Category: Classical music

The concept and the packaging had made me far too sceptical. Once I had listened, I was won over by the sheer emotional presence and the persuasive whole-heartedness of Lisa Batiashvili’s violin playing. “Secret Love Letters” is a programme of four works. On the surface, they are loosely themed around whether emotional truth is to be hidden or revealed. “We often even define our daily life by the things we keep to ourselves in our minds and hearts.” writes Lisa Batiashvili in the programme note. “Music […] has always been the most amazing vehicle for artists to share secret messages and speak about their hidden loves and untold stories.” It sounds obvious, but when one listens to the music it resonates. People who know Georgian culture tell me that the expression  “თავი გადადო” (tavi gadado – literally ‘he puts his head down’) is an important one. It means to be totally engrossed in something to the exclusion of everything else. And that, perhaps, is the key to what Lisa Batiashvili’s artistry is all about, the way she can and does communicate everything she wants or needs to say through her violin, and does so with a power and conviction that are irresistible and overwhelming. 

The centrepiece here is a fine performance of the Szymanowski violin concerto, with a very well-judged balance in the orchestral sound of the Philadelphia Orchestra, who certainly give full expression to the climaxes. Wonderful brass, too. The Franck sonata – with Georgian pianist Giorgi Gigashvili (b.2000) and apparently still a student of Nelson Goerner in Geneva –  is remarkable. The recitative at the beginning of the third movement is a masterclass in pacing and flow; I have found myself going back to it again and again. The Chausson “Poème” is dedicated to Eugène Ysaÿe, like the Franck Sonata. The opening is marked ‘lento e misterioso’ and that is exactly what we get. The final work is Debussy’s “Beau Soir” with Yannick Nézet-Séguin at the piano, in a performance which tells its story eloquently. In her sleeve note Batiashvili writes: “As a child, I told my secrets only to my violin. I treated the instrument like a doll, or a sister, sharing my most private thoughts with it.”  Yes, I know her text will have been cleared and approved by the marketing cohorts of a $40bn corporation…but I believe her. “Tavi gadado” indeed.

Sebastian Scotney

Bach: Masses The Sixteen/Harry Christophers (Coro)

The Lutheran Mass seems on the surface a bit of a contradiction in terms, but in fact Luther was a fan of the Mass in Latin, and there was a Lutheran tradition, still going strong in Bach’s Leipzig, of using the first two movements of the Mass – the Kyrie and Gloria – alongside the other sections in German versions. Bach was always an enthusiastic self-plagiariser and 20 of the 24 movements of the Masses in this collection are reworkings of his own cantata movements – and the other four are probably as well, but with the source material lost.

This recycling principle is also at the heart of this release by The Sixteen, which is a re-packaging as a double album of two separate discs from 2013 and 2014. But when the music-making is of such a high quality, putting it all in one place is a positive boon. The Sixteen – here represented by an elite squad of eight vocalists and chamber orchestra – are typically springy and are persuasive advocates for the idea of Bach with small forces. There is a lovely consistency that comes from the soloists also making up the chorus, and the solo movements are uniformly excellent. It is invidious to pick out any, but I must mention Grace Davidson’s heartbreaking “Qui tollis” and Robin Blaze’s “Domine Fili”. The addition of horns in the Gloria of BWV 233 brings a thrilling energy that infects the chorus, and there is fine contrapuntal singing in the “Cum sancto spiritu” in BWV 235. The excellent booklet essay by Daniel Hyde casts a great deal of illumination on the whole subject of Bach’s Masses and demonstrates the enduring value of the CD: listening to this ‘blind’ could have been a somewhat baffling experience, but with everything contextualised was instead a complete joy.

Bernard Hughes

Greg Davis: New Primes (Greyfade)

This “investigation into the compositional properties of prime numbers” is occasionally baffling but consistently beguiling, as is the fact that Greg Davis used (presumably) high-end software to transform number sequences into electronic sound and released the edited results on vinyl, this painstakingly crafted, cutting-edge music heard via analogue technology that’s been around for over a century. So much experimental repertoire sounds at its best in this format, arguably because you’re compelled to sit still and concentrate while you’re listening. The opening track. “Sophie Germain” (named after a famous French mathematician) begins as an indistinct hum, the low frequencies brilliantly caught on this LP pressing. Ones ears quickly adjust, and within minutes the language begins to make sense. A description of Davis’s compositional process in the press notes repays rereading, and repeated listenings draw attention to the craft, the humanity behind the sounds. Nods towards traditional tonal harmony slowly become more noticeable, as with the open fifths closing “Proth”.

At times, New Primes is like listening to a compilation of sustained bell sounds, the overtones as important as the root notes. The opening seconds of “Piepoint“ are a good example, and I found myself trying in vain to reproduce the stretched opening chord on a keyboard. A consistent, regular pulse is hinted at in the same track without ever revealing itself fully. Transitions between the blocks of material are brilliantly engineered, the chords drifting in and out of focus. The final minutes of the closing track, “Euclid”, slowly take flight and soar, the album resolving onto a single held note. You can buy New Primes as a high-res download, but the vinyl edition is the one to have.

