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. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

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…

Swedish traditional and popular music across centuries and styles.

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

“Stravinsky belongs to that group of composers whom we admire first and foremost for their intellect…  but it would be a mistake to believe that this intellectual admiration excludes emotion.” So writes pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet in the note to his terrific new recording featuring Stravinsky’s works for piano and orchestra and which appeals to the heart as much as the head. Bavouzet won awards last year for his recording of the Prokofiev Piano Concertos. Here, joined by a very much on-form São Paulo Symphony Orchestra under the suave, alert direction of Yan Pascal Tortelier, he again demonstrates his affinity for genuine orchestral collaboration while submitting to that lapidary yet rhythmically vital realisation of line and texture so important in Stravinsky’s music. The Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments has never sounded more like a multi-coloured riot of tessellation across which drift occasional shadows. The following Capriccio is also pure delight, Bavouzet’s playing shot through with a sparkling lyricism that he even manages to inject into the 12-tone Movements. And if the piano in Pétrouchka is merely a member of the orchestra, Bavouzet nevertheless relishes his role in contributing to one of the tightest yet most theatrically lavish performances of this…

Innovation, intimacy and insight: this is what opera should be about.

Brönnimann elicits a serene poetry to match Hardenberger’s fluent, fluid lines and leaps. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in