Jeremy Rose read The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes’ seminal account of Australia’s invasion, colonisation and transformation into a penal colony, in 2012. He was struck by the brutal reality faced by prisoners shipped over from the continent, as well as by the Indigenous population, and eventually found a way to engage with that dark history through music. Iron in the Blood is a series of scenes performed by Rose and the Earshift Orchestra, underscoring narrated excerpts of Hughes’ work, read by actors Philip Quast and William Zappa. The excerpts give an overview of the struggle of the convicts, as well as the cruelty of British officers and lawmakers. The descriptions of the treatment of the original population – particularly the genocide of Tasmania’s Aboriginals – are harrowing. Musically, Iron in the Blood is an eclectic experience. Tracks draw on more conventional jazz idioms, while art music traits are present too, including sonic landscapes with dislocated, chromatic harmonies and extended instrumental effects. Some of the most intriguing features are the extended, frantic, improvised solos, often underscoring the most disturbing parts of the narration. Individual performances and sound are excellent, and the narrations are enjoyable both on a theatrical and… Continue reading…

Despite a sprawling plot that offers precious little in the way of hope for humanity, La Forza del Destino is blessed with one of Verdi’s finest scores. Martin Kušej’s psychologically complex staging for Bavarian State Opera won’t appeal if you’re looking for a chocolate-box production, but it packs a punch and makes much sense of this rambling Spanish Revengers Tragedy. Set in a world of scrappy urban warfare, the kind haunting many a modern war zone, it conveys a constant threat of terrorist atrocities. The direction has its unrealistic moments – people leap, roll and slide on and off the family dining table like nobody’s business, while simulated sex and Verdi don’t always gel – but its visceral nature tallies with the opera’s grim themes of honour and revenge, and  graphic imagery of modern-day massacres will strikes chords. Musical standards are very high indeed, with Asher Fisch leading a dramatically punchy reading of the score. Kaufmann is thrilling, yet subtle as Don Alvaro and, despite a silly wig, puts in a convincing portrayal. Anja Harteros is a perfect, neurotic Leonora, voice rich and text imaginatively handled. Ludovic Tézier is a robust Don Carlo, Vitalij Kowaljow plays powerful double roles, and…

Paint Your Wagon is one of those shows that, despite the fine craft of its lyricist and composer, proved difficult to revive thanks to a less than compelling book. A morality play set in gold-rush California, grizzly Ben Rumson and his daughter Jennifer strike gold and found Rumson Town attracting a horde of roughnecks. Jennifer falls for Mexican Julio Valvera so is packed off east for schooling, but not before Dad purchases a Mormon’s spare wife. Jennifer returns but the gold has run out so she and Julio settle down to farm the ravaged land. The show opened in 1951 but ran for a disappointing 289 performances, doing better in the 1953 West End run with 477. I Talk To The Trees and They Call The Wind Maria became popular hits. Years later Hollywood took a sledgehammer to the book, dropped several fine songs with replacements penned by André Previn and let loose Josh Logan who, despite his Broadway origins, had a knack for spoiling fine shows on celluloid. The result was an overwrought mess at a somnolent 158 minutes with Lee Marvin’s Ben Rumson a drunken buffoon mugging for the camera and growling out Wand’rin… Continue reading Get unlimited…

The music of the Medieval and early Renaissance is a startlingly unfamiliar language for modern ears with its strange clashes and cadences. Thanks to the tireless work of scholars, specialist performers and boutique labels, nowadays we can immerse ourselves in order to become sufficiently ‘fluent’, yet one can only wonder at what emotional responses this music must have triggered in the average 14th-century listener. Next to the big names of the Burgundian School, Arnold and Hugo de Lantins were second league but their works pop up in various codices alongside Dufay and Binchois. Little is known about Arnold but even less about Hugo – we’re not even sure they were brothers – but they were both clerics in the diocese of Liège. The first evidence of their work appeared in Northern Italy. This recital by Le Miroir De Musique, a superb ensemble of four singers and six instrumentalists, offers a lovely programme of secular chansons and rondeaux interspersed with instrumental arrangements. The vocalists here strike an ideal balance of disciplined purity with an unforced, open vocal delivery. Clara Coutouly is especially enchanting in her solo turns Hélas amour, que ce qu’endure and Puis que je voy, belle,… Continue reading Get…

