If I were a more assiduous sort of person, I would no doubt have spent the last four weeks regaling you with accounts of Zürich’s various operatic (and otherwise musical) goings-on. After all, there is no shortage of classical music — vocal and non — in this town, especially not now, as our time here has corresponded exactly with the Zürcher Festspiele. Ah, but that lake is so distracting. I’m afraid far more time has been spent watching ducks and picnicking in the sun than inside either the opera house or the Tonhalle. Which is not to say I didn’t try — I investigated my operatic possibilities, honest I did, but when push came to shove, there was little so overwhelmingly tempting that I couldn’t help but go. It was almost as if they’d seen me coming, and conspired against me: Carmen, Cav/Pag and — when Elina Garanca was obliged to cancel her last two Anna Bolenas, something I was half-keen to see — La bohème. Loved by millions, yes, I know, but all of them unfavourites of mine. I do somewhat regret never getting around to booking for Falstaff, however, and part of me wonders whether I should have…

Round 1 of the competition called for any work by Haydn or Mozart alongside an own choice work. This competition is quite unique given the breadth of repertoire choice, even in the early rounds. But glaring me in the face is the fact that of the 16 ensembles this year, only 2 have dared to play Mozart. Why is Wolfgang Amadeus so ignored? Or is it purely strategic, given Mozart is notoriously difficult to pull off? I must admit that until last year I had never wholly enjoyed performing the Mozart Trios. It’s not that the music is not exquisite; rather that finding the right balance of phrasing delicacy and emotional expression is a huge challenge. When my old group Trio 303 competed in MICMC back in 1999 as the lone Australian representative, we chose a late Haydn trio for the first round. At the time it wasn’t because we were scared of Mozart; just that we knew we could play the rhetorical Haydn better. Perhaps that’s just it! As an older, wiser, more experienced performer, Mozart just doesn’t loom as large as it used to. It was pointed out to me (with abject horror) by one of the young…

Laureates from the first MICMC, the St Lawrence String Quartet, have mentored competitors from this the 6th MICMC, the Attacca Quartet from the USA. The St Lawrence violist Lesley Robertson is also on this year’s jury. Here are the two generations of quartets both playing Haydn: St Lawrence String Quartet Attacca Quartet This got me thinking. Firstly, of the idea of a musical family tree – a pedagogical thread that connects generations through informed chamber music practice. Perhaps in 20 or even 10 years’ time we’ll see members of the Attacca Quartet coaching another twentysomething quartet. As a student I had some wonderful teachers, who were also taught by wonderful teachers, and so on. I felt a distinct pride in knowing my teacher had studied with André Navarra and Pablo Casals, and hoped that some of their wisdom would rub off on me. As a student in Basel in 1997 I was fortunate to have regular lessons with Walter Levin (LaSalle Quartet) and Hatto Beyerle (Alban Berg Quartet). Between them they’ve taught hundreds of top-quality ensembles across countless countries with the combined carbon footprint to prove it. In fact, Walter Levin’s LaSalle Quartet themselves taught the young Alban Berg Quartet,…

The Planets was composed between 1914-17 as a seven-movement orchestral suite, receiving its premiere in the final weeks of World War I. I have to admit it was one of the first orchestral works that captivated me and I remember first attempting to perform (I use the term “perform” very loosely!) “highlights” in a simplified version for my primary school orchestra. This week I have the chance to play it with the Sydney Symphony in a performance complete with a film displayed above the orchestra, showing NASA images and visual renderings of the planets themselves. One of the best video recordings i’ve come across is by the BBC Philharmonic conducted by the late Sir Charles Mackerras at the 2009 BBC Proms. It’s one of those works that’s so arresting that it has been used widely in popular culture. The Planets seems to pop up in the most unexpected places in a range of guises. The menacing opening movement, Mars: The Bringer of War, has been heard in everything from TV documentaries to the background music for Nintendo Super Mario Bros 3 in the “Dark Land” levels (albeit in a horribly distorted MIDI arrangement). Similarities have been drawn between Holst’s Mars…

