Opera Australia endorse current artistic leadership amidst impressive financial results. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The Houston opera company says “no thanks” to planned Neil Armfield production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

Arguably the world’s finest orchestra, the Concertgebouw, is set to present concerts in Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney in November 2013. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

V for Verdi, V for Vendetta: in this dark take on dictatorship, terrorism and betrayal, everyone wears a mask.

The Estonian Philharmonic Choir bring the deeply moving sacred music of their celebrated countryman to Australia.

The Australia Council have announced that Julian Day will be the new Composer in Residence at the Peggy Glanville-Hicks house. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

A bad Christmas may spell the end for the UK’s last high-street music chain. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

It’s been a long time coming but at last Ligeti’s 1978 “anti-anti-opera” Le Grand Macabre arrives on DVD in a revolutionary staging by Barcelona’s innovative urban theatre troupe, La Fura Dels Baus. Nekrotzar, the Grand Macabre of the title, arrives in Breugheland (inspired by the Dutch painter Pieter Breughel’s nightmarish visions), and announces the end of the world.  In the face of a population entirely absorbed with sex, alcohol and petty politics, however, his apocalypse fails to materialise and life goes on as before.  Very much an opera for today, I would argue. This visually compelling production was a highlight of the 2010 Adelaide Festival and has been a hit wherever it has played. We begin with a giant video image of a woman watching TV, surrounded by cigarette ends and gorging on a burger.  A sudden seizure and she falls to the floor, her atrophied body metamorphosing into a giant three-dimensional set. This massive corpse is peopled by Ligeti’s grotesque cast of characters who crawl over her flanks, make love in her eye-sockets and enter her various orifices (even at one point from out of her giant vagina). Most remarkably though, the body is used as a giant projection…

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was one of the 18th century’s great musical rebels, working in a revolutionary and transitional period but destined to be overshadowed by others. History has a way of doing that to composers who don’t fit neatly into boxes. His father Johann Sebastian Bach and Mozart, geniuses both, perfectly reflect their times. Emanuel Bach may have been just as gifted, but he is neither Baroque fish nor Classical fowl and only now, it seems, are we really beginning to recognise his unique talents. Eschewing the single-emotion-per-movement model of his father’s generation, he revels in veering from one mood to another, juxtaposing introspection with temperamental outbursts and exploring divergent rhythms and quirky harmonies. Revered by Mozart, this is music that at times reaches beyond Classicism into the turbulence of Beethoven and the Romantic period. In short, CPE Bach was quite a visionary. There are four Sonatas here, the first dating from 1744 (Emanuel’s most radical period) while the latest work, a Fantasie, dates from 1787, the year before he died. The early F-Sharp Minor Sonata begins with a highly unsettling movement, playing off an unstable rhythmic motive against an endearing gallant tune. His kaleidoscopic treatment of these two…

According to Schubert’s friends, the composition of Winterreise in 1827, a year before his death, left the composer agitated and disturbed. Wilhelm Müller’s poetic journey starts with Gute Nacht, as a traveller walks away from us into a moonlit, snowy landscape. At the end of the cycle, The Signpost, he takes the path to his death. All very close to the bone for a composer with a terminal illness, and the first performance duly shocked his contemporaries. It’s good to report, then, that this superb, bold and harrowing new interpretation by the Austrian baritone Florian Boesch and English pianist Malcolm Martineau may just shock a whole new generation. There are big choices here but crucially, every moment of this intimate collaboration has been thought through. Each emotional twist and turn is presented as another step on Schubert’s solitary winter journey, from the abandoned home of his loved one to a lonely grave. Boesch may not have an idiosyncratic voice like Fischer-Dieskau or Matthias Goerne, but he certainly has an individual style and a special way with poetry. His vocal mood-swings and unprecedented use of half-tones – at times more popular songster than classical lieder singer – sets him apart from…

Starring Cheryl Barker, John Wegner et al; Opera Australia Sydney Opera House, October 12 Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Austrian conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt has been one of classical music’s great iconoclasts now for well over 50 years. Always challenging our preconceptions, he invariably comes up with something fresh and this delightful double disc is no exception. His stated aim is to create a “revolution” in the way we listen to 19th-century dance music, and in particular the waltz which he sees as reflecting a social shift from high-brow, concert hall fare to a genuinely egalitarian music. He also makes a good case that Strauss and Lanner’s dance bands may well have outshone the Viennese court and theatre orchestras in technique and ability to master a wide repertoire. So how does he go about convincing us? First of all, he uses Concentus Musicus Wien, his own period band. That smaller, leaner string tone helps, but in addition, Harnoncourt conjures up all manner of different tones with no less than ten different types of trumpet and five different types of clarinet! In a word, he takes the “sound” seriously and I must say he has a great deal of fun along the way. His starting point is Mozart’s late dance music which frequently utilises “Turkish” instrumentation to express Austria’s confidence in…