Listening to Alonso Lobo’s music it is easy to understand why the great Victoria considered him an equal. Having trained under Francisco Guerrero at the cathedral of Seville, Lobo was appointed as his teacher’s assistant in 1591, but was two years later appointed to the prestigious post of maestro de capilla at Toledo cathedral. There he remained for a successful decade before returning to Seville in 1604 where he worked until his death in 1617. This impressive programme begins with Guerrero’s Easter motet, Maria Magdalena et Altera Maria followed by Lobo’s own Missa Maria Magdalene. Lobo’s homage to his master is also sumptuously cast in six parts and is full of wonderfully awe-inspiring moments, such as the Et Incarnatus and the Osanna in Excelsis. Such was Lobo’s fame his music was often copied, finding its way to other countries and even to the New World. This is particularly fortunate in the case of his Lamentations. Two sets were written, but only one is performable, and that in a manuscript from 1772. Written to be performed in a darkened church during Holy Week, each lamentation begins with a letter of… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

Much of his compositional output was written prior to a heart attack in 1918 and remained unperformed until after his death, but American modernist Charles Ives is now well-established as a significant and pioneering composer. Ives’ father George was a bandmaster during the American Civil War, and taught his musically-inclined son skills that included playing the piano in one key while singing in another. In part, as a consequence of this, Ives’ works explored polyrhythms, dissonance, atonality, quarter-tones and other techniques that were to become international staples of experimentalism. Another of Ives’ enduring preoccupations was traditional American hymns and songs, references to which can be heard at various junctures in his Four String Quartets, composed between 1910 and 1917. There have been regular releases of the set since the premiere recording by Rafael Druian (violin) and John Simms (piano) in 1957, but only a handful are currently in print. Welcome then, is this new recording from French violinist Annabelle Berthomé-Reynolds and Belgian pianist Dirk Herten. Berthomé-Reynolds brings a delicate lyricism to these intricate but very accessible works, and the interplay between violin and piano is unified and sympathetic. Ives veers from rousing sprightliness to dreamy pastoral (sometimes within a few…

Louis XIV was 15 in 1653 when he took part in a lavishly staged ballet performed on seven evenings in the Salle du Petit-Bourbon at the Louvre Palace. It was engineered by his ministers as a clever piece of political propaganda to cement the divine authority of the monarch along with a centralised government after the unrest of the Fronde rebellions. The spectacle was remembered for decades after and gave Louis his title of “the Sun King”; the four “watches” of the night with some sinister post-midnight revelries culminated in a glorious dawn with the King strutting his stuff in a costume of glittering celestial glory. Sébastien Daucé has spent three years recreating this work from fragments and disparate sources; a project of great scholarship, integrity and imagination. Amongst the anonymous dance tunes, and those of Jean de Cambefort, Daucé has interpolated airs du cour by Michel Lambert and Antoine Boësset, while scenes from Cavalli’s Ercole Amante and Rossi’s Orfeo have been added to remind us of the dominance of Italian opera in Parisian theatres before Lully. Ensemble Corespondances are superb exponents of this rarefied repertoire and the expansive forces of 18 voices and 33 instrumentalists… Continue reading Get unlimited…

Excellence. If you want to hear some, listen to the first track of Gondwana Chorale’s debut album Soar. The opener, Dan Walker’s Concierto del Sur, offers us a breath of life as this exquisitely produced recording brings together more than 50 of the brightest young singers in modern Australia. The dynamic texture of Orlovich’s Butterflies Dance continues the journey of divine music and sound, while another highlight is Abbott’s Fool – a percussive and masterfully articulated song from Words of Wisdom, a collection of works drawing on newspaper quotes. Also of note is the strength in upper voices found in Lament to Saint Cecilia by Stanhope. Gondwana’s voices are worthy of a five-star review. But something about this album doesn’t sit right. The bold cover photography shows our blue sky and red land; inside, notes boast “new Australian works that capture the mystery and grandeur of our land” sung by children of dairy farmers and flying doctors. The inclusion here of sacred works from Guerrero, Monteverdi and Rachmaninov does not represent contemporary Australia, nor does it push to establish a national sound from a young generation of singers. And with their talent, they have the power to unite people in…