Poulenc: Les Animaux modèles, Sinfonietta BBC Concert Orchestra/Bramwell Tovey (Chandos)

You wait ages for a recording of Poulenc’s delicious four-movement Sinfonietta and two appear in rapid succession, the late Bramwell Tovey’s performance following on from Dima Slobodeniouk’s Lahti Symphony on BIS. The latter has a touch more bite, thanks to the closer recording balance, but both are excellent. Taped last March, this was the late Bramwell Tovey’s final recording before his unexpected death in July. His Sinfonietta boasts pin-sharp playing from the perennially underappreciated BBC Concert Orchestra (listen to the winds at the opening of the gorgeous “Andante cantabile”) and an irresistible sense of fun.

The main draw on this warmly recorded anthology is the complete score of the wartime ballet Les Animaux modèles, ten minutes longer than the more familiar suite and containing two extra movements. Poulenc’s third and final ballet was premiered in 1942 in a Paris under Nazi occupation, the haunting finale, “Le repas du midi” described in Nigel Simeone’s excellent notes as “an outpouring of love for a homeland which Poulenc feared might have been lost”. There’s nothing flippant in this score, Poulenc smuggling in a salient quotation from his Litanies à la Vierge Noire and a clear allusion to the anti-German song “Vous n’aurez pas l’Alsace et la Lorraine”, which Nazi officers attending the premiere failed to spot. The first of the sections excised from the suite is “L’Ours et les deux compagnons”, a growling tuba representing the bear, followed by “La Cigale et la fourmi”, the grasshopper’s waltz set against the ant’s perpetuum mobile scurrying. Both are vintage Poulenc. Tovey’s performance is tender and affectionate, superbly played. There’s more: a pair of fizzy movements from Les Mairies de la Tour Eiffel, and the Pastourelle from L’éventail de Jeanne, both of them ballet scores composed collaboratively. All wonderful, and the Rousseau sleeve art is appealing.

A Shropshire Lad: English Songs Orchestrated by Roderick Williams Roderick Williams (baritone) Hallé/Sir Mark Elder (Hallé)

There is something of Little Britain’s “write the theme tune, sing the theme tune” about this disc of Roderick Williams singing his own orchestral arrangements of 20th century English song. Not content with being the leading British baritone of his generation and an excellent composer of choral music, it turns out he also has a command of writing for orchestra, presumably born of many years standing in front of the very best. He graciously allows Sir Mark Elder to conduct, but this project, on the Hallé Orchestra’s own label, is very much about Williams. The arrangements here have been assembled over a few years, supplemented by four arrangements, made specially for this recording, of notable female students of Vaughan Williams. Ina Boyle’s “The Joy of Earth” is imaginatively scored for orchestra without strings, except for a solo violin in soaring countermelody. Madeleine Dring’s “Take, O take those lips away” is a highlight, dreamy harmonies circling round and round, while Williams sits deliciously on the back of the beat in lovelorn reverie.

Vaughan Williams’s The House of Life is one of two larger cycles on the album. “Silent Noon” has an Elgarian breadth and Williams floats through the distinctive upward leaps of the melody. “Love’s last gift” is revelatory, the wind playing gorgeous. The other is George Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad, in which the composer, so tragically killed in WWI in 1916, inhabits the world of English folksong while also transforming it into something distinctly his own. I could sing the praises of virtually everything on this album which – in short – I absolutely loved. But I must mention the most personal resonance for me: my earliest musical collaboration was accompanying my father on the piano as he sang John Ireland’s Sea Fever. At the time I assumed all songs were that good, but now I can see it for the outstanding thing it is. Here Williams has warm horns at the start giving way to chillier strings in verse two. As elsewhere, Williams’s singing is completely in sympathy with the music, infinitely alive to the text, and his orchestrations shows the voice off to its best effect. This stunning album is a must-have for lovers, or would-be lovers, of this repertoire.

Bernard Hughes

Lev ‘Ljoba’ Zhurbin: Enter the Fadolin, Lost in Kino 2 (Kapustnik Records)

Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin plays both the fadolin and a famiola. Constructed by luthier Eric Aceto, these are six-stringed violin and viola variants – the additional lower strings on the former an F and a C (fa and do), extending the violin’s lower range by over an octave. The 18 solo tracks on Zhurbin’s Enter the Fadolin are an attempt “to jumpstart the fadolin’s story, to build an initial set of repertoire for the fadolinists of today and the next generation”. Many began life as improvisations, others deliberately written in pencil away from the instrument. Not that it’s easy to tell the difference between “fully notated works that sound improvised, and improvised works that were notated and re-recorded from transcriptions.” The instrument sounds marvellous, the bass notes warm and rich in a winning transcription of the C major prelude from book 1 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Bach’s BVW 903 Chromatic Fantasy also works well, the huge leaps from bass to treble clef sounding thoroughly natural. A “Fine Fantasy for Fadolin” written by Zhurbin’s 75-year-old father is a whimsical showpiece, including a witty nod to Portuguese fado music. Dvorak’s 9th Symphony gets quoted in a number played to rough sleepers and cycle couriers during the 2020 lockdown. The playing is soulful and technically brilliant – this is a fun collection.

