When thinking about what music evokes for different people, it’s worth remembering that centuries-old musical notes on a page had very different connotations for our forebears than they do for us. We find immediate common ground in the denotation, in the mathematics of music; but it is the job of interpretation and scholarship, of imagination and dreaming, to journey further into those dark regions and yield new insights. Thus do we converse with absent friends. Heard This and Thought of You similarly plays with ideas of memory, possibility and friendship over time and distance. In their booklet note, Australian recorder player Genevieve Lacey and Scottish-born accordionist James Crabb admit that little music has been written specifically for the combination of recorder and accordion. Yet these instruments “carry many connotations”. There is also the lovely idea of matching musical voices with writers (Lacey and Crabb love to read) by asking a number of writers to write to someone following the idea “Heard this, and thought of you”. These letters are included in the booklet. The music itself ranges from Renaissance pieces by Ortiz, Palestrina and Locke – a kind… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

The Slovak composer Eugen Suchoň (1908-1993) possessed a rich, distinctive voice that drew as much on the diatonicism of late-Romanticism and the modality of Slovak folk music as on Impressionism and chromaticism. But what most astonishes when listening to these three impressive large-scale orchestral works from the mid-1930s and mid-1950s is Suchonˇ’s subtle yet expansive orchestrations and fulsome narrative drive. It’s easy to be reminded that he did a lot of piano improvising for silent films. Metamorfózy (Metamorphoses, 1953) is quasi-programmatic, the portrait of the artist around the time of World War II. Each of its five sections is exquisitely crafted but the final Allegro feroce, with its rushing strings and explosive brass and percussion, steals the show. The earlier Baladická Suita opens in a mood of bustling energy through which one can glimpse the gorgeous lyricism of the following Adagio, which in turn submits to a frenetic Allegro molto that is itself conquered by the final movement’s lush impressionism.  Completed in 1956, Symfonietta Rustica is adapted from parts of the composer’s Sonata Rustica for solo piano and is dominated by the spirit of folk song and dance. The Estonian National Symphony Orchestra under Järvi play this music as though…

Astonishingly, the Belgian composer, organist and pianist Joseph Jongen (1873-1953) entered the Liège Conservatoire at the age of just eight. So one can imagine the gifts bestowed upon a musician who was at one time considered the greatest living Belgian composer and who is today chiefly remembered for his organ music. This is Volume 85 in Phaedra’s In Flanders’ Fields series, which aims to give listeners some idea of the richness and beauty of Flemish and Belgian classical music, past and present, performed by Flemish musicians. According to Phaedra’s website, the enterprising Flemish label wants to shine “a light on music by composers from the Low Countries, especially from Flanders and Wallonia… to save them from indifference and oblivion.”  Here the spotlight is on Jongen’s chamber music for winds, with and without piano. The earliest work is the Lied for horn and piano; the most mature, the Concerto, Op. 124 for woodwind quintet (1942). 5 Beaufort (the Brussels Woodwind Quintet), which comprises players from the National Orchestra of Belgium, and Belgian pianist Hans Ryckelynck, choose however to open with the uncharacteristically modernist Rhapsodie, Op. 70 for woodwind quintet and piano (1922). The remaining works are an attractive blend of Saxon late-Romanticism…

Each chapter in Peter McCallum’s fascinating and informative history of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, in this, its centenary year, feels like a movement in a musical suite. That’s not to say McCallum’s language is especially florid or poetical, or that his voice rings off the page; indeed, McCallum, Associate Professor at the Conservatorium and Chair of the Academic Board of the University of Sydney, prefers the clear, level tone of the academic who knows how to write well for a general audience. As a regular music critic for The Sydney Morning Herald, you could say he gets his daily practice. No, it’s more that each chapter has an individual flavour and character, which the various personalities, shifting fortunes and changing fashions impart as unifying themes or motifs. The result is a more than highly readable account of an important part of Australia’s cultural heritage. One could go so far as to say it has helped define us as a nation. First, there is the unique nature of the Conservatorium’s original building – converted stables dating from 1821 which with their Gothic turrets… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Edward Gardner continues the series he began as the newly-appointed Chief Conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra with a second volume devoted to Janácek’s orchestral works.

★★★★★ One of the most profoundly thrilling and beautiful musical experiences of this reviewer’s life.

Ohlsson delivers an incisive yet fulsomely poetic reading of Brahms' massive First Concerto.

