Since graduating from the Tasmanian Conservatorium in 1987, reed-playing multi-instrumentalist Paul Cutlan has worked in a wide variety of styles from contemporary classical to jazz and world music. The central work on this disc, the Across the Top suite, is inspired by his work with world music ensemble MARA! on their Musica Viva tour for schools and Indiginous groups across the North of Australia in 2007. All four works on this Tall Poppies disc are influenced by folk music, filtered through composers like Bartók, Britten, Stravinsky and Sculthorpe, and melded with the ideas and practices of jazz improvisation. This never meanders, however, but is all tightly structured and highly approachable, and is, when all’s said and done, best described as chamber music of deep purpose and clarity. Improvisation and world music, when they do occur, are used to enhance Cutlan’s compositional ideas, and his sense of tonal colour and instrumental textures are indeed highly alluring. Those who are familiar with the NOISE string quartet’s recent set of improvised works on two CDs will have some idea of what to expect from their contributions. With Balkan specialists Llew and Mara Kiek, as well as one of Australia’s finest bassists, Brett Hirst,…

If there is one nationality who really wrote with hearts on sleeves, it was the Russians. If there is an instrument that can really explore torment, it’s the cello. Russian Cello, is a wonderfully colourful project for Zoe Knighton and Amir Farid who deliver a selection from known masters (Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev) and less-known contemporaries (Glière, Gretchaninov and Sokolov).  The duo start with an exquisite rendition of Rachmaninov’s Vocalise that allows Knighton to warm up her thrilling tenor-sound, sensitively accompanied by Farid. The programming continues with other ‘songs without words’, including an enchanting Album Leaf from Glière followed by Stravinsky’s eccentric, folk-inspired Chanson Russe. The playing goes up a gear with a pair of Glazunov items, beginning with Chant du Ménéstrel. Knighton’s portamento is suitably full of woe and in the substantial Elégie she really gets to show much more range, muscling into her lowest register with grit. Farid is an attentive partner in crime. Both are attuned to each other’s subtle musical choices.  Gretchaninov’s Sonata is the first long-form piece on the album. With charming interjections from the piano and a pretty melody for the cello it’s a lovely warm up for Prokofiev’s Sonata, which gives Knighton and Farid…

Rameau’s oeuvre for harpsichord comprises a mere four dozen pieces from a composing career of nearly six decades so it is not surprising that players have taken to raiding the great tunesmith’s operatic works, citing his transcription of Les Indes Galantes as precedent. The bulk of this recital is Guillermo Brachetta’s transcription for two harpsichords of music from Platée (1745); a scathing satire of fashion and operatic conventions disguised as a comic romp. Poor Platée is a hideously ugly nymph (a tenor in drag) who resides in a swamp but is quite unaware of her uncomeliness. Heartless Jupiter decides to prove his fidelity to Juno by courting such an unlikely conquest just for the fun of it and leaves Platée broken and humiliated to the cruel amusement of the gods. Rameau’s score satirises Italian opera with bizarre vocal gymnastics and is chock full of musical non sequiturs, onomatopoeic effects (a croaking chorus of frogs), startling orchestration and dozens of good tunes. You may wonder if all this comes across with the reduced palate of the harpsichord, but such is the quality of harmonic and melodic invention beneath the opera’s glitteringly orchestrated surface, these reductions can stand on their own even…

Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G Minor first came into the world as his second string quartet. Then he wrote what we now know as his A Major, No 2 and reworked the G Minor piece into a quintet so that he could join the Beethoven Quartet on piano when the two works were premiered. They therefore sit side by side very comfortably on disc, and they could be in no better hands than those of the Takács Quartet and Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin. This excellent Hyperion release marks the Takács’ first recorded venture into Shostakovich territory, and it is most welcome. From the quartet’s densely layered opening moments it’s obvious that the Colorado-based foursome are very much at home here. The Recitative and Romance second movement, which poured out of Shostakovich in a single day and probably with late Beethoven in mind, is perfect for Edward Dusinberre’s distinctive solo violin. The Piano Quintet, on the other hand, gives several nods to JS Bach, especially in the pivotal Fugue. Here Hamelin – a Hyperion regular with 50 albums under his belt – makes an exciting companion for arguably the… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

