Hi there. My name is Matt Siegel and what I don’t know about classical music could fill a medium-sized concert hall.  I am not an expert like the other contributors on this website; I couldn’t tell you the difference between Brahms and Beethoven if there was a gun to my head, and my musical taste tacks more towards the Ramones than Ravel. So, what am I doing here? Well, it hasn’t always been this way. As an upper-middle class kid growing up on Central Park West, I had no shortage of exposure to world-class music. My mother would drag me kicking and screaming to the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall, hoping that her love affair with the arts would, perhaps by osmosis, be absorbed by her only son. But somewhere along the way my musical training got a bit off track. I ended up repaying her generosity by learning the bare minimum about classical music (namedropping a couple of relatively obscure composers) needed to impress girls who knew (hopefully) even less about it than I did, and spending a decade playing the guitar and bass in art-rock bands whose work could charitably be called “atonal”. Then, for some reason that…

As any musician will agree, the chance to collaborate with gifted musicians can be an inspiring experience that in turn can shape your own creativity. In the third week of my residency at The Banff Centre I was delighted to take up the opportunity to work with bassist Edgar Meyer. The previous weekend I had been blown away by his performance with mandolinist Mike Marshall and was only too eager to meet this musical legend. A virtuoso performer and innovative composer, Meyer is a three-time Grammy Award-winner renowned for his work in a wide range of styles… Oh, and he also happens to have mastered the piano, banjo and dobro.   I was also delighted to collaborate once again with an old friend from Australia, violinist Christina Katsimbardis. In addition to rehearsing Kodály’s Duo for Violin and Cello and the Handel-Halvorsen Passacaglia, I spent what remaining hours I had in the week workshopping JS Bach’s Gamba Sonata No 1 with Christina and Edgar. Ordinarily one might expect a gamba sonata to be performed on a gamba and harpsichord; however, we extracted each line of the music with the gamba part performed on the cello, right-hand keyboard on violin and left-hand…

That was quick. 2011 has been and gone and we’re already halfway through January. The time for year-in-review blog posts has probably passed – and I’ve already written one elsewhere anyway – but I think 2012 is still new enough for me to sneak a year-ahead post in. Not my year, per se; I’ll probably bore you enough with that as it actually progresses. No, in the time honoured operatic tradition of Performance Envy, I thought I’d look instead at what I won’t get to see: all the brilliant performances happening in Australia. As it happens, I’ll actually be in Australia quite a bit next year, and because the opera gods love me – or, at least, because the global conspiracy against me has subsided – I will in fact manage to see some of the performances which would otherwise have been on this list. Cheryl Barker in Die Tote Stadt, for instance. And of course, some of the other obvious highlights – the Adelaide Symphony’s Das Lied von der Erde, Act I of Die Walküre in Melbourne, Pique Dame at the SSO – are the very reason I’ll be in town, so I’ve left those off as well. Here,…

This time last year, hundreds of Brisbane musicians were wading through murky musical waters in front of a documentary crew for a performance of a “cursed” symphony. This November, they finally get to see themselves on the big screen when The Curse of the Gothic Symphony comes to the  Brisbane International Film Festival. Sniggering allowed! A flock of fruit bats are making evil, conniving squeals outside my window. It’s the perfect soundtrack to what I’m about to write: a blog of a black magic, symphonic, nature. Mwahaha. My previous contribution to Limelight was written days before the start of the Melbourne International Film Festival. The festival was about to host the world premiere of the documentary The Curse of the Gothic Symphony. Seven years in the making, it followed a team of obsessive event producers and hundreds of nerdy classical musicians as they set out to achieve a near-impossible task. They were trying to stage a performance of Havergal Brian’s allegedly cursed Gothic Symphony – a work so complex, so obscure, so sonically ghastly that no-one on the planet had touched it for 30 years. And, they were trying to stage it in Brisbane. Why not just try to build an…

If you want a disc of Liszt’s Greatest Hits you could do worse than have Lang Lang as your guide. The hype and the hysterical fan base of the megastar Chinese pianist have not entirely managed to obscure the fact that he continues to mature as an artist. Lang has said Liszt is a special composer for him, and his playing on this disc demonstrates that affinity very clearly. What a wide-ranging composer Liszt was. I recently reviewed Brendel’s Liszt recordings, which concentrate on the inward, philosophical late works. Lang opts for Liszt the showman: cascades of glistening scales and fancy finger work (La Campanella), surging double octaves (Hungarian Rhapsody No 6) and so on. But Liszt also set the ladies swooning with the beauty of his tone and the breathless quality of his rubato, and Lang understands this side of the composer as well. In Liebestraum and the transcription of Schubert’s Ave Maria he achieves a perfect balance: not over-romanticised but not foursquare either. The thundering virtuoso and the gentle poet come together in Liszt’s First Piano Concerto − one of the best piano concertos ever written, in my opinion. This performance, recorded live with Gergiev and… Continue reading Get…

Perversely, I was hoping that this Rachmaninov Third Symphony would be a dud, making it easier to recommend unequivocally the recent Noseda/BBC Philharmonic recording on Chandos – fat chance with these forces. EMI (or whatever they’re called now after yet another acquisition) have done their latest star recruits proud in this elusive work, which combines elegance, nostalgia, wistfulness and sheer glamour. The contoured phrasing is as curvaceous as Betty Grable’s hips (not as bizarre an analogy as you might first think, as this work is as suffused – consciously or otherwise –  as much with the spirit of Hollywood as Romanov Russia). The RLPO’s string tone is fabulously lush but the playing is refined without ever a hint of blowziness in the “big” tunes, with both pellucid textures and dramatic energy throughout: I’ve never heard the opening of the finale or its reprise at the very end played with such manic velocity, beautifully captured by EMI’s engineers. The central movement has a captivating tenderness and the rhythms in the Scherzo interlude are whip-crackingly precise. Petrenko also avoids the episodic or fragmented approach one sometimes hears. The other pieces on the CD make it a calling card for the RLPO’s newfound…