Naming a chamber ensemble may not be as tricky or permanent as naming your firstborn, but can still pose many challenges for young musicians starting their careers. The contenders for this years competition come from myriad cultures and backgrounds – from Hungary, USA, UK, Russia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and Australia. Here’s a quick summary of some names we’ll see this year, and some from the past. Named after a group member Kelemen Kvartett named after the first violinist, Barnabas Kelemen, and UK’s Lawson Trio after pianist Annabelle Lawson (wouldn’t it be refreshing to see a group named after the cellist or violist for a change…) Kelemen Kvartett Named after a composer/musician/artist Finzi Quartet after British composer Gerald Finzi, Barbirolli Quartet after the famous maestro Sir John, Australia’s Streeton Trio after the Australian Heidelberg School landscape painter Arthur Streeton, Trio Paul Klee from France after the Swiss-born artist, and Piatti Quartet, supposedly after the 19th-century cellist Alfredo Piatti. Famous examples: Alban Berg Quartet, Amadeus Quartet, Borodin Quartet, Cuarteto Casals… It’s a long list. Barbirolli String Quartet The prosaic, the poetic and the cryptic A musical term inspired the Attacca Quartet (meaning to continue without break from the end of one…

I came to Los Angeles pretty much for one reason only, to meet composer and conductor Eric Whitacre, whose work little man in a hurry will have its Australian premiere in a concert in August with the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs alongside works by Schumann, Wolf and of course, Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem. I have only been to LA once and that must have been over 15 years ago as part of a tour with a children’s choir for which I was the repetiteur – I only remember seeing parts of Hollywood from the back of a tour bus and Venice Beach. Everything else was sound checks, dressing rooms and billets. It was an intense tour and LA was the last stop with concerts at Disneyland and Universal Studios. This time I had been advised to hire a car but it was not until I checked into my rather trendy hotel that I realised that Los Angeles is no New York – a subway trip to any destination. As they say in the film Sunset Boulevard (where I was staying!), if you lose your car in this town, it’s like having your legs cut off. So with my navagatrix GPS in…

A few days ago I was thrilled to attend a rehearsal of the Australian Chamber Orchestra as they prepared to embark on their current national tour, Baroque Virtuosi. As usual I was struck by the brilliance and energy of the ACO musicians, particularly in this program stepping out of their ranks to perform as soloists in their own right. There may not be a star guest director for these concerts, but who needs one when you’ve got a Strad? The ensemble’s newest member is a Stradivarius violin dating from 1728/9. With a price tag of $1.79-million, it joins a growing number of fine instruments in use by members of the orchestra, including Richard Tognetti’s 1743 Guarneri del Gesù, a 1759 Guadagnini violin played by Helena Rathbone and a particular favourite of mine, the 1729 Guarneri filius Andreae cello played by Timo-Veikko Valve. In the rehearsal we were treated to three works featured in the tour: Tartini (arr. Kreisler) Violin Sonata, Op 1 No 4, the Devil’s Trill, performed by Satu Vänskä, the Telemann Viola Concerto featuring principal viola Chris Moore and the Vivaldi Concerto for Four Violins (Helena Rathbone, Satu Vänskä, Madeleine Boud and Mark Ingwersen). Hearing the newly acquired (as yet unnamed – but you can still…

In the first round of the competition we are playing the Haydn Trio in C Major and the Brahms Trio in B Major, Op 8. The Haydn Trio could only be described as glorious. It is a much more rhetorical piece than the others we are playing: you can hear a drama between characters unfolding as if we are caught in some kind of play. This is a fun piece for us to play, because we can really act out the characters ourselves, and we have the chance to change characters quickly and often. Our approach is to converse with and surprise each other through the performances. We really enjoy the freshness and vitality of the music. While the Haydn was full of dramatic characters and immediacy, the Brahms unfolds with a much greater feeling of breadth. Haydn coaxes more articulated “talking” from our instruments where the Brahms requires more singing. Maybe there is no other composer before or since who conceived such a satisfyingly rich sound for a piano trio as Brahms, and this trio in B Major is particularly harmonious. When we find the right sound, its lusciousness is much greater than the sum of its parts. Our…

