Review: Mountain (Australian Chamber Orchestra)
The ACO scales the heights with breath-taking visuals and a well-crafted score.
The ACO scales the heights with breath-taking visuals and a well-crafted score.
Following the success of The Reef, Richard Tognetti talks about the ACO’s new “cinematic and musical odyssey”, Mountain.
The ACO Artistic Director honoured by the Helpmann Awards for longstanding service to the live performing industry.
Richard Tognetti's new odyssey leads a line up including Brett Dean's Hamlet, Orwell's 1984, Messiaen's Turangalîla and more.
Opera Australia performs at Vivid Live for the first time with a concert featuring music by Adams, Dessner and Greenwood.
In a night of juxtapositions, the ACO moves in for the kill with a rapturous array of music from Heaven and Earth.
The Finnish musician may not intend to commit murder but he certainly hopes for redemption. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in
As Donald Francis Tovey writes in his eminently useful Essays in Musical Analysis, Mozart’s three last symphonies, written in 1788 over six weeks, “express the healthiest of reactions on each other” and, being “in Mozart’s ripest style makes the full range of that style appear more vividly than in any other circumstances. Consequently, they make an ideal programme when played in their chronological order.” Thus does one often hear them, as a kind of triptych or three-movement, Major-Minor-Major meta-symphony, both in concert and on record. And thus does one hear them in this instance, recorded live during the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s 2015 Mozart’s Last Symphonies national tour, which commemorated 25 years since the great Frans Brüggen conducted the orchestra in the same programme. It was also Tognetti’s first year as leader. Listening again to Brüggen’s last great pronouncement on these three symphonies (for the Glossa label in 2014), one marvels anew at the way he shapes the Orchestra of the 18th Century’s lithe, colourful responses to Mozart’s almost Shakespearean combination of low comedy and high seriousness. But it is to John Eliot Gardiner’s live 2006 recording of Symphonies Nos 39 and 41 that we must turn to find something like…
Muscular performances of Schnittke, Schubert and Beethoven from a commanding Guest Director.
The composer is inspired by the moods of the sea, Tennyson’s Ulysses and poetic images of sailing in his new violin concerto. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in
★★★★½ Tognetti’s crack band backs classy Russian mistress of the roulades.
Peter Weiss donates a rare 1729 Guarneri cello valued at $1.8 million to the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
Margaret Throsby indulges her curiosity about musical questions from improvisation to why we get musical tingles.