I was reminded of Radu Lupu) and a terrific sense of rhythm. A few hours after the announcement came the closing concert – a marathon in which almost all the musicians to perform at the…

The big, and upsetting, news for Australians is that the Streeton Trio have not made the finals of the Chamber Music Competition. Whispers in the breakfast room of the Rica Nidelven Hotel have suggested many jury members thought they were a cert to get through, but others took exception to their exuberant way of moving while they played. It seems hardly fair. Shouldn’t it be all about the music? It’s enough to put you off your reindeer pancakes. But such are the vicissitudes of international competitions (insert plug here for the debate about piano competitions in the October Limelight https://store.haymarketmedia.com.au/collections/limelight). The finals of the competition are held tomorrow. Three ensembles have made the cut, two of which are French. The Paul Klee Trio (France), the Trio Atanassov (France) and the Fournier Trio (UK/Australia/Korea). At least Australian cellist Pei-Jee Ng of the Fournier is representing the green and gold. If they win, Australia will, at least, claim one third of the glory. (I’ll certainly be yelling “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie” in between all the movements.) Other highlights of the past few days… The brightest was a double revelation: the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra (Norway’s own TSO) and conductor André de Ridder. This German-born…

It’s the morning of Day Three of the Festival. I’m in the computer room of the Rica Nidelven Hotel, the only one I’ve ever been in with a view of a river.

So here I am standing in the northernmost cathedral in Europe staring up into the face of an elephant. The Nidarosdomen, in the Norwegian city of Trondheim, is a miracle of 12th-century stonemasonry, festooned with gargoyles of every possible shape: goats, monkeys, dogs, dragons… and extremely cute elephants. If Pixar ever designed a Gothic cathedral, this is what it would look like. The Nidarosdomen is my first stop on a quick sightseeing jaunt around Trondheim before the annual Chamber Music Festival gets started tonight. Guest of honour and composer in residence: our own Brett Dean. His face is plastered around the town on billboards and posters, and I can’t help feeling a flush of national pride. Our boy has definitely made good. But before the Festival begins – and I’ll talk about the musical delights later – I’m captivated by the beauty of this scrupulously conserved little Nordic town. Architecture here is piously lo-fi: one- and two-storey weatherboard buildings with ornate casement windows, all painted in pastel greens, yellows, pinks… In the city centre, the only flat bit, these dolls’ houses cram the cobbled laneways, while the wide boulevards are lined with the elegant fin-de-siècle apartment buildings that are standard…

Exhibiting their unique mastery of the instrument were two of Australia’s most charismatic piano wizards – Ross Bolleter and Anthony Pateras – as well as visiting UK virtuoso Mark Gasser. The three together provided the musical fabric with which this tapestry was woven, adorning it with colours that were by turn stark and subtle, explosive and delicate. First to seduce the audience was Bolleter with his wistful and contemplative Daughters of Time. Performed on three of the five old, ruined pianos that reside in Bolleter’s kitchen, this lengthy work plays like a homage to the passage of time. Seated on the floor with the three pianos towering over him – one in front and the remaining two flanking him on either side – Bolleter works the three instruments like an acoustic mixing desk. He passes from one to the other, at times plucking strings on one piano with the right hand and striking keys on another with the left, then shifting his position to reach the highest notes of one piano with his left hand and the highest notes of the third piano with his right, his arms barely able to stretch the distance. The pianos are in themselves worthy…

I was unaware, last night, that my descent into the underground of Perth’s new State Theatre Centre would be like a free fall into the viscera of an untamed sonic universe. I had glanced only nonchalantly at the concert program; Gérard Grisey’s Le Noir de L’Étoile (literally “The Black of the Star”) performed by Melbourne-based Speak Percussion. I had heard vague whispers of an odd seating arrangement, with audience members on the floor in the middle of the performance space, encircled by the six musicians like some organic surround sound system. Yet at this stage it was all academic to me; mere words on a page, scattered hearsay. It hit me when the lights went down. A deep-voiced narrator begins to speak, his accent tinged with a Germanic wistfulness. His tone is dry yet warm, and he speaks of distant cosmic spaces, of supernovae, of pulsating neutron stars. And as simply as that, the context is set. The spell is cast. As the voice fades, the primordial rumbling of a bass drum warns of an impending darkness, a force both sinister and organic, capable of untold destruction, yet born of the earliest stirrings of cosmic matter. The sound swells imperceptibly,…

When I was at school, in art class, from the start of Year 7 we were encouraged to create our own masterpieces. It is odd then, as a professional musician, that I have never written a work that has been performed in a concert setting. Last year when we were selecting the songs for our concert Brighton to Bondi, we decided we really needed a work to pull the concept of the concert together but also bring all the performing elements into one piece. Unable to find a piece about the English/Australian connection that involved piano, organ, large choir and youth chorus, I decided to write one! In the foyer of the Sofitel Hotel in New York over quite a few cups of average coffee, I sketched the outline for my piece Brighton to Bondi, which features words from New Zealand poet Tim Jones. His poem seemed like the perfect text for my piece. Tuesday Poem: Impertinent To Sailors Curved over islands, the world dragged me south in a talkative year slipping Southampton as the band played a distant farewell. It was better than steerage, that assisted passage: ten pound Poms at sixpence the dozen, promenading in sun frocks, gathering…

Forgive this somewhat delayed reaction. Packing, flying and the vacation-like inertia which Florida weather tends to inspire have all conspired to mute my blogging urge just recently. Since last I wrote, I’ve changed cities twice — from Santa Fe to Orlando (for a much needed week of unpacking and sitting still) and from Orlando to Hong Kong, where The Tenor in My Life will sing two performances of Das Lied von der Erde at the end of the week. As it turns out, it’s even more hot and humid here than in Florida, but inertia must be fought and I’ve been meaning to write this entry for several weeks. I think what I have to share is still worth sharing. Basically I just wanted to spread the world about a wonderful show I saw in Santa Fe — probably one of the most obscure obscurities I’ve ever seen, but an opera which, at least based on what I saw in Santa Fe, deserves to be better known. The opera in question? Menotti’s The Last Savage. No, I hadn’t heard of it either, at least not until I knew I was going to Santa Fe and checked out their season. It’s……

The Proms is a grand tradition: a 116-year-old annual series of classical music concerts; a quintessentially English institution aimed at bringing music to the masses. I am an idiot: a 35-year-old hack musician, unable to sight-read or even play the same thing twice; an emphatically Australian artist who aims to mock the grand institutions of the masses. Grand tradition and idiot will be combined this Saturday night, on the occasion of the first-ever BBC Comedy Prom. I have managed in recent years to stumble upon a lovely and fun career by getting onstage and saying whatever I like in whatever form I enjoy. And what I like to say is often “motherfucker” and “pope” and “cancer” and “cheese” (among many more esoteric appellations), and the form I enjoy is often disco or funk or beat poetry or shouting. So you can understand why I am quietly shocked that people choose to buy tickets and watch me at all. But more surprising has been my slow a-/de-scent into the very bosom of my adopted home’s apparently conservative establishment. In the last year, I have written for the Royal Shakespeare Company, toured with the Sydney Symphony, and performed at the Royal Albert…