Jeremy Dibble, indefatigable scholar of all things English, Romantic and musical, has exhumed a sizeable body of madrigals written in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Some of the composer’s names will be familiar: Elgar, Stanford and Parry. Some choristers will be familiar with Stainer, whose oratorio, The Crucifixion makes an annual appearance on Good Friday at St. Paul’s, Melbourne. The names of Leslie, Goodhart and Pearsall will more often than not draw a blank. Pearsall is best known for his arrangement of In Dulci Jubilo in Willcocks’ Carols for Choirs 1. Encouraged by societies who ran competitions with generous prizes, these composers and many others turned their hand to the form of the madrigal, attempting on the one hand to evoke something “antique” and on the other to push the form’s harmonic and textural envelope in new directions. Victorian prudery is evident in the lack of any salacious Elizabethan texts. Hard by a Crystal Fountain and Come Again, Sweet Love are definitely out. Stanford and Pearsall, each in their own way, are the best of this bunch. Stanford unashamedly displays his ‘modernist’ credentials in daring but deftly handled harmonies in God and the Universe and On Time. Pearsall in ‘antiquarian’ mode…

A composer of Catholic liturgical music in a Lutheran society, Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679-1745) was fighting an uphill battle for popularity even during his own lifetime. After his death, his music all but disappeared from the repertoire, and still remains firmly on the fringes of concert programming. One ensemble, however, is doing more than any to change this. For over 20 years, Czech conductor Václav Luks and his superb Collegium 1704 choir and orchestra have been turning out eloquent recordings that celebrate the  intricate counterpoint and bold harmonic gestures of the composer JS Bach so admired. Their latest is particularly interesting: a world premiere recording of the Missa Divi Zaveri, a major 1729 work thus far silenced by the poor condition (including lost parts) of its surviving manuscript. Now Luks himself has produced a complete edition, and the results are thrilling. The Mass features the largest forces Zelenka ever composed for, including four trumpets, timpani, doubled flutes and oboes as well as strings, chorus and SATB soloists. The result is truly festal in scale, possibly an informal audition for the job of kapellmeister at Dresden that would eventually go to Hasse. With no Credo, the centre of musical gravity shifts…

If you want to hear a dazzling young female pianist with a promising career ahead of her, try this. Such creatures are common today, but this set is special. It collects unreleased recordings Argerich made in 1960 and 1967 for North and West German Radio. At the time of the earliest of these, she was studying with Friedrich Gulda, who famously said he had nothing to teach her as “she could already do everything”. Argerich’s recognisable characteristics are here: lightning reflexes; pithy attack; astounding nuance at high speed. She has since abandoned the solo repertoire, so it is fascinating to hear her in Mozart (Sonata No 18, K576) and Beethoven (the Sonata in D, Op. 10 No 3). The latter particularly benefits from her vitality and velocity; it is a shame she never recorded more Beethoven sonatas. The second disc contains works she rerecorded shortly afterward for DG: Prokofiev’s Toccata, Ravel’s Sonatine and Gaspard de la Nuit. In Ravel’s Ondine she is arguably too volatile – tranquillity is not in her armoury – but Scarbo is a knockout. So is her 1967 performance of Prokofiev’s Sonata No 7: the sharpness of her rhythmic response takes your breath away. Throughout her…

Antony Gray is a London-based pianist who has gained praise for his recordings of Poulenc, Bach, Brahms and Goossens and one can see his skill with these composers fertilising this new disc devoted to Schultz’s pianistic output. In the Adelaide-born composer’s music there is a sense of space, which is entirely appropriate to the vast Australian landscape; and unlike many earlier composers, Schultz is is content to write in a more neo-tonal manner without resorting to dissonance or mimicry of birdcry. Even in his recent Interludes (2015), there is a sense of late-Romantic intensity. And though Schultz does not regard himself as much of a pianist, there is much here – a sparseness of creative landscape, which defines modern notions of Australia. His music is more melodic than atonal, and yet almost naively deductive in its sense of logic, place and space. Here is music that is haunting and inward, searching for a sense of landscape if not comprehension. Schultz’s literary influences are disparate – from the 10th-century Japanese Pillow Book to Inventions from his own opera The Children’s Bach after Helen Garner’s touching novella. His counterpoint is all so appropriate, making even more sense of the Bach adopted by…