It’s the time of year when many of us in the media enjoy letting our heads swivel back and forth, Janus-like, over the old year and the new.

Sex and lies in Ancient Rome will be on the menu for Festival’s second outing. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

We talk to the award-winning singer about what’s hot in musical theatre today, and ask if race is still an issue. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and countertenor Andreas Scholl feature in latest Bond installment. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Devils and tritones and nuns! Oh my!

Editor’s Choice, Vocal & Choral – November 2015 “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded survived” – the old schoolroom rhyme is still a good way of recalling the fate of the six colourful women who married Henry VIII. Anne Boleyn, the second wife and the first to get the chop (literally) had quite an interesting life before she came to Henry’s attention. As a maid of honour to Margaret of Austria, a great musical patron, then in the French court of Henry’s sister, Mary and later in that of her stepdaughter, Queen Claude, Anne would have been exposed to a wide variety of musical styles, as well as being given ample opportunity to develop her own musical talents. All the more intriguing then, is a music book kept in London’s Royal College of Music that bears her name. It contains 42 works, both sacred and secular, by a variety of composers. Some are smaller works destined for domestic or devotional settings, while others are grander, liturgical works. David Skinner and his vocal consort (named after the Tudor singer, composer, music copyist… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Vote for your favourite three in our inaugural Australian and International Artists of the Year Awards. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Here are our shortlists of the 25 albums of 2015 rated most highly by our critics. But which will come out on top?

★★★★½ Robertson’s ‘from the heart’ Mass returns to the heart indeed. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Rush, Russell Beale, Salminen & Skovhus: four Lears on tackling Shakespeare’s tortured monarch. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The SSO’s chief explains why he’s taken his time before conducting the music Beethoven never heard. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

There is something special about the blend of voices among family members – witness the Everlys or the McGarrigals in the pop world  – but there are few instances that exist in the field of classical music. German father and son team Christoph and Julian Prégardien, however, are two exceptional tenors in their own right and have been performing duets over recent years. Now they have taken their popular recitals with pianist Michael Gees into the studio for the Dutch label Challenge Classics. The result, Father and Son, is an entertaining collection of curiosities and rearrangements of what some may consider to be sacred cows. The arrangements, mostly by Julian Prégardien and Gees, include 12 Schubert songs and were the product of rehearsals followed by in-the-moment improvisations, much like you would hear in a folk club. This, they argue, is in the spirit of contemporary accounts of the original Schubertiade evenings. The Goethe setting Der Erlkönig divides logically into the two roles of the night-riding father and the son who dies in his arms. Other songs sit less comfortably as duets, for this listener at least, although the Prégardiens and Gees perform them all impeccably. Two little-known German composers are…