The well-loved violist and music teacher has drowned while on a school excursion near Alice Springs.

Audiences may be spoilt for choice at the up-coming festival, with plenty of hard-edged theatre and saucy cabaret.

There have been best-selling books and several films, now the late Apple CEO is to be immortalised in Mason Bates’ new opera.

Baz Luhrman’s musical of his iconic film fares no better abroad than it did at home.

Stephanie Eslake will be honoured for her contributions to classical music in Australia.

Stuart Skelton’s Janáček, David Robertson’s Adams and Opera Australia’s King Roger are all in the running for 2017.

Skipworth has won the Orchestral Prize while Dean has taken out the Song Cycle category in the 2016 awards.

Composers Matt Rankin and Vanessa Nimmo are harvesting old technology to create new sounds. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Researchers at the University of Washington have released the latest music resource to aid machine learning.

The award-winning German actress and singer has passed away aged 92.

The Year Seven student from New South Wales is the youngest ever winner of the prestigious music prize.

It is the earthy directness of violinist Franziska Pietsch’s sound, over Detlev Eisinger’s sepulchral piano, that captures the ear of the listener in this disc from Audite. Prokofiev likened a passage in the first movement of his First Violin Sonata to “wind sweeping across a cemetery” and Pietsch and Eisinger perfectly conjure this darkness, their spacious tempo giving the movement a sense of deep loneliness that periodically swells into pained longing. There is a gritty violence to the jagged Allegro brusco and the third movement is searingly plaintive. The intimate recording captures every detail of Pietsch’s resonant pizzicatos in the outer movements and the finale bristles with folk-energy, receding into quiet lyricism. The Second Violin Sonata – originally composed for flute but arranged for violin at David Oistrakh’s prompting – is almost pastoral. Composed during Prokofiev’s sojourn in the Ural Mountains during World War II, a jagged motif whose rhythm echoes the Morse Code “V for Victory” that accompanied the BBC’s broadcasts recalls the ongoing violence. The motif – three dots and a dash – sends aural sparks flying from Pietsch’s violin and there’s a quirky bounce to her Scherzo.  Pietsch and Eisinger interweave soulfully in the Andante and the finale…