Like the greatest innovators, poet and composer Guillaume Machaut (c. 1300-1377) was thoroughly versed in the language of past masters. One of the chief representatives of the medieval Ars nova and the latter-day trouvères, and renowned in his day and beyond, Machaut wove tales of courtly love, whose roots are in antiquity, with new-spun threads of startling melodic, rhythmic and harmonic originality. Decades of recordings by the Clemencic Consort, the Deller Consort and the like have in recent times immeasurably enhanced a contemporary reputation which still rests chiefly on one work, the brilliant and innovative Messe de Nostre Dame. Formed in 1988, the one-to-a-part male Orlando Consort stands with the Hilliard Ensemble in making a unique contribution to the on-going conversation with Machaut’s timeless music, of which this second volume in their complete edition for Hyperion. Where their first volume focused on the nine songs from Machaut’s masterpiece Le Voir Dit, The Dart of Love contains representatives from four genres favoured by Machaut: the ballade, the rondeau, the virelai and the motet. Availing themselves of the new performing edition The Complete Works of Guillaume de Machaut, countertenor Matthew Venner, tenors Mark Dobell and Angus Smith and baritone Donald Greig perform…

Giovanni Battista Cirri (1724-1808) and Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805) were both born in Italy; were both virtuoso cellists; worked extensively abroad (Cirri in England, Boccherini in Spain); and had a collection of six cello sonatas printed in London around 1775. But Italian-based Australian cellist Catherine Jones is surely right when she says that Cirri “is already composing in an early Classical style” while Boccherini “is a composer of the high Baroque.” To prove her point, she presents three sonatas from each, revealing the delight she shares with both composers in the cello’s technical and expressive capabilities. Jones has previously recorded three Boccherini sonatas from the same collection while a student; the Cirri sonatas – Nos 3, 4 and 5 – are premiere recordings. Her light, responsive touch and pungent, mostly vibratoless tone perfectly match Boccherini’s playfulness, exuberant embellishment of repeated figures and his imitations of the strummed chords of the Spanish guitar, which are redolent of another Italian who worked in Spain, Domenico Scarlatti. Jones, supported throughout by Nuti, McGillivray and Carter, also luxuriates in the rich sonorities of the drawn-out single and multiple-stopped tones. These characterise certain episodes in Boccherini’s music. Cirri’s, by contrast, display a Classical restraint. Highly recommended….

Finally, one of Britain’s finest ensembles tackles the final masterpiece of one of Britain’s finest composers. The results are, as you’d expect, spectacular. Henry Purcell left the semi-opera The Indian Queen unfinished at his death in 1695 and it fell to his brother Daniel to supply a happy ending of sorts in the form of The Masque of Hymen for the 1696 revival. Consequently, audiences would have heard less music at the work’s Theatre Royal premiere in 1695 than they would have in any of Purcell’s previous semi-operas such as The Fairy Queen, from which the present work borrows a dance (more recycling sees the inclusion of the overture from the ode Come Ye Sons of Art). But what the music might lack in quantity, it more than makes up for in quality. Purcell devoted every ounce of his skill and artistry to bring to life John Dryden and Sir Robert Howard’s convoluted play about the Mexican Queen Zempoalla’s war with the Montezuma-led Peruvians, and the airs, dances, duets, trios and choruses perfectly manifest those “Italian and French styles English’d” so typical of this English Orpheus. The recording opens with an amusing pre-show entertainment, Purcell’s satirical three-voice catch To all…

★★★★☆ This is the best kind of crossover. Swedish traditional and popular music across centuries and styles – folk, jazz, ABBA(!) – rubbing shoulders with songs and chamber music by composers Johan Helmich Roman and Carl Michael Bellman. The dishes are plentiful, varied and tasty without being overly rich, with just a little French dressing courtesy of Marin Marais.  Australian-based period instrument band The Marais Project features a flexible line-up which this time comprises Tommie Andersson on theorbo and guitar and Jennifer Eriksson on gamba with tenor Pascal Herrington, flautist Melissa Farrow and violinist Fiona Ziegler. For starters they serve up a strikingly beautiful instrumental arrangement of an old pastoral hymn which the booklet describes as “one of the most haunting and melancholy tunes from the region of Dalarna.” For dessert there’s Andersson’s cheeky yet effective arrangement of ABBA’s Waterloo in the form of a baroque courante. In between there is much to choose from. Bellman’s delightful songs, in which a limpid-voiced Herrington is accompanied by classical guitar with varying involvement from the other instruments, exude Mozartian charm and irreverence. Roman’s staid trio sonata provides a suitable palate cleanser before Andersson’s arrangement of late jazzman Esbjörn Svensson’s Pavane: Thoughts of…

An Australian vintage puts Bach and Co.’s new wine into old bottles.