Although critics tend to single out his marathon Piano Concerto in five movements and his magnum opus, the opera Doktor Faust, like Franz Liszt, the vast majority of the Florence-born Feruccio Busoni’s compositional output is devoted to work for the solo piano. It is indeed appropriate that the Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin who specialises in obscure and difficult scores has now turned his gaze on this virtuoso and teacher. Perhaps more than any other composer this side of Henze, Busoni has brought an ingenious balance to bear between Teutonic counterpoint and sunshine and passion from the Mediterranean. Whilst Busoni’s philosophical ideas in the New Aesthetic pair him with the likes of Nietzsche, his musical composition is perhaps not so forward thinking – like Mahler, he still teeters on the edge of tonality whilst suggesting the ideas of Paul Hindemith’s sonatas of the 1930s. Even now pianists, if they approach Busoni, tend to focus on his Bach transcriptions rather than upon original works – though even here we find witty appropriations of English folksong (Greensleeves) and Bizet’s Carmen. Very little of this work has been favoured by modern pianists. The major exception is the Adelaide-born and Dutch-based contrapuntal specialist Geoffrey Douglas Madge…

Sydney-based string quartet The NOISE say they began improvising for fun – avoiding the usual through-composed repertoire.

Lennox Berkeley has often been more of a biographical footnote than a well known composer. Highly regarded as a teacher (students include Richard Rodney Bennett and the recently passed John Tavener), his oeuvre includes symphonies, opera and chamber music. A collaborator of Britten, he was equally friendly with Ravel and Les Six and his output has a more international sound than many of his British contemporaries. Written between the 1930s and the 1950s, his works for violin and piano immediately strike one for their clarity of purpose. Here is chamber music that is both cultured and approachable. The English violinist Edwin Paling together with the Tasmanian- based pianist Arabella Teniswood- Harvey (the wife of Michael Kieran), proves to be an ideal musician for the task at hand. And here is a task that is both scholastic and musical, bringing together a previously unpublished first Violin Sonata as attractive as any of the other works in this program. Equally fine are the Introduction and Allegro composed for the underrated Israeli violinist Ivry Gitlis and the earlier second sonata written whilst Berkeley studied with Nadia Boulanger. Whilst it is not necessarily ground breaking in terms of invention, Berkeley’s chamber music for violin and piano is…

These performances have aged very well indeed making this an ideal way to discover HWH.

  The Venezuelan educator and politician José Antonio Abreu has added another string to his bow, one to sit proudly alongside his Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, firebrand conductor Gustavo Dudamel and a revolutionary approach to music education, El Sistema modern recordings in the catalogue presented in the familiar warm acoustic associated with the Yellow Label. The main reason for my unreserved praise lies with the viscerally exciting take on the criminally neglected Argentinean Alberto Ginastera’s First Quartet from 1948. There have been several recordings (an initiative which now has its first local teacher based in Adelaide). Comprised of four of his orchestra’s string section leaders, he has devised an exciting young ensemble of the highest order. In their debut recording, the Simón Bolívar Quartet presents a wisely chosen program bringing together three seemingly disparate composers in Ginastera, Dvorák and Shostakovich. Dvorák’s popular American quartet was written during the composer’s stay in the States and develops its own specific folk motifs – it’s this ingenious idea that brings together a trio of geographically separated composers on this fine disc. In his Eighth Quartet Shostakovich goes even further, quoting his own earlier Trio Op 67. In itself it’s a lament for the…

Adelaide Festival Theatre, June 1 Beethoven’s epic ode to humanity recognises forty years of music making in Adelaide. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Those who are familiar with pianist Simon Tedeschi’s artistry will realise that Gershwin and the pianist go back a long way. (In fact, he made his debut with Graham Lyell in the concert band version of Rhapsody in Blue at the tender age of twelve.) Not only is it central to his performance schedules; he plays it in different guises, (he’s been heard in all of the arrangements of Rhapsody in Blue from solo
piano and piano with percussion
to jazz band and Ferde Grofé’s
familiar 1942 version for full
orchestra.) The major question
arising from all of this is why has
taken Tedeschi so long to record
this material, which he describes as
“the accompaniment to my life and musical career”? Given the uniform mastery of these performances, it must be agreed that this project has been worth the wait. As early as the second selection on the disc, the gorgeous trilogy of blues-inflected Preludes, it is apparent that this is a Gershwin interpreter who can hold his own against anyone in the catalogue. Tedeschi has the full measure of these short but often elusive pieces and, as elsewhere in this remarkable recital, goes a long way towards proving
that it is no longer considered necessary to be……

Keeping in mind that the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould would have celebrated his 80th birthday just a few months ago, Sony has seen fit to release a deluxe limited set which gathers together all of Gould’s JS Bach recordings, mostly in their original LP covers with the photogenic, iconoclastic Gould often in full focus. It is just as well that an impressive hardback book accompanies the set, thereby reproducing the liner notes (often by Gould himself) at a legible size. Of course, many regard his two wildly divergent studio recordings of the Goldberg Variations (1955 in mono, 1981 in digital stereo) as seminal, but there is much to be discovered here for the uninitiated. It should be noted, though, that as Sony has chosen to reproduce the albums as initially released, we occasionally get items overlapping throughout the set – excerpts from the Well-Tempered Clavier can also be found on the compilation Little Bach Book, for example. In this collection we have no fewer than five Goldberg recordings, including a live traversal from a late 1950s Salzburg recital and a CBC radio broadcast from as early as 1954. One wonders why certain concerti are repeated, and whether the stereo remix… Continue…