Romitelli's drowning girl gets thrown a welcome dramatic lifeline.

Soprano Jane Sheldon on Helmut Lachenmann's colourful and virtuosic Got Lost.

You only have to hear Dawn Upshaw or Barbara Bonney sing Aaron Copland’s exquisite Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson to know what’s wrong here.

Soprano and new music pioneer Jane Sheldon reveals why she is a singer who envies the birds.

Artistic Director of the Omega Ensemble, David Rowden, shares the secrets of their success. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

New York-based Australian soprano Jane Sheldon posts about Nature, her latest album, recorded with pianist Nicole Panizza.

Melissa Lesnie talks to Jane Sheldon about her experiences singing the music of a contemporary music legend. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Andrew Ford’s eclectic tastes and playful persona, well known from his bitingly witty and perceptive critical essays and radio shows are well represented here in this collection of finely crafted compositions from 2001-2007. The main work, Learning to Howl for soprano, soprano saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet, harp and percussion, sets verses of Sappho and other mostly women poets across the centuries in an approachable lyrical style – the vocal writing refreshingly natural and idiomatic. The work has an austere, delicate beauty with its sparse accompaniment of harp and percussion and Ford’s keen ear for sonority and colour is much in evidence. Jane Sheldon’s pure tone and accurate intonation interweaves well with the wind obbligatos played by Margery Smith, but the songs would benefit from more dramatic projection and variety of tone on the vocalist’s part. The other lengthy work here Elegy in a Country Graveyard overlays recorded interviews of elderly residents with choir and ensemble to create an evocatively atmospheric depiction of a spectacularly positioned graveyard at Robertson in NSW’s Southern Highlands – a nostalgic tribute if quaintly ‘ABC Radio’ in character with its cawing crows. Three short works complete the disc of which the standout is Snatches of Old…

There are too many ensembles and other individuals to list all of them here, but you will find names as familiar as those of cellist Daniel Yeadon, clarinettist Paul Dean, Cantillation and Gondwana Voices. Confidence is high, then, in the quality and integrity of these performances. The words they have to present are drawn from a number of writers, and in musical terms they sound fine. What the words actually are, though, is entirely lost en route from printed page to eardrum. Stanhope is mindful enough to give his music the structural cohesion to carry us across the waves of his sea, but whatever message he hopes to bring takes a dive. He refers to a variety of rather mystical sounding sources for his compositions, without being too literal about what he does with them. For instance, Aboriginal references in the title track do not mean we hear Aboriginal music. Rather, what we hear is a rhapsodic composition inspired by Stanhope thinking his Aboriginal thoughts. The result is a mix of classically-minded vocal ambience with hints of world music and a dollop of easy listening, which in themselves all work fine. However, if a shadowland is where he is headed,…