There are a number of traditions associated with Australia Day. BBQs, beer, sunburn, cricket, and the Triple J Hottest 100. Although I haven’t tuned to the station all that often over the past 12 months, there’s a certain irresistible sense of occasion associated with the countdown that gets me hooked. This year, it got me thinking about the music I had been listening to in 2010. I started to reflect on the various times throughout the year when I thought to myself “wow”. So, I have decided to do my own “Hottest“ list. However, my focus here is not music that was released in 2010, but music that was new to me in 2010 and left a lasting impression (so, yes – the connection is weak). Furthermore, 100 is far too ambitious. Therefore, I present my Hottest 10 of 2010 (part one). Arvo Pärt: Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten Love or hate his music, you have to appreciate it’s simplicity (and the success he’s had with it). In my opinion, it’s beautiful music – but that shouldn’t necessarily be attributed to the composer. It’s a simple idea: various sections of the string orchestra descending a minor scale at different rates…

I was listening to our Prime Minister speak the other day. Some say she has a dreadful voice. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but I do think she could do with some voice training. Julia Gillard’s voice seems stuck down the back of her throat, strangled by her own uvula. She doesn’t need a media minder so much as an opera coach, to allow her to find the upper harmonics in her voice.  She is coming across as a bass-contralto, but I’m sure there are warmer tones to be had.  The danger is if she continues with the very flat and uninspiring delivery, we will stop listening. There was a time when voices were important. John Laws got into radio primarily because of his extraordinarily stentorian tones. His voice meant business, and eventually he made it a big business. No wonder they called him the Golden Tonsils. On radio now, it doesn’t matter what sort of voice you have. Not so much Golden Tonsils as Nickel Adenoids. The ABC used to be very concerned about such matters, but now they couldn’t care less. There are voices on local radio that are as appealing to me as a chainsaw cutting…

The Welsh soprano Dame Margaret Price, best known as a Mozartian and Lieder singer par excellence, has died. She was 69. Here she is with what I think is one of the most impossibly beautiful songs ever written, Mahler’s “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”. Rest in peace, Dame Margaret. See also: David Nice’s detailed (and video-illustrated) obituary at The Arts Desk.

Thank you to all those people who came to the Domain on Saturday night to join the Sydney Symphony, Sydney Philharmonia and John Bell in our concert dedicated to the music inspired by the bard presented as part of Lindy Hume’s 2011 Sydney Festival. It was a great program featuring Prokofiev’s evocative ballet score for Romeo and Juliet and Walton’s brilliantly orchestrated score for Olivier’s film of Henry V. There was a wonderful feeling on stage and we fed off the enthusiasm of the audience right up to the last note of the 1812 overture…which of course has very little to do with Shakespeare! It is a privilege to work with such dedicated singers, talented orchestral musicians and Australia’s greatest thespian, John Bell. Here’s to a great year of performances in Sydney in 2011!

Sony and Decca have recently announced record deals with Nino Machaidze and Aleksandra Kurzak respectively, and I suspect there’s going to be at least a bit of shared repertoire between the two – Nino’s is a collection of bel canto arias, Aleksandra’s a selection of “lyric and coloratura” fare with Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti all on board. Nino’s name I knew mostly from the cover of a DVD I haven’t seen, a Roméo et Juliette from Salzburg opposite Rolando Villazon; Aleksandra’s from the cast list of the Royal Opera’s current production of Il Barbiere di Siviglia, which I’m hoping to see in the next couple of weeks. But having not actually heard either of them, I figured I should probably overcome my irrational fear of hyped sopranos and go YouTubing a little. Nino Machaidze, who made her La Scala début at the age of 24, seems already to be the more filmed of the two – as well as the aforementioned Roméo et Juliette, there’s a Gianni Schicchi from Milan, an opera gala from Berlin and an I Puritani from Bologna. Not bad. I don’t think I’m in love with her just yet, but this aria from Puritani is pretty…

It’s interesting how often pianos are at the centre of unsavoury relationships. In the film The Piano (1993) Holly Hunter gets her piano back one key at a time by letting Harvey Keitel do “things he likes” while she plays. They fall in love and eventually play more than scales together, and she ends up sacrificing a finger as a result. I hated the film. I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t have dragged the piano just a few feet further up the beach. In The Piano Teacher (2001) Erika is a piano professor in her forties at a Viennese music conservatory who lives in an apartment with her domineering mother. Her father is a resident in a lunatic asylum. With such a stable family background it’s no wonder she starts to obsess about her 17-year-old piano student. The film also touches on voyeurism and sadomasochism. Anything to make playing scales more interesting. In The Seventh Veil (1945) Francesca Cunningham is a suicidal pianist and mental patient who earlier in her life came under the guardianship of James Mason in the role of a crippled musician and teacher who prevented her from being with her true love. I can see a…

