This month’s concert highlights from ABC Classic, independent radio and streaming.

This month’s concert highlights from ABC Classic, independent radio and streaming.

Snap! Violinist Stefan Jackiw has sportingly uploaded footage of the moment his $30,000 bow failed him.

Sir Simon Rattle chats about Bruckner, Brexit and the London Symphony Orchestra's tour of Australia.

Everyone should have equal opportunities to access and participate in the arts, says Morwenna Collett, who discusses the value of being inclusive, a roadmap for how to get there, some Australian examples and an international case study.

Karabits evens the score in Walton’s Symphonies.

Kirill Karabits loves Kareyev to bits, but it isn’t always clear why.

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…

★★★☆☆ Before the live performance of Prokofiev’s Second Symphony, Kirill Karabits warned the audience of an “ear-lashing”. Bearing in mind the disproportionate number of retired majors and active Tory matrons among the Bournemouth Symphony’s subscriber base, I suppose it was wise.  Personally, I’d put the first movement’s shock factor (and it’s really only the first movement which has that motoric Age of Steel quality) at around that of The Rite of Spring. It won’t blow your mind (or your speakers). Despite the obvious commitment of Karabits and his players, I didn’t find the work particularly interesting. But what an incredible advance between this and its immediate symphonic predecessor! The Classical Symphony (No 1) had some lovely moments, especially in the second movement but here, it’s a case of the excellent being the enemy of the merely very good. I still have the mellifluous felicities of the London Symphony’s Sydney performance under Gergiev last November lingering in my ears.  What was interesting was the Sinfonietta, an unjustly neglected work which I’ve encountered only as a fill-up to a late ‘70s recording of Ivan the Terrible. It demonstrates that when Prokofiev set out to charm, he was absolutely beguiling! The other work…

The Guild label’s mission to restore Volkmar Andreae to the “pantheon of 20th century Swiss composers” continues apace with the third release of his orchestral works, with the excellent Bournemouth Symphony conducted by the composer’s grandson Marc Andreae. The Symphony in F was composed when he was just 20 and was his first large-scale orchestral work. Its debt to Brahms is undeniable, but it also shows the Wagnerian influence of Andreae’s teacher Franz Wüllner, who premiered Das Rheingold and Die Walküre. Andreae is best known for his recordings of the Bruckner symphonies and it is obvious from this early work that he has studied the Austrian master’s command of symphonic structure. Andreae was offered to succeed Mahler as conductor of the New York Philharmonic but preferred to stay with the Tonhalle Orchestra Zürich. However, like Mahler he did compose some settings of poems by Li-Po after Hermann Hesse pointed out the Tang dynasty poet’s works. Li-Tai-Pe, here beautifully sung by English tenor Benjamin Hulett, is the jewel in the crown of this album. The eight songs are worth the purchase price alone. However John Anderson’s performance of the Concertino for Oboe and Orchestra is definitely an added bonus. In all,…

Prokofiev’s rarely performed Third Symphony (Mackerras performed it with the Sydney Symphony in 1977) is the symphonic equivalent of Almodóvar’s Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown. I enjoyed it more than I expected to.  Based on ideas from his opera The Fiery Angel, about religious hysteria, it’s nowhere near as maniacal as the Second Symphony but the frenzy is still just beneath the surface. It’s a tour de force the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra carry off with aplomb under their Ukrainian chief Kirill Karabits, illustrating the galvanic effect he’s having in that haven of gentility on England’s South Coast.  The Seventh Symphony (Prokofiev’s swansong) Karabits describes as “tragic”. I think his conducting is more convincing than his commentary, as the work was composed for young audiences! It’s cool, enigmatic, almost elegant in parts, “late night” Prokofiev, if you like, occupying the same sound world as Cinderella. His reading is certainly darker than either André Previn’s 1970s LSO one, or Nicolai Malko’s pioneering Philharmonia recording made a few years after the composer’s death in 1953. Karabits solves the “problem” of the alternative endings by recording both: the original was a subdued “leave taking” but the ever vigilant “authorities” demanded something…

Benjamin Britten’s personal life has been well documented – his relationship with Peter Pears in a period when homosexuality was still illegal, his pacifism and years in America and his friendships and fallings-out. But two documentaries by John Bridcut will rate as indispensable for the full picture of the man – both for the interviews and with the people who knew him best and for their impeccably performed musical excerpts. Britten’s Children is, in the filmmaker’s words, “an edgy subject, full of danger”, these days perhaps even more than ever before. Bridcut’s fascination with the composer started when he took part as a chorister in Britten historic recording of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius. His interviews with the various boys with whom Britten became “besotted” – including the late English actor David Hemmings for whom the role of Miles in The Turn Of The Screw was created – show these relationships to be innocent, if unusual, and without a physical sexual element. In a moving highlight Bridcut tracks down Wulff Scherchen, the German teenager whom Britten dumped for Peter Pears. Scherchen, now a grandfather living in Australia who was willing to be seduced, has kept all of Britten’s love letters is filmed…