Last night, following our four performances with Sydney Symphony in Mahler’s epic Second Symphony, we were back in the rehearsal room for Messiah. In the space of just one week, we will have rehearsed the choirs, met the soloists, put together the orchestra and done our two dress rehearsals, ready for our opening night performance on Thursday December 8, 2011. We present Messiah every year so on one level, there is an element of predictability, but there is also the thrill of performing with new choristers, soloists and conductors. In each year there are subtle changes to the performing edition as Handel did not leave us with a definitive version of the work, so my job always starts with choosing what to sing and what to leave out. Sometimes this is based on a famous historical performance such as the “Dublin” version or the Foundling Hospital version. Some years it is based on the soloists I have chosen and others on a mere whim! This year, I have left nothing out! It is the whole shebang with the versions that most of the audience would recognise as their favourite settings. I have played around a little with the orchestration, giving…

Over brunch with Limelight‘s online editor Melissa Lesnie recently, I was asked how my life has been affected by the sudden success of my first album. “Has classical stardom transformed Sally Whitwell?” she asked. When my giggling subsided, I felt compelled to give some serious thought to the question of how my life and career has changed post-Mad Rush. Or indeed, how it hasn’t changed. First of all, let’s think about profile — fame, infamy… Whatever you want to call it. A part of me admits that it would have been nice to have become rich/famous/glamorous as a result of a best-selling, ARIA Award-winning album. Were I a pop musician of some description, I’m sure this kind of thing might have been on the cards, but in the classical music world, here in Australia? Hmm… Let’s just say that even with the profile I have gained, life is still a cheerfully modest affair! Perhaps, then, I should take this opportunity to count my blessings. I am very lucky to have signed with ABC Classics, not only because they are wonderful people, but because being represented by them pretty much guarantees media saturation in the form of airplay on ABC Classic…

Last week I wrote about concept albums, but it was my experience in programming interesting performances that provided the training ground I needed to create the unified recording project that is The Good, the Bad and the Awkward. As a graduate student I was introduced to the idea of the “concept recital” by Nadia Piave, a supremely talented and uniquely gifted individual who taught me how to think outside the square. At the time, I was completing a Graduate Diploma in piano accompaniment at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. My teacher was the unparalleled David Miller. I was new in Sydney, fresh out of the Canberra School of Music, and had very few contacts, so he was trying to find me a singer to work with. Up until that point, to be frank, I’d had some pretty average experiences of working with singers. Basically, I’d found many singers I’d worked with during my undergraduate years to be creatively unimaginative, insecure and emotionally needy. (Thankfully, I’ve discovered a plethora of smart and wonderful singers since those days… What a relief!) Back then, I’d decided that I didn’t have time for the drama – “I’m a musician,” I thought, “not a counsellor!”…

Last week, in honour of All Souls’ Day, I headed to YouTube to find a suitably transcendent rendition of Strauss’s gorgeous song Allerseelen. I was rather hoping Barbara Bonney would oblige. Alas, she did not. No matter; instead I found one by the one and only Miss Elly Ameling. The Mary Poppins of lieder, practically perfect in every way. Here she is. You see what I mean. Perfect. And then YouTube did what it does best — it dragged me into its suggested list of related videos. How could I resist more Elly? Clearly, I couldn’t. And then before I knew it I’d gone from Elly singing Strauss to Elly singing Schumann to Elly singing … I Got Rhythm. Oh yes. As I dimly knew, but had half forgotten, Elly the Perfect had also turned her hand to the Great American Songbook. Was she perfect at that too? Listen for yourself. I think she pretty much is. This is completely delightful, and her slight accent just makes it that much more charming. I also really, really hope that that’s her whistling at the end. And there’s more where that came from: she recorded two albums of this sort of music,…

Over the next little while I’m going to be sharing my journey on the making of my second solo album. The whole journey, from “go” to “woah”. First of all, here’s where we’re at currently. I’ve had the initial meeting with the very lovely Martin Buzacott, my producer at ABC Classics and a man of remarkably eclectic and cultured tastes. He doesn’t mind me occasionally rabbiting on about Frank Zappa or Radiohead. Or Bach. Or Celtic folk music. I really like that about him. Anyway, it’s to Martin that I am required to pitch my ideas – my concept, if you will – for this album. Yes, you heard right; I said “concept”. I’m endeavouring to make a “capital C” Concept Album, a collection of works unified by a particular theme, which could be the subject matter of the text, a narrative or some abstract musical idea. But the point is that a concept album communicates this idea as a complete and uninterrupted listening experience. As a listener, you are asked to put aside an hour of your life to listen to them properly (that is, if you’re really interested in hearing what an artist has to say). In the…

From the beginning of 2008 until the end of 2010, the only one of her Sydney performances I missed was a matinée of Otello; I also travelled to Melbourne and London to hear her, and it’s probably best if I don’t count the number of words I’ve written about her over the years. So you’ll understand why, even when I realised I’d be spending the indefinite future away from Australia, I resolved nevertheless to maintain my devotion as far as possible. And while it was ultimately impossible for me to make it to her Opera Australia Capriccio or her Vec Makropulos in Strasbourg, Opera Queensland’s Tosca was easier — all I had to do was fly over from Taiwan. Nine hours instead of 15 makes a lot of difference. I’ll get to the Tosca in a moment. But I also stopped in Sydney for a few days en route — I had to say hello, and I wanted very much to see Opera Australia’s Don Giovanni. Or, more specifically, I wanted to see Jacqui Dark as Donna Elvira. Jacqui’s Elvira was one of the things I was most… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

Like the Perth City Link, David Pye, Lee Buddle and Phil Thomson’s new opera set in the Western Australian outback may further revitalise a cityscape slowly coming to its own as a forced to be reckoned with on the Australian new music scene. At its heart, the plot of Western Australia’s newest operatic spectacle Into the Shimmer Heat is disarmingly simple. A girl, left mute by the death of her father, suffers the further trauma of her mother’s death. Through various life-affirming vicissitudes, her soul is saved, and she resolves to embrace life in all its tainted glory. Deceptively simple? Not particularly. In the end, this skeletal outline coincides almost perfectly with the scene-to-scene progression the drama follows: there is no diverting subplot, no sudden peripeteia, no earth-shattering dénouement. The story inches steadily toward its redemptive finale with the inevitability of a Western beach sunset. Yet its simplicity is not necessarily a flaw. Into the Shimmer Heat, the brainchild of Western Australian composers David Pye and Lee Buddle and writer Phil Thomson, is enriched by two layers of dramatic embroidery. The first is a special kind of Australian outback mysticism, involving desert spirits and an otherworldly oasis, a gathering spot…

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…