The first two decades of the 20th century were a time of radical experimentation in European art music, and St Petersburg was by no means behind the times. Avant-garde music flourished during and for some time after the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. It wasn’t until the rise of Stalin that progressive modernism was actively stifled. We know the struggles faced by Shostakovich, but many of his compatriots abandoned their stylistic experiments (Popov), emigrated (Lourié), or mysteriously disappeared. Roger Woodward gives us a cross-section of miniatures written between 1905 (Scriabin’s first Feuillet d’album) and 1926 (Mosolov’s Two Nocturnes). Alexander Scriabin was the father of this school, literally so in the case of his son Julian, represented here by three preludes. Julian’s music was sophisticated and promising, but he died at the age of 11. Not all artworks that are stylistically groundbreaking or historically important are masterpieces. (How often do we listen to Schoenberg and Cage, compared to Sibelius and Copland?) Much of this music sounds tentative as a composer feels his way into new harmonic realms. This is certainly true of Obuhkov’s fragmentary Tableaux psychologiques of 1915. Yet when the new language is focussed, as in Stanchinsky’s Canon (1908), the result…

Joshua Bell’s first disc of sonatas with Sony is well worth the wait. At its centre is the ever-popular sonata by Franck, alongside works by Saint-Saëns and Ravel. Both Bell and his accompanist friend Jeremy Denk revel in the ever-changing impressionistic colours of harmony and timbre that this repertory evokes and demands. There is plenty of Gallic flair in the Franck, and the tension between stasis and forward movements is finely judged, resulting in some exhilarating climaxes. The interweaving of major and minor elements in the famous finale are beautifully pointed by the violin and expertly underpinned by the piano. Bell’s judicious but unashamed use of sweet tone and sweeping portamenti is entirely appropriate. Saint-Saëns’s sonata is immediately appealing, with an imposing opening movement full of fire and passion succeeded by some improvisatory languor and concluding with an elegant, high-spirited finale with a dash of gypsy fiddling thrown in. By contrast, the worldly sophistication of Ravel gives Bell a chance to display some other colours, especially in the Blues movement where the violin is by turns banjo strummer or jazz chanteuse. Bell and Denk face steep competition in the Franck; this splendid trio of sonatas makes a winning proposition. Continue…

Like me, you may have found yourself glued to the telly last April to watch the latest royal wedding. Like me, your ears may have been glued in particular to a short choral work that was sung during the ceremony. That piece was Ubi caritas by Paul Mealor, who has been described by the New York Times as “one of the most important composers to have emerged in Welsh choral music since William Mathias”. Your familiarity or otherwise with Mathias should not inform your opinion of Mealor, as his is an impressive talent. This CD features not only the little wedding gem but an entire collection of the composer’s work for choir and it’s mostly very strong. The opening quadrant of madrigals Now sleeps the crimson petal features gorgeously subtle twists of harmony and Salvator mundi tempers strident modal declamations with memorable ornamentations. However the disc dips a bit with the Stabat Mater, which tends to cycle through clichés to simplistic emotional effect (Mealor describes this as the “most personal work on the disc”, which may be revealing). Perhaps the reason Mealor has become the royals’ latest go-to composer is that he’s such a known quantity; each… Continue reading Get unlimited…

Richard Tognetti and the ACO are in sparkling form in this wonderfully enjoyable program of Grieg. The major work here is Tognetti’s skilful transcription of String Quartet No 1 in G minor, Op 27, the composer’s only extant complete work in the genre. Digging into the almost Piazzolla-like rhythms of the opening movement, the band delivers a zesty account of this colourful score. The contrasting episodes of the Romanze and the Intermezzo are handled deftly, while the concluding Saltarello has an almost manic intensity. By way of contrast we are then offered the Two Elegiac Melodies, Op 34. These popular but all too brief works are played superbly; their aching melancholy lit by beauty of tone and delicacy of ensemble. Erotikk from the Lyric Pieces is a scintillating miniature, more nostalgic than sensual, sensitively arranged by Tognetti for solo violin and orchestra. What better way to finish than with the Holberg Suite? At pains to preserve the dance-like quality of Grieg’s neo-Baroque masterpiece, the orchestra achieves a perfect blend of energy and lightness throughout. Admirable rhythmic acuity characterises the Praeludium, the courtly intimacy of the Sarabande contrasts well with the crisply accented Gavotte. The fervent Air, with its… Continue reading…

A saltarello is a medieval dance named for its leaping steps (“little hop” in Italian). One might wonder why this meditative, atmospheric album takes a lively dance form as its title when there is only one specimen on the program. In fact it’s the three players who do the jumping – across nine centuries of music, and between Garth Knox’s rustic medieval fiddle, seven-string viola d’amore and modern viola. He switches weapons seamlessly from one track to the next and demonstrates poetic phrasing and technical mastery with all three. Hildegard von Bingen’s Ave, generosa is the earliest music heard here, echoing through time in a vibrato-less, double-stopped fiddle version capturing both soaring chant and drone. A yearning vocal quality resonates throughout this inspired instrumental program, from lilting variations on the folksong Black is the Colour of my True Love’s Hair to Dowland’s Flow My Tears and Purcell’s Music for a While, unerringly matched in mood by Agnès Vesterman’s nuanced cello basslines. Hearing such timeless songs in Knox’s arrangements is to hear them as if they were always intended for these instruments. Curiously, the only work originally scored for viola d’amore, Vivaldi’s concerto RV393, is the least convincing for… Continue reading…