One of the best things about being a student, according to many, is the excessive amount of holidays – particularly over the summer. For me, that means an opportunity to finally work on a piece for submission to one of the many calls-for-works that come to my student email inbox, but which I flag for later action. At least, that’s the theory. In reality, however, I allow the majority of the deadlines to pass and, sometime mid-January, realise that I’ve wasted the majority of the break and must immediately begin work on something (simply to appease my guilt). So, last week I perused a few of the aforementioned emails and found one that appealed. There was, however, something in there that very nearly turned me off: the specification that the ensemble was “up for adventurous works which included extended techniques”. Call me old-fashioned, but those two words, “extended techniques”, immediately make me uncomfortable. Whenever I see a pianist stand and reach for the strings, or a clarinetist free their instrument of its mouthpiece and prepare to palm-slap it, I start looking at my watch. I am genuinely surprised by the number of composers who employ these methods. My first thought…

If I’ve learnt one thing in the last two-and-a-half weeks, it’s that – provided you have the clothes and stomach for cold weather – winter is an excellent time for touristing in Europe. Having previously only come to London in busy, overpopulated summer, it’s been a delight to find the city so free of queues and crowds. And our four days in Salzburg also benefited nicely from the near-complete lack of people. Oh, there were a few. But tourism in Salzburg is almost entirely about the Festival, and we, of course, weren’t there for that; we weren’t even in time for Mozart-Woche. So even the oldest, prettiest and Mozartiest bits of town were quiet and walkable, and it’s such a picturesque place that even the cold and wet can’t make it miserable – although it was nicer still when the rain let up on Day #3. We even took a carriage ride through the Altstadt, which naturally put Fiakermilli’s aria in my head. I resisted the souvenir shops, with their cornucopia of Mozart tat, and limited myself instead to a visit to this house. Not a great photo but the sign above the door says “Mozart Wohnhaus”. These are the…

In a sense, having written a column for Limelight for the past three years I have already been blogging, but a column is more like an old steam driven blog, as opposed to this new bullet-train Limelight website, where one can react more quickly to events. For instance, I had already written my column when we heard that Joan Sutherland had passed away. I didn’t know her at all as well as the many singers and colleagues she sang with over the years, but our paths did cross a number of times. I played for a National Vocal Symposium where she and Luigi Alva were the star tutors. Then later I hosted a discussion with her and Richard Bonynge at a lunch. Each time she was delightful to be around. The last time I saw her was when I was hosting a big do that Opera Australia put on for her at the Opera House – a celebration of their 50th wedding anniversary. It was also the night that Australia Post was unveiling their Legends stamp, with Dame Joan on her very own piece of Australia. At the end of the concert, which included many of Australia’s finest singers and…

As a student of composition at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, I am fortunate enough to be exposed continuously to the latest musical offerings from both Australian and international composers. I also enjoy the luxury of having an excuse to spend countless hours analysing and discussing a huge variety of works, predominantly composed in the past half-century or so. It is these experiences that I intend to share each week and I hope that you will help me make sense of this modern musical world in which we live. Today, however, I’d like to share my thoughts on a slightly more mundane topic. The Christmas/New Year period has, as usual, provided me with a number of  opportunities to catch up with some people I don’t often see throughout the year. Something you should know about me is that, in spite of the fact that I’ve taken on this blog, I don’t really like to talk about myself. On these annual catch-ups, however, the time inevitably comes when I have to explain what I’ve been doing for the past 12 months. And then, the dreaded question: “What style of music do you compose?” Now, I’m not a fan of labels. It…

I have just come from my third experience of watching productions from London’s Royal National Theatre, screened more or less live to cinemas around the world. This time it was Haytner’s new production of Hamlet – a work that has been in the repertoire now for over 400 years, like much of the repertoire I perform regularly with orchestras and singers. Next door, a performance of Verdi’s Don Carlos was being shown from New York’s Metropolitan Opera. What interests me is the appeal of this way of seeing theatre, or should I say live performance, not live. Both my partner and I agreed that it was a superlative production with a fine Hamlet and a particularly fine Gertrude (my favourite role) but it did in the end leave us cold. We were not involved with the production because we were not physically in the same space as the actors. Audiences make theatre work, and the coughing, rustling of lolly wrappers and collective laughter, shock, applause and disappointment are what drive the experience.  Every performance is dangerous and different, and this is what creates the buzz as the lights dim and the first words are spoken or the first notes are…

With time, the venture grew, and I found both a voice and a readership: first in New Zealand, where I’d begun, and in Sydney, where I moved back in 2006. That blog, as at least some of you will already know, goes by the mildly pretentious (hey, I was 19 when I named it) title of Prima la musica, and while regular readers of said blog will know I’ve neglected it somewhat of late, it nevertheless remains, for the time being, a going concern. But Limelight, having already let me loose upon its printed pages, has now kindly offered me my own little sliver of its new-and-shiny online presence, too – an offer too providential to refuse. One of the reasons for the aforementioned blog-neglect has been a drastic (positive!) change in my own circumstances. In brief: as of 2011, I’ve left Sydney for life on the road with the Heldentenor in my life. A big change, as you can imagine, and one full of possibilities for opera fanaticism – which is, after all, what I do best. But it has also shut off a possibility or two; in particular, it means I can’t function as a critic any more,…