Lost in Kino 2 collects extracts from three film scores written by Zhurbin, who also plays, variously fadolin, famiola and viola . Most of the tracks were recorded in a home studio, one part at a time, skilfully stitched together by producers Alex Kharlamov and James Sizemore. A handful of pieces sound bare without the supporting visuals, but there’s much to enjoy here. Spikier numbers recall Eisler, though Zhurbin can suddenly lapse into smoochy atmospherics, as with “Marina” and “The Breakdown”. “Volleywaltz” sounds like Nino Rota, and Inna Barmash’s vocal contribution to “The Song of Parting” is glorious. Dive in.

@GrahamRickson

Glass: Symphony No.12. Photo credit: Filharmonie Brno.

Brno, Nov 18 (BD) – On 15 November, the International Classical Music Awards, one of the most prestigious international competitions, announced the nominations for the best recordings of 2023, including the January release of Philip Glass’ Symphony No. 12, “Lodger,” which was recorded with Filharmonie Brno. The orchestra performed the piece at its Czech premiere last year, and will perform it for the first time in front of a New York audience next year at Carnegie Hall, as part of a major US tour, with the personal participation of Philip Glass.

Under the direction of Principal Conductor Dennis Russell Davies, the recording is dominated by multiple Grammy-winning singer Angélique Kidjo from Benin, and features one of today’s most acclaimed organists, Christian Schmitt. “I’m really excited about this, I remember once discussing with Philip the idea of composing a symphony. He had successful operas, a couple of orchestral works, and I was keen to get his music into concert halls and play it with a symphony orchestra,” said Davies, who has a long-standing friendship with Glass.

He also used it in the recording of his Twelfth Symphony, which had its world premiere in 2019. Thanks to Davies, the score underwent many revisions and minor changes to the text. Dennis Russell Davies has worked extensively with Kidjo, including on the European premiere. 

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“Angélique and Dennis really got the piece into shape during the many performances together as it went through numerous revisions on the way to its final form. I am grateful for their continued dedication in this way. Christian has brought his well-known experience to a prominent organ part, and Filharmonie Brno under Dennis’ direction sounds great,” Glass said.

Glass’s Symphony No. 12 was given its Czech premiere by Filharmonie Brno with Kidjo and Schmitt at the Prague Spring Festival, and repeated at the opening of the Moravian Autumn Festival. “Next January we will take it to Leipzig and then mainly to Carnegie Hall. We will start our big American tour with it on 8 February at its New York premiere, in the personal presence of the composer,” said Marie Kučerová, director of Filharmonie Brno.

https://brnodaily.com/2022/11/18/culture/filharmonie-brno-receives-nomination-for-international-classical-music-awards/https://brnodaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/CD-Glass-Symfonie-c.-12-1024×683.jpghttps://brnodaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/CD-Glass-Symfonie-c.-12-150×100.jpg2022-11-18T11:33:24+01:00Bing NiArt & CultureBrnoNewsBrno,Culture,NewsGlass: Symphony No.12. Photo credit: Filharmonie Brno.

Brno, Nov 18 (BD) – On 15 November, the International Classical Music Awards, one of the most prestigious international competitions, announced the nominations for the best recordings of 2023, including the January release of Philip Glass’ Symphony No. 12, ‘Lodger,’ which was recorded…Bing NiBing
Nibingni1992@gmail.comAuthorPh.D student in Communication Studies, a hopeless cinephile and frontier culture fanatic and fussy music appreciator.Brno Daily

In 2018, when exploring the music of Rebecca Saunders in that year’s Lent Series, i made the following remark regarding recordings of her music:

The fact that i’ve explored Rebecca Saunders’ recorded output over four articles suggests that she’s well represented by recordings of her work. But almost half of her compositions haven’t yet been recorded, including such major works as chroma …, insideout …, murmurs, traces and the three concertos Still, Void and Alba. One hopes as her reputation continues to grow and consolidate that the recorded picture of Saunders’ output will become yet more complete.

Rebecca Saunders on record (Part 4)

In the last few years that situation has improved a bit, but it’s been given an unexpected boost by the latest release from the usually more mainstream-oriented UK label NMC. Skin features three works by Saunders composed during the last eight years: the percussion duo concerto void (2014), Skin (2016) for soprano and ensemble, and the string quartet Unbreathed (2017). i’ve written extensively about all three of these works previously, void and Skin also as part of the 2018 Lent Series (and also, more briefly, after Skin‘s first UK performance at HCMF 2016), and Unbreathed following its world première at the Wigmore Hall in January 2018. i therefore won’t go into detail about each piece again here, though it’s important to stress how fantastic it is to have three three such substantial works by Saunders together on a single disc, in what are all outstanding performances.

