This was the second time YouTube has assembled a symphony orchestra of this grand, global scale, this year with the orchestra flown in to Sydney from 33 countries. The audition criteria raised the bar from Carnegie Hall’s YTSO1. Cellists had to play no less than five excerpts including such notorious selections as Strauss’ Don Juan. There were also concerto (Schumann or Haydn in D for cellists) and Bach requirements. The same audition process applied of uploading your audition video onto the World Wide Web to be judged by a professional panel and public vote. No comfortable task by any means, but it was an experience that had me asking myself, “what good is it to be a musician and spend your life in a practice room behind closed doors?” There will always be people to deconstruct and comment on your playing, but at the end of the day I believe we shouldn’t be afraid of that. We should be sharing our music, embracing the chance to perform for each other and taking on healthy criticism. The week leading up to the final performance was absolutely jam-packed with activities. We had masterclasses, chamber music concerts, sectional concerts, a jam session and…

During a lazy afternoon at home, hiding from this New York winter which refuses (despite the theoretical advent of spring) to depart, I stumbled upon a film called Mr Imperium. Maybe you know it? No, me neither. It’s one of Lana Turner’s lesser efforts. In fact, if the IMdB trivia page is to be trusted, MGM thought it was so terrible that they delayed its release until after its male lead’s next film had had a chance to offset it. The man in question — and the operatic link which brings me to blog it — is Ezio Pinza, star of the Met, La Scala and Covent Garden, in his film début. It’s really not a very good picture. The plot is typically silly: actress (Lana Turner) falls for Pinza’s crown prince of somewhere-like-Monaco, they’re torn apart when he becomes king and picks politics over True Love, but he wins her back through the cunning use disguise and contrived musical numbers and she finds a way to 1. save his kingdom and 2. keep him in the USA with her, since he doesn’t want to be king anyway. And along the way, they shoehorn in a few moments like this:…

In September 2010, I was in Tokyo for a choral tour. My previous performing experiences had been squarely confined to the Western world: the Anglophone bloc of Australia, America and the UK, and two or three concerts in continental Europe. Of all the small things that made the Japan tour utterly different, the most striking was the demeanour of the Japanese audiences. After each item on the programme, not a sound: no coughing, no paper-shuffling, no shifting around, and certainly no talking. Simply silence – until the invariably generous final applause. We don’t see much of that in Sydney. To be sure, the Sydney concert culture to which I’m most accustomed – and next to which Tokyo seemed so alien – involves a noticeable amount of extrinsic audience noise. Regular performers on the scene often seem to roll their eyes by reflex when the subject of audience etiquette comes up. With each tour by a European stalwart – a Berlin Phil, or a Tallis Scholars – there’s a disgruntled second violinist (or the like) complaining that our audiences are the most ill-mannered they’ve ever encountered. Particular outrage issues, it appears, from those Sydney concertgoers rendered hypersensitive by harbouring a little…

Some time ago in a Soapbox article in Limelight I proposed that the arts should extricate themselves from arts funding and link up with the Department of Health, where the sums are so big no-one seems to worry about spending billions of dollars. I also suggested that doctors could prescribe a ticket to a play or an opera, so that the patient would feel better having a nice night out, and the arts organisation would benefit from the ticket price being returned like a Medicare co-payment back to the company. I had no idea that the Mayor of Turku in Finland was such an avid reader of Limelight, but lo and behold this is what they’re doing (or a version thereof) in Finland! The only problem I can see is that there would be a sudden influx of traveling arts company reps visiting GP surgeries, handing out Opera Australia mugs and Bell Shakespeare computer mouse mats, and taking doctors on lovely trips to Hayman Island to talk about the benefits of opera over straight theatre. With our theatres and concert halls packed to the rafters with the sneezing, sick masses, we could once and for all get rid of the…

Although I rarely share this fact with people, Nyman (I don’t feel familiar enough yet to call him Michael) was probably the foremost figure that drew me to instrumental composition. As a teenager, my musical interests lay in the guitar-driven grunge rock of Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins et al, with the occasional dose of Lloyd-Webber, Claude-Michel Schönberg et al. It would have been around this time (my late teens) that I saw the film Gattaca. It would be a stretch to say that the film changed my life, but there was definitely something special about the soundtrack. If you’re unfamiliar, here’s a taste: I spent years passively seeking out a recording of the Gattaca soundtrack (if I found myself walking past the soundtrack stand in a record store, I’d have a quick peek under “G”). Eventually, bored with the latest offerings from the alternative rock world, I went to the trouble of ordering it. A week or so, and $9.95, later I had a new favourite CD. But, who was this composer? I decided to look into what else this Michael Nyman fellow had written. My first port of call was the store responsible for reuniting me with the music from Gattaca,…

All I knew of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades before last night were Lisa’s and Pauline’s reasonably famous numbers (I’m a soprano recital disc fanatic, so this not an entirely new situation for me) and, somewhere in the dark baritonal recesses of my mind, fragments of Yeletsky’s. I certainly didn’t know how long it went on. And on. AND ON. I’m being mean, and I perhaps I shouldn’t, because there’s a lot of gorgeous music in this opera, and I was only fleetingly bored. The story certainly lends itself well to operatic treatment: it just needed someone with, say, Janácek’s gift of concision to write its libretto. Tchaikovsky’s brother’s effort, meanwhile, lingers where it should but also where it shouldn’t, and just when you think a quick, punchy ending is what’s called for, the curtains open on a gambling table and it’s turned into La Traviata. Before that, it’s a Russian Werther. At least, that’s what I kept thinking. Tortured tenor with stalkerish tendencies, object-of-affection who loves him back but is promised to a sensible, rich and frankly preferable baritone, and a miserable ending for everyone. Funnily enough, the Met’s production is an Elijah Moshinsky, and so was the only Werther…