Welcome to the Streeton Trio’s blog updates! As the only Australian group in this year’s Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition, we will keep you posted during our preparation for the competition. My name is Emma Jardine and I’m the violinist of the group. The other members are Martin Smith (cello) and Benjamin Kopp (piano). We are three young Australians who have been living in Europe for the past few years. Despite fears that volcanic ash would delay our return to Australia, we arrived last week and are thrilled to be back home again. We have a concert tour of Victoria and NSW leading up to the competition in July, so it’s going to be a busy month for us, but we’ll do our best to give you all the updates on the Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition from an insider’s point of view. But first, a recap on what we’ve been doing to get to this point. Most people are only just starting to hear about the MICMC now, but we actually applied for this competition back in August 2010. To apply, we had to send in a DVD of one of our live performances. Then, after a few nervous…

Lyricist W S Gilbert died in 1911 and I think it is simply splendid that he and his music collaborator Sir Arthur Sullivan are still able to make it to the news pages one hundred years later. I was the conductor of The Very Best of G&S with the Sydney Symphony and loved every minute of Stuart Maunder’s wonderful, jocular list of irritants in Ko-Ko’s updated song from The Mikado. I fully expect that Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, Clover Moore, Justin Bieber’s dermatologist, lovers of the music of Brahms, any aunty who has a moustache, anyone with a mobile phone, Westfield and all the others who made it to the list will follow Hillsong Church’s lead and send letters demanding legal clarification. This is not even a storm in a teacup; we’re talking a babycino cyclone here, a tiny waterspout in a Barbie-sized tea set. “That Hillsong lot on television, all joyfully singing psalms, I wish they would desist, and their happy claps resist” is so inoffensive it is hardly worth the effort of typing up a letter of complaint, and probably not even worth the effort of complaining about the complaint – so I’ll stop here and just quote…

After only a little while – more or less after the first read-through, in fact – the conductor requested that those singing the lower parts make some expressive changes. They were to abandon the legato, church-choir style that they had been using so far – as he noted with some pride, this particular ensemble was not a church choir. Instead, they were to give their lines some more “shape”. The conductor demonstrated, singing with almost caricatured emphasis on the tactus, and making so little of the unaccented final syllables that it almost sounded as though gaps were being freely left between words mid-phrase. He then elaborated: what he was after was, it seemed, akin to the down-up bowing of a cello. The singers undertook to meet the request. Oddly enough, the rehearsal then continued, and moved on to other pieces, without the subject being revisited at all. The episode got me thinking about what constitutes effective communication in rehearsing this kind of repertoire, which conductors may typically be expected to know a good deal better than their choristers. These particular singers may well have been left somewhat bemused: precisely which church-singing habits were to be broken was not specified; the…

Zandonai: Francesca da Rimini Francesca, I’m pleased to say, is doing very well indeed. This doesn’t come as a massive surprise to me, though, given that my main inspiration for including it on the original list was my forthcoming trip to see a production of it at London’s Opera Holland Park, with none other than Australia’s Own Cheryl Barker and Julian Gavin as Francesca and Paolo. I’ll admit that seeing it live shook my faith in the piece temporarily — the libretto is not the strongest, though perhaps OHP’s Mike Volpe would beg to differ! — but after three shows, I was more or less converted. Italian verismo has never been the corner of the repertoire closest to my heart, even when brewed with other operatic influences, as Francesca is; but it has some fairly wonderful moments and I still recommend getting to know it. The small Francesca discography welcomed a new recording into the fold in April this year, with the release on Myto of a 1958 performance from Rome; and if you’re in the right place at the right time, staged performances are remarkably easy to find for such a non-standard work. Along with OHP’s production, 2010 saw stagings in…