It makes some sense that it’s the HCMF performance of Skin, by Juliet Fraser and Klangforum Wien conducted by Bas Wiegers, included here, as the work requires the players to be dispersed throughout the space, which worked particularly well in Huddersfield’s St. Paul’s Hall. Saunders’ music is typified by many things, one of the most obvious being struggle, effort, the determination to grapple, wrangle, articulate, and perhaps clarify. Fraser’s personification of Molly Bloom’s monologue is absolutely dazzling here, a locus of potential tangibility in the midst of a vast network of loosely but tangibly connected satellites. i’m always struck afresh by how raw Saunders’ music always sounds, like frayed nerve endings, electrified and bristling. It’s the only music i know that sounds so surface-oriented – laid bare – without ever being remotely superficial. It’s an essential part of that other primary characteristic, music caught between light and shadow, sound and silence. This is the aspect that makes writing about her work so challenging and difficult, due to its continual stream of channelled, focus activity, in which notions of structure and section (if they’re even present) always take second place to that overarching act of critical engagement. In this respect Skin is perhaps the most elusive of the three works on this album, though perhaps that’s a symptom of its nervous, fretful, stammering energy. Nonetheless, Fraser’s final exhalation is a moment of absolute directness, despite its meaning being as ambiguous as all that preceded it: achievement? exultation? relief? despair? death? life?

i’m still minded to regard the world première, captured on the Donaueschinger Musiktage 2016 box set released by NEOS, as the more effective rendition of the piece, but there’s not a lot in it, and in any case it’s just wonderful that this superb performance from Huddersfield has been preserved with such stunning clarity.

Surely one of Saunders’ most beautiful works, void is treated here to a low-key but hypnotic performance by percussionists Christian Dierstein and Dirk Rothburst (for whom the work was written) with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Enno Poppe. On the one hand, it’s a less dramatic approach than the world première, but i wonder whether that speaks more directly to the work’s inherent nature. There are many occasions throughout void when one wonders to what extent, if any, the performers’ actions amount to anything of substance, whether any of the details actually matter. Initially there’s the impression of a kind of slow flexing, as if the music were waking up, testing out movement. In the midst of this a weird, streaky pulse appears, like a group of marching wraiths. Yet it soon becomes apparent that this flexing isn’t preparatory but is the focus, all the music’s energy being channelled back into itself in a never-ending cycle of starting and fading. Is it an equilibrium? Is this the sum total of all its actions being cancelled out? Is it, in fact, a void?

i’ve noted before about the way the halting demeanour of the music becomes mysteriously continuous, and that’s again the case here, no doubt partly due to the behavioural similarities that permeate the primary ideas in the piece. All of which makes void‘s denouement all the more unsettlingly strange: first pitches become extended – a new element in this soundworld – then almost everything dissolves, leading to a hard-to-grasp final few minutes melding vestiges of that ghostly pulse with gorgeous, faint traces of shimmer. What’s been achieved? Are we anywhere different from where we began? Are such questions null and void?

Similar questions of negation and ‘anti-substance’ proliferate in Unbreathed, performed in this recording by the work’s dedicatees, Quatuor Diotima. After the 2018 première i pessimistically remarked that “While i’ve no doubt the piece will be widely-heard, the UK’s track record of supreme indifference suggests it’ll be a long time before we hear it again here.” Sure enough, i’ve never encountered it since (here or abroad), so this is a welcome return to a piece that really blew me away four years ago. In contrast to void, but similar to Skin, there’s a constant sense in Unbreathed that each and every action doesn’t just matter but is absolutely vital. The quartet contends around a single pitch, peppering it with swoops, slides, glistenings and tremolos, always – despite, again here, regular halting – giving the impression of a desperate tussling attempt.

As in 2018, one of the most fascinating things about the piece is the way the players meld together in the long first section, four bows wielded by a single musical voice, passing through varying forms of pulse, arriving at a point of furious intensity where, typically for Saunders, they crash to a halt, continuing faint and wiry. The latter portion of the piece finds the players separated, by which point that sense of struggle has more or less evaporated. It’s highly intriguing to hear what was such overt activity earlier now turned private, the quartet’s aims perhaps individualised, though the coda is a spell-binding coming together, as if the quartet were attempting to sing a slip-sliding song.

Three baffling, brilliant, beautiful compositions by one of new music’s most fearlessly, effortlessly radical composers. Few albums can be described as essential, but this is absolutely one of them. Released tomorrow by NMC, Skin is available on CD and download.

