Pianist’s win is one of the few awards to make any sense in a hopeless muddle of misjudged categorisations.

Pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska has won Best Classical Album at this year’s ARIA Awards in a ceremony held this morning. Her double CD of the complete solo piano works of the late Peter Sculthorpe was a clear front runner having received favourable reviews at home and abroad. Otherwise the ARIA organisers outdid themselves by shoehorning mismatched and eclectic albums into meaningless categories before letting albums win that by most stretches of the imagination shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

It was another good year for ABC Music, recognised with three ARIA Awards in the Fine Arts categories. However the morning’s event (whoever holds awards in the morning?) was the usual frustrating dual-purpose affair that saw the classical music, jazz and world music winners wrapped up quietly, and where more column inches will invariably be expended on the simultaneously announced nominations in the ‘popular’ music categories. Rock and pop lovers will as usual be spared sitting through such tiresome musical genres at the big event next month on November 26.

Cislowska, a close friend of Sculthorpe since she performed his piano...