Sitting here on a plane on my way to Melbourne as the sun rises in the east, I muse this morning on the excellent playing of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra. Last night was the second Symphony in The Park – held on Stage 88 – a free event that showcases the orchestra. The first year was a classical affair and last night was a Broadway night with singers Peter Cousens and Trisha Crowe, and yours truly waving the stick. The CSO is in fine form these days. With Nicholas Milton as chief conductor and the wonderful Barbara Jane Gilby as leader, it plays with real energy. I am always interested in the internal energy of an orchestra. The best ones are like well-groomed race horses, you only need to turn them in the right direction and they’ll glide down the track doing all the hard work themselves, without needing to crack the whip that much. Canberra is in that league, I think, and certainly improving every year. The orchestra gets most of its funding from a very supportive ACT government, and very little from a less supportive Federal Government. The Canberra Symphony is incredible bang for buck, because as it’s…

I will begin by describing my two most recent musical experiences. Last night, I attended a performance of Jersey Boys at the Theatre Royal. For those unfamiliar with the musical, Jersey Boys tracks the formation, successes and ultimate disbanding of 60s pop group The Four Seasons. It is interspersed with various bits and pieces of the band’s hits – another of those “Jukebox musicals”. While I probably don’t fall into the production’s target audience, I did enjoy it. This was my pop music experience. This morning, in a composition analysis class, we listened to and analysed Iannis Xenakis‘ 1961 solo piano work Herma. For those unfamiliar with the piece, Herma is as much an exercise in mathematical set theory as it is a composition. Xenakis divides the 88 notes on a piano into a few different pitch sets. He then bases sections of the piece on pitches obtained through various set operations. The processes are fairly straightforward, but to apply them to music is… very Xenakis. He was, after all, a mathematician and qualified architect – something which heavily influenced other works such as Metastasis. This was my art music experience. As you can imagine, these two heavily contrasting listening…

When was the last time you experienced a Concert Conversion: a live performance that made you sit up wide-eyed and –eared to completely re-evaluate an artist?

Time flies when you’re having Wagner. Our two months in London are over now, just like that (in fact I’m already writing to you from New York) and in the last four weeks I managed to see something like six performances of Parsifal at the English National Opera. And nor was I just doing my duty for the Tenor In My Life (dare I acronymise him? TTIML?). It turns out I really, really like Parsifal, which before the start of this year I’d never heard in its entirety. The circumstances helped, of course. Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s production, which had its start at the ENO and then traveled the world, is evidently regarded as one of the great Wagner stagings of recent years, albeit not by absolutely everyone; during this season I think we probably averaged about one reviewer who didn’t love it to every couple who did. And that’s fair: it’s fairly austere and a bit alienating (deliberately) and thus not to everyone’s tastes. Then again, what is? I certainly have no objection to seeing a super-pretty super-traditional Parsifal — actually I’d quite like to — but I found Lehnhoff’s production ultimately quite captivating. Not sure I quite fathomed all of…

Today at the Con, Italian composer Ezio Bosso spoke at a seminar for composition students. Readers of Limelight may recognise his name from Emma Kean’s March article on the Sydney Dance Company. Ezio has collaborated with choreographer Rafael Bonachela on LANDforms, a new work that will be premiered by the SDC later this month. Ezio spoke about the process of collaboration, as well as his approaches to finding inspiration for his compositions. One central message of his talk was that “we find ourselves through collaboration”. He urged us to never avoid collaborating – explaining that you will learn nothing if you confine yourself to your desk and your score. I wholeheartedly agree with Ezio’s sentiments. I recall that when I started telling friends about my decision to return to uni to study composition, I was occasionally asked whether a degree was really necessary to be a composer. And, while the answer is probably “no”, I had no doubt that immersing myself in a collaborative environment would be far more beneficial than reading scores, listening widely, and working in private. But, I digress. A former pupil of Phillip Glass, Ezio has worked in film as well as dance. He discussed one…

Elena used the lecture (which was the first in this year’s Alfred Hook Lecture Series at the Con) to share with us the various ways in which she uses events, objects and ideas to inspire her compositions. These inspirational sources vary greatly – perhaps best demonstrated in Elena’s newest piece Setting Out, which was premiered (also at the Con) on Sunday afternoon. The concerto for bassoon contains movements inspired by Elena’s experience catching public transport, and one based on the surname of artist Martin Sharp. I was most interested, and moved, to hear Elena explain the way she has used Schizophrenia as inspiration for her work. Elena’s son suffers from the disease and much of her work has been aimed at providing Alex with some respite from the internal voices with which he must constantly struggle. In order to do this, she transformed her musical style from that point on – abandoning avant-garde complexity in favour of harmonic simplicity (see Eliza Aria, below). While Elena didn’t spend a great deal of time discussing this very personal source of inspiration on Friday, some independent research led me to this interview from a few… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4…