“Live and love with open mind/Let our cultures intertwine.” In April, at a performance by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO), the bass sang that ode to mutual understanding by Wordsmith, a rapper, in the final movement of Beethoven’s ninth symphony. The original text, by Friedrich Schiller, begins: “Joy, bright spark of divinity/Daughter of Elysium.”

Classical music is often thought to be intimidating. Performed by white men in white bow ties, the art form is perceived to exemplify snobbery, stuffiness and racial privilege. Ensembles such as the BSO want to change that. Some groups are taking classical music from hushed concert halls to car parks and trendy nightclubs; many orchestras are performing film scores as well as symphonies (the Lyon National Orchestra, pictured, among them). The Pierre Boulez Saal, a hall in Berlin, invites parents to morning chamber-music concerts—baby, not jacket, required.

To many in the classical-music world, increasing accessibility is a way of staving off irrelevance. Just 1% of music sales and streams in America are of classical pieces, according to MRC Data, a research company. Before the pandemic 58% of concertgoers in Britain were aged 65 or older, reports a study commissioned by the BBC. The BSO’s main hall was more than 60% full on average before the pandemic; recently it has been 40% full.

Many people have not felt that they belong in a concert hall. Black Britons were less than 1% of the pre-pandemic audience. Reginald Mobley, a black American countertenor, says that when he was growing up in Florida his family thought of classical music as the music of cross-burners. Some scholars view the Western canon—roughly the masterworks of composers from Josquin des Prez in the 15th century to Igor Stravinsky in the 20th—as a product of privilege. Beethoven, an “above-average composer”, has been “propped up by whiteness and maleness”, contends Philip Ewell, an American musicologist.

Such notions did not deter Mr Mobley. A professor who heard him singing in a barbershop quartet identified him as a countertenor. Now Mr Mobley sings baroque and other music with major ensembles in Europe and America. “People of colour coming into the arts should not be a fluke like it was for me,” he says.

Cultural gatekeepers increasingly agree with him. In July the BSO appointed Jonathan Heyward as its first black music director. Mr Mobley is the first programming consultant of the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston, with a mission to diversify its repertoire. Works by neglected black composers, such as Florence Price, are heard ever more often.

In some ways the pandemic helped pry classical music open. It prompted Wigmore Hall, a chamber-music venue in London, to stream free concerts. This “democratised” its audience, says its director, John Gilhooly. When the hall reopened in September 2020, younger folk filled more seats. On streaming platforms, classical music is “finding a way to people who don’t think of themselves as classical-music lovers”, says Tom Lewis, co-president of Decca Records. A third of classical-music streaming is by 18- to 25-year-olds; some are mixing it with other genres.

Such enthusiasm is to be celebrated, but eagerness to expand the audience can come at a cost. The issue of accessibility is “an absolute minefield”, says Paul McCreesh, artistic director of the Gabrieli Consort & Players, a choir and orchestra. That is because the clamour for classical music to be more approachable and relevant risks drowning out the music itself. There is also now an added expectation that it will promote social justice. Classical music must respond. Its artistic health depends on how it does so.

One concern is that classical music’s civic mission will overshadow its cultural one. In a recent radio interview Michael Tilson Thomas, music director laureate of the San Francisco Symphony, worried that many young musicians’ commitment to social causes was not matched by their dedication to music. Anthony Tommasini, formerly the New York Times’s chief classical-music critic, has proposed that orchestras stop “blind auditions”. He hopes that making visible the race of musicians applying for jobs will increase the number of non-white performers, but this would mean, as he acknowledged, ending a practice that from the 1970s helped raise the number of women in orchestras.

“Powerbrokers” such as funders and broadcasters are a big source of “extra-musical concepts”, thinks Mr McCreesh. The consequences of that came to seem more alarming this month when the Arts Council England, which distributes money from the government and the lottery, ended grants to some top-flight groups in London, such as the English National Opera, as part of a policy to boost the arts outside the capital. Jennifer Johnston, an opera singer, spoke for many classical musicians when she lamented on Twitter the “permanent watering down of our industry so [that] the government can say it’s not ‘elitist’”.

The quest for accessibility can add to other forces that push classical music, perhaps the form that most rewards concentrated listening, to the periphery of people’s attention. They are not new. Popularisers have long recognised that getting people to sit still and silently is at odds with getting them to show up. When the “promenade concerts” that became the BBC Proms, Britain’s big summer classical-music festival, began in London in 1895, Beethoven was played “to an accompaniment of popping corks”. In his day, Mozart expected audiences to be boisterous.

Eager as musicians are to broaden their audience, there’s no getting around the fact that many classical works demand patience, especially in live performance. “In a classical concert, you just sit in a rather uncomfortable seat and you try not to make too much noise for two hours,” says Sir Stephen Hough, a British pianist, composer and author, “but you should leave feeling a different person.” Even Mozart lamented playing to a salon of aristocrats who were making sketches of one another: “I had to play to the chairs, tables and walls.”