Girl bands comprising recorder consorts probably aren’t going to catch on anytime soon. But if they do, UK ensemble Consortium5 could lay claim to being supergroup of the recorder world. Not only do they regularly collaborate with contemporary composers and performers in unique and challenging ways; they are also committed to the preservation of earlier music for what was for centuries one of the most popular instruments in Europe. The consort – a set of matched instruments such as viols or, as here, recorders, in different sizes – which flourished in Europe between the late 15th and early 17th centuries, undoubtedly quickened the development of complex instrumental music in its own right. Elizabethan consort music however represents one of the high points of the genre, with the free exchange between transcriptions of vocal polyphonic works, so-called In Nomines, and more abstract fantasias and dances further enlivened by consort songs and broken consorts (usually strings and winds). Performing on a set of 10 Renaissance recorders, this release finds them moving among the In Nomines of Byrd and Tye, the dances of Ferrabosco and Dowland, the madrigalian fantasias of Coperario and Ward and more besides. Think of a solitary organist producing sounds…

Bach’s Cello Suite No 1 opens Australian recorder player Alicia Crossley’s latest release, Alchemy, with a shock to the system. Performed on bass recorder, the familiar work is removed entirely from its comfort zone. Crossley takes the suite at a quick pace, her loud breaths a reminder of the realities of performing on such a colossal instrument. The work is followed by Telemann’s Fantasia No 10 on the naturally louder tenor recorder. Although she’s well suited to the baroque, Crossley demonstrates her versatility across a variety of cultures and eras, each work transcribed to suit her needs. Australian composer Anne Boyd’s Goldfish Through Summer Rain introduces exquisite harp textures in a Japanese-sounding work inspired by a Korean poem. Debussy’s Syrinx – originally for flute – is performed expressively with vibrato altering timbre rather than pitch. Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea follows with extended techniques such as ‘finger shading’ and ‘fluttement’ (finger-vibrato) in a spiritual pairing with guitar.  A dreamy Sicilienne by Fauré reintroduces harp, but you’ll have to wait for the end to reach the standout – JacobTV’s The Garden of Love. Of all the unlikely pairings, who knew tenor recorder and Boombox could work so well? The composition challenges Crossley…

José Serebrier’s new Dvořák cycle ranks with Kubelík’s, Kertesz’s, and Rowicki’s sadly overshadowed but excellent set. For me, the last three symphonies are usually the least interesting and revealing – as here, where they’re perfectly OK but unremarkable (the third movement of the Eighth lacks the sinuous elegance of other readings). Where this cycle scores is in the performances of the neglected Second, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and the generous addition of other major works such as the Legends, the delightful Scherzo Capriccioso, the masterful concert overture In Nature’s Realm and a selection of Slavonic Dances in radiant performances, the Bournemouth players in top form.  No young composer was more prolix than Dvořák (one of his early string quartets lasts 70 minutes!), as demonstrated in the First Symphony, subtitled The Bells Of Zlonice where the youthful rhetoric runs unchecked. The three-movement Third and the Fourth (whose last movement always reminds me of a bizarrely titled song I heard as a child on the ABC Argonauts programme: “Dashing away with a smoothing iron, she stole my heart away”) are interesting, but the Second Symphony, long a favourite of mine, is more disciplined and Serebrier has its measure, making it a real…

Recording of the Month – January/February 2016 How wonderful for an organisation to be celebrating 200 years of performing The Creation! Part One of Haydn’s masterpiece was performed in Boston on Christmas Day, 1815 by the Handel and Haydn Society to a rapt audience of about 1,000 people. It’s hard to imagine how the 13 instrumentalists on that occasion coped with Haydn’s colourful score and supported the chorus of 90 men and ten women, but the pioneering spirit of that performance has born lasting fruit: H+H is still going strong, as this excellent recording attests. Harry Christophers, the current Artistic Director of Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society eschews the ‘blockbuster’ approach of Paul McCreesh’s 2008 account and opts instead for medium-sized forces: a chorus of 42 accompanied by an orchestra of 47 that perform in Boston’s hallowed Symphony Hall. This means that tempi are on the whole slightly more flowing and less monumental, allowing some of the more intimate moments to shine through. Haydn’s English text has always been troublesome. Christophers adopts a less interventionist approach than McCreesh, with the happy result we still have some favourite turns of phrase: the “flexible tiger”, “with verdure clad” and “the wonder of his…

