The innovative American string quartet, with a penchant for performing in the dark, comes to Carriageworks.

This year’s Festival should cause quite a stir with a radical Rite set to upstage even Ute Lemper. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

New Chief Conductor’s inaugural season goes back to basis with Beethoven, Brahms and a handful of big guns. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Boat ferrying singers to the floating stage at the Bregenz Festival capsizes depositing three singers into the lake. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Organist at St Paul’s, composer for the Chapel Royal and ultimately Master of the King’s Music, Maurice Greene’s only fault, it would seem, was that
 he wasn’t Handel. His settings
 of Spenser’s Amoretti (little 
love sonnets) trace the poet’s courtship of his future wife and may be England’s first song cycle. Each of these ditties comprise as many as five contrasting sections. Greene’s setting of Spenser is generally first rate and his response to emotional mood spot-on. The Merry Cuckow, for example, begins with a “trumpet shrill” fanfare that has more than a whiff of The Beggars’ Opera. He then falls into 3⁄4 time as the mood shifts towards love, yet still manages to set the birds name to the traditional “cuck-oo” notes. He can also rise to moments of great beauty, as in One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon The Strand with it’s drooping scotch snaps. It may not have the emotional through line of a Wintereisse, but the cycle ends effectively with three mournful reflections on absent love. Benjamin Hulett’s light, focused voice and exemplary diction perfectly conveys the subtleties of Spenser’s texts. To vary the continuo, Giangiacomo Pinardi on the orbo joins Australian harpsichordist Luke Green…

George Benjamin’s new opera is based on the strange and brutal 13th-century Provençal tale Le Coeur Mangê, in which an unnamed ruler (The Protector) asks an illuminator (The Boy) to glorify his power for perpetuity in a book. The Boy’s presence awakens the sexual independence of The Protector’s wife (Agnes), and their subsequent affair leads to the murder of The Boy. In a grisly dénouement, The Protector forces his wife to eat The Boy’s heart, after which she jumps from a window to avoid a similar fate. In order to allow the contemporary world to “bleed through”, British playwright Martin Crimp has added three “angels” who manipulate the drama as if conducting an experiment and double as subsidiary characters. It’s a brilliant conceit that produces
a satisfyingly tight piece of musical theatre matched in intellectual rigor by Benjamin’s razor-sharp score. Crimp ingeniously mixes direct speech with characters narrating their own actions, which lends the recording a special clarity, as you are frequently aware of what a character is doing or thinking. Benjamin uses his orchestra (in this instance 
the peerless Mahler Chamber Orchestra) with enormous imagination and sensitivity to evoke the musical world of the medieval illuminator. Bass viola da gamba……

Now a sprightly 86, Australian tenor Robert Gard looks back on filming the role of Aschenbach for Tony Palmer. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

An extraordinary collaborative project in Melbourne attempts to recreate the music we hear when we die. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

John Bell's new production of Puccini's "shabby little shocker" is far from shabby but still a shocker.

Britten's response to the Vietnam War receives an auspicious Aussie premiere at long last.

Raconteur, wit, music critic and stalwart of the BBC’s My Music program passes at the age of 91. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Revered British conductor Sir Colin Davis passed away a few months ago, yet reviewing his last recording still comes a something of a shock. Listening to this live concert performance of Weber’s ghostly masterpiece is a welcome reminder of the virtues that kept this tireless musical advocate at the top of his game for 50 years. Carl Maria von Weber was a regular visitor in the Wagner household while the young Richard was growing up, and nowhere was his influence more clearly felt on the operatic giant- to-be than in his gothic fairytale, Der Freischütz. Davis homes in on that Wagnerian dimension, and if his Weber is a relatively sedate affair next to his blistering Berlioz, it benefits from his other great strengths – instinctive sense of orchestral balance and sensitivity to singers. It’s a big-boned reading and the LSO plays its collective heart out for their Chief. Soloists are ideally memorable and the horn section is to die for. Christine Brewer makes a fine Agathe. Her ample voice is beautifully shaded when required and her prayer is most moving. New Zealand tenor Simon O’Neill sings the vacillating hero Max. His voice is clear and penetrating but it’s a tight…