To present classical music as hard work risks keeping audiences away, but suggesting that it is easier listening than it is risks disappointing them. It is best, both for audiences and the art itself, when accessibility is paired with ambition. Robert Newman, the impresario who helped launch the Proms, wanted to guide listeners up to Olympus, not to bring the music down. His grandiose aim was to “train the public by easy stages. Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music.” The Pierre Boulez Saal calls its fare “music for the thinking ear”.

There are ways to make classical music more accessible without compromising it. Sir Stephen suggests shorter concerts without intervals. #SingTheScore, a series of videos by I Fagiolini, a British choral group, mixes silliness and sophistication. Good music education is crucial to diversifying both audiences and ensembles. The skills required to sing in the Gabrieli Consort are nurtured mainly in fee-charging schools, says Mr McCreesh. That mostly leaves out white working-class children as well as those from ethnic minorities. Gabrieli Roar, which works with state-school and other youth choirs in Britain, tries to correct that.

If every school offered such teaching, more children would cherish the hush that comes when a conductor raises the baton, knowing that the music that follows will transmute life in ways that hold in suspense their own lives. When it falls, after a moment, the ovation can begin. ■

The Canberra International Music Festival has announced its 2023 program, with 28 concerts, 150 international and Australian artists, and five premieres to grace the Australian capital in the midst of autumn. Artistic Director Roland Peelman highlighted the wonder and magic found at the heart of the Festival, which runs from 28 April to 7 May and centres around the heritage Fitter’s Workshop in Kingston.

“The Child Within, Listening to a New World is the festival’s theme for 2023, celebrating the enchanted forest of our children’s imagination. Through the magic of music, it seeks to find the child inside all of us,” said Peelman.

Following the success of The Creation in 2022, the Opening Night Gala will see the Australian Haydn Ensemble perform The Mozarts, the Haydns & the Bear, a playful program that celebrates the bond between friends and families intertwined through music. Tenor Andrew Goodwin and soprano Chloe Lankshear join as soloists.

Brodsky Quartet. Photo © Sarah Cresswell.

The festival’s headline acts begin with a captivating combination: the UK’s Brodsky Quartet plays with William Barton on 30 April in a program of Bach, Schubert and Barton’s own works. The program also includes the premiere of Andrew Ford’s String Quartet No 7: Eden Ablaze, written about the 2019 bushfires that ran through the town and the Gondwana Rainforests for the first time, as well as the first concert performance of Ford’s In My Solitude.

On 29 April, the Brodsky Quartet celebrates its 50th anniversary with a selection of its finest repertoire. Originally founded as the Cleveland Quartet, previous collaborators include Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello and Björk, and Katie Noonan, whose 2016 album with the quartet, With Love and Fury, was nominated for the Best Classical Album ARIA Award. 

William Barton also joins forces with Aunty Marlene Cummins for Marloo’s Blues, in which Cummins tells her story of adversity and triumph as an Indigenous musician and activist. They will perform with the Djinama Yilaga Choir, who appear with the festival for the first time.

Musical family ties re-emerge in a concert called Sibling Revelry, where the works of the Mendelssohns, Boulangers and Australian twins Martin and Peter Wesley-Smith are celebrated alongside each other. The concert also features the teeming talent of Melbourne’s own siblings, Flora and Theo Carbo, who premiere a new work for the Festival. 

The 100th birthday of Hungarian-Austrian composer György Ligeti  – whose music was famously used in Stanley Kubrik’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey – will be marked by the Festival in a collaboration with the ANU School of Music on 1 May.

French quartet Quatuor Van Kuijk return to the festival for a lineup of Mendelssohn, Fauré and Schubert. They also perform at Taste of the Country alongside violist Katie Yap, pairing wine, music and food. The Festival’s breakfast series is back as French For Breakfast from 1–6 May; a series of daytime events will take place at Verity Lane Markets as well as two Saturday night events, presenting the work of local BIPOC artists.

Marlene Cummins. Photo supplied

Alexander Gavrylyuk performs a solo recital, Andrew Goodwin performs by candlelight, and Sonya Lifschitz presents a new multimedia performance at the National Gallery of Australia, all in honour of Ukraine.

This thread is followed with a headline event of Britten’s The Children’s Crusade, to be performed by the Luminescence Children’s Choir.  Theatre pioneer and poet Bertolt Brecht had his words set to music in a pacifist’s plea that finds itself as relevent as ever almost 50 years after its first performance.

The Festival also presents a rare performance of the recently rediscovered Dunera Mass. In September 1940, 2542 ‘enemy prisoners’ from Britain arrived in Melbourne and Sydney on board HMT Dunera. Most were Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi persecution, and included musicians, artists, writers, scientists and philosophers. Interned in camps near Hay and Orange in NSW and Tatura in NSW, they became know as the ‘Dunera Boys’. Released in 1941, many of them chose to remain in Australia. This CIMF program re-enacts a concert held in Hay in 1941, which featured music written on board the ship by Peter Meyers, who arranged for the Mass’s first performance.