When thinking about what music evokes for different people, it’s worth remembering that centuries-old musical notes on a page had very different connotations for our forebears than they do for us. We find immediate common ground in the denotation, in the mathematics of music; but it is the job of interpretation and scholarship, of imagination and dreaming, to journey further into those dark regions and yield new insights. Thus do we converse with absent friends. Heard This and Thought of You similarly plays with ideas of memory, possibility and friendship over time and distance. In their booklet note, Australian recorder player Genevieve Lacey and Scottish-born accordionist James Crabb admit that little music has been written specifically for the combination of recorder and accordion. Yet these instruments “carry many connotations”. There is also the lovely idea of matching musical voices with writers (Lacey and Crabb love to read) by asking a number of writers to write to someone following the idea “Heard this, and thought of you”. These letters are included in the booklet. The music itself ranges from Renaissance pieces by Ortiz, Palestrina and Locke – a kind… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

I’ve always wondered whether Shostakovich’s Ninth began life as an ironically subversive take on the superstition surrounding Ninth symphonies. It clearly wasn’t what the authorities were expecting as a crowning glory of the so-called ‘Wartime Trilogy’ with the sublime Eighth and the interminable and bombastic Leningrad.  The famous description of it as “Haydnesque in proportion and Rossiniesque in wit” is captured by Gergiev and his Mariinisky forces. I love the constant subversion in the Largo, the only even partly “serious” movement where the funeral march initiated by the bassoon is subverted by… the bassoon. The rag-tag cartoonish quality is also heard to great effect in the finale where we suddenly get a Soviet Army Band appearing.   The First Violin Concerto is an interesting companion: it’s hard to imaging anything more starkly contrasted. Kavakos has shed his wunderkind image and turns in a wonderfully subtle performance, especially in the spectral Nocturne opening movement, surely the most sinister nocturne in all music. I agree with other reviewers in remarking on his restrained volume here but I think it works, like the delicacy of his tone. No one will ever surpass either Oistrakh or Vengerov in his 1994 recording but Kavakos embodies…

This final installment of Rumon Gamba’s six discs exploring the orchestral work of turn of the (last) century French composer Vincent d’Indy – whose aesthetic pitched up somewhere between César Franck and Richard Wagner – is probably not the best place to gain an entry-point. Fans will be happy to have a new recording of Wallenstein, the composer’s three-part pseudo-symphony inspired by a rather vainglorious poem by Schiller. The 1976 recording by Pierre Dervaux and the Orchestre de la Loire remains the go-to, but Gamba’s Iceland forces are captured with intimate depth, brass pushed slightly forwards in the mix; d’Indy liked nothing better than a brass fanfare, so such sonic gerrymandering is acceptable. The piece itself, though, is remarkably unremarkable. Given d’Indy’s pedigree as a disciple of Franck and Wagner, his attempts to create a Franckian cyclic structure deploying Wagnerian motifs as staging posts flounder because his melodic and gestural hooks feel so unmemorable and generic. Elsewhere, Bryndís Hall Gylfadóttir’s sweet and effervescent playing sells d’Indy’s folksy Lied for cello and orchestra. But you can see why the monochrome Sérénade et Valse, Suite dans le Style Ancien and Prelude to Act III of his opera Fervaal remain historical curios.

This remarkable film was a hit when released in 1995, garnering an armful of awards and making a squillion at the box office; a triumph for Australian filmmaking. George Miller and Chris Noonan used an imaginative mix of animation, live action and animatronics to create a convincing world of talking animals and drama. The enterprise was helped on its merry way by Nigel Westlake’s fine score, in which he primarily drew on Saint-Saëns’ organ symphony. I use the word ‘merry’ purposefully, as the noble theme of the story and the way it plays out is joyful. Dare I say, heartfelt? Quick grab a tissue!  There are passing glances at other classical composers such as Grieg, Bizet, Fauré and Delibes; whose Pizzicati from Sylvia is used to great effect. Westlake uses this source material creatively and often with humour (even Jingle Bells gets a look in) leaving the great theme by Saint-Saëns as the musical binding for this life-affirming story. The playful arrangement of this big tune for Farmer Hoggett’s dance in the last track is a sheer delight.  Westlake’s skill as a composer is matched by his brilliant orchestration (and in the world of composition the two skills are not…