Other new works include Elliott Gyger’s Solitaire, a solo viola work to be performed by James Wannan. Katie Yap and harpsichordist/keyboardist Donald Nicolson premiere Black Cockatoos as part of Yap’s Freedman Classical Fellowship project Multitudes, where she aims to find unity and cohesion within a multifaceted musical approach. Dan Walker also offers a new work for dance, to be hosted in the Arboretum as part of the Festival’s new collaboration with Australian Dance Party in celebration of Danceweek.

The Canberra International Music Festival runs 28 April – 7 May. Tickets for members go on sale on Friday 18 November at 10am. More information can be found here.

Chinese pianist Lang Lang has won plaudits for his mastery of the classical repertoire, performing with conductors from Daniel Barenboim to Simon Rattle. But his extrovert performances of works from Chinese folksongs to Metallica and Herbie Hancock have also inspired millions of children to learn the piano.

On his new album, The Disney Book, Lang Lang presents iconic movie melodies, reimagined in new versions written especially for him by some of the world’s leading arrangers.

Here, Lang Lang reveals the music that has helped to mould him as a performer.

‘Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 is my all-time favourite, as well as the piece that launched my career. I listened to it in my little dormitory at the Shengyang Conservatory, and I was amazed at how powerful classical music could be. Before that I had listened to beautiful Mozart, but one day I heard these huge chords at the opening of the concerto, and I thought, ‘Wow!! This is something.’ Later this concerto launched my career when I played it with the Chicago Symphony [standing in for André Watts], and I’ve played it many times since.

‘As a ten-year-old in 1992 I watched a video cassette of Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations on my small television. I’d never heard Bach played this way. Such a strong personality! You think of Bach as being economic, but the way Gould played it was like a Picasso – he totally changed the shape, the melody, the voice, the articulation. It was the same material, but he turned it into another, amazing creature.

More recently I played the Goldberg Variations in concert and I’ve recorded two versions, one a live recording at Bach’s Thomaskirche in Leipzig and another in the studio. Glenn Gould said it’s much better to record in a studio, and I also agree, but there’s something about the spontaneity of a live concert – those special moments, that you don’t get in the studio.

‘As students we are always practising exercises by composers like Czerny and Moszkowski, but Chopin’s 24 Études are on another level. They are not just about pure technique; they are about serving the music. This is why we have to practise, to make the bridge between the mechanics and real music, and this is what Chopin delivers in his Études. The first one I played was the ‘Black Key’ Étude, Op. 10 No. 5, and that was a very difficult piece for me at eight years old. Each year I learnt five or six more until, at 13, I played the complete Chopin Études in concert.

‘Nessun Dorma’, performed by Luciano Pavarotti, has to be one of my five choices. He has this special skill of making sunshine in the music. There are other great artists like Plácido Domingo or Jonas Kaufmann, but Pavarotti is The One. Somehow when he sings, that’s it – music is supposed to be like that. He has the talent, he has the high notes and he has that sound. It’s something you cannot practise – you have to be born with it, and what’s more, he brings this music to everyone, even people who don’t understand classical music.

‘I met Pavarotti in my late teens in Philadelphia, on one of his last tours, and I gave him a recording of my Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto to listen to. He wrote me an email which I still have, saying that he could see sunshine in my performance of the concerto. That was really inspirational for an 18-year-old!

‘We Are the World’ by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie is the song that breaks through all the barriers in this world. If we had more songs like that, there would be no wars. I play it often in charity concerts – including last year in Central Park during a charity concert for children.

‘I have a Foundation for children and I believe you have to be very creative in your approach to music education. There isn’t just one way of teaching; don’t stick rigidly to rules but let children find their own voice. My wife [pianist Gina Alice Redlinger] has been introducing our young son to music through some of the beautiful classical and crossover pieces from her album, Wonderworld. I think the pieces on my latest Disney album will be perfect for his early listening education. After all, my first experience of classical music came from an episode of the cartoon Tom and Jerry, ‘The Cat Concerto’!

Lang Lang’s new album The Disney Book is out now.

Lang Lang’s choices

Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1

Lang Lang (piano), Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Barenboim
Deutsche Grammophon DG 4742912

Bach Goldberg Variations, BWV 988

Glenn Gould (piano)
Sony Classical

Chopin: 24 Études

Vladimir Ashkenazy (piano)
Decca 4662502

Puccini: ‘Nessun Dorma’ from Turandot

Luciano Pavarotti
Decca 4780208

Michael Jackson/Lionel Richie ‘We Are the World’

Newport Classical celebrates the season with two weekends of holiday programs in December – Messiah at the Mansion featuring Ensemble Altera and The Choir School of Newport County in two performances on Sunday, December 4 at 1 pm and 3:30 pm at Rosecliff (548 Bellevue Ave.), and Classical Christmas at Emmanuel on Saturday, December 10 at 3 pm at Emmanuel Church (42 Dearborn St.), which concludes with sing-along carols and a festive reception. 

Messiah at the Mansion on December 4 features Handel’s iconic oratorio Messiah performed by Rhode Island’s fast-rising Ensemble Altera, led by Christopher Lowrey, and the Professional Choristers of The Choir School of Newport County, led by Peter Berton. Audiences will enjoy a boldly reimagined chamber version of this timeless classic, including the famous “Hallelujah Chorus,” surrounded by the splendor of Rosecliff mansion. Newport Classical is proud to present the second year of this new, annual holiday tradition, perfect for the whole family. Messiah at the Mansion is sponsored by Cynthia Sinclair through her generous support of The Choir School of Newport County.

Classical Christmas at Emmanuel on December 10 is a community celebration, featuring classical Christmas repertoire performed by Emmanuel Church Director of Music and Events Randy Elkins, conductor and organ; Newport Classical Board President Suzanna Laramee, piano; Lucas Swanson, trumpet; with vocalists (and sisters) Meaghan Kelly Brower, Alison Kelly Hosford, and Kate Kelly Longo;and the Emmanuel Church Choir. The collaborative performance will conclude with sing-along carols and a joyous reception hosted by the Parishioners of Emmanuel Church.

Up next on Newport Classical’s Chamber Series, the Parker Quartet performs at Recital Hall at Emmanuel Church on Friday, November 4, in a concert featuring Beethoven’s Op. 18, No. 4; Caroline Shaw’s Valencia; and Bartok’s String Quartet No. 5. The New York Times has described the Parker as, “something extraordinary,” while The Washington Post has praised the ensemble’s “exceptional virtuosity [and] imaginative interpretation.” On February 17, Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Martinez performs selections by historical and living composers including Caroline Shaw and Viet Cuong, plus Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, among others. Virtuoso 25-year-old violinist Randall Goosby will perform alongside pianist Ann Han on March 10, blending traditional and 20th century works of Beethoven, Grant Still, Ravel and Boulanger. Cellist Thomas Mesa and pianist Ilya Yakushev perform a program on April 21 that unites the music of Bach and Rachmaninoff with contemporary works by Lera Auerbach and Kevin Day. On May 19, the Kenari Quartet showcases the stylistic versatility of the saxophone in a program that features the music of Bach, Mendelssohn, Jennifer Higdon, and David Maslanka. Then on June 9, violinist William Hagen will conclude the 2022-23 Chamber Series with a program featuring rarely heard works by Louise Farrenc, Clara Schumann, Harry Thacker Burleigh, and more. The 2023 Newport Classical Music Festival is slated for July 4-23, 2023 with programming to be announced in late March.

For Newport Classical’s complete concert calendar, visit www.newportclassical.org/concerts.

Health & Safety

The safety of Newport Classical’s audience, musicians, staff, and volunteers continues to be the top priority, and with this in mind, the following precautions are currently in place, in line with industry best practices for indoor performances. Anyone attending a Chamber Series concert will need to show proof of full COVID-19 vaccination OR a negative PCR test taken in the prior 72 hours or antigen test taken in the prior 6 hours. Proof of vaccination or testing must be presented at time of entry.

In accordance with CDC and state guidelines, masks are no longer required, but recommended for indoor concerts. Newport Classical’s COVID-19 protocols remain subject to change and NC reserves the right to implement a masking requirement if cases begin to surge in Rhode Island. Any changes will be communicated to ticket holders in advance of their performance.

About Newport Classical:

Newport Classical is a premier performing arts organization that welcomes people of every age, culture, and background to intimate, immersive musical experiences. The organization presents world-renowned and up-and-coming artistic talents at stunning, storied venues across Newport – an internationally sought-after cultural and recreational destination.

Originally founded in 1969 as Rhode Island Arts Foundation at Newport, Inc. and previously known as Newport Music Festival (NMF), Newport Classical has a rich legacy of musical curiosity presenting the American debuts of over 130 international artists and rarely heard works and is most well-known for hosting three weeks of concerts in the summer in the historic mansions throughout Newport and Aquidneck Island. The organization has produced more than 2,000 concerts and hosted more than 1,000 musicians and singers. In 2021, the organization launched a new commissioning initiative – each year, Newport Classical will commission a new work by a Black, Indigenous, person of color, or woman composer as a commitment to the future of classical music.

Newport Classical is proud to be an essential pillar of New England’s cultural landscape, and to invest in the future of classical music as a diverse, relevant, and ever-evolving art form. Newport Classical’s four core programming initiatives – the iconic summer Music Festival taking place across Newport; the year-round Chamber Series at the organization’s home base Newport Classical Recital Hall at Emmanuel Church in downtown Newport; the free family-friendly Community Concerts held in green spaces around Aquidneck Island; and its newly expanded Music Education Residency program – illustrate the organization’s ongoing commitment to presenting “timeless music for today.”