Read more about the article The Fairy’s Kiss (Musica Viva)
Leila Josefowicz and John Novacek. Picture: © Alex Jamieson

The Fairy’s Kiss (Musica Viva)

Debussy’s Sonata in G minor opened the program: his last completed work, signed “Musicien français,” composed as he lay dying in wartime Paris, its continuous-variation writing looking backward to Couperin and Rameau rather than forward to Romantic bravura. Josefowicz played it with her entire body, the melodic line’s slow unspooling as much danced as bowed, the finale’s tumultuous joy registering as gesture before it registered as sound.

0 Comments
Read more about the article Amidst the Shades
Amidst the Shades album cover. Picture: Supplied

Amidst the Shades

And thanks not only to the seamless stylistic transitions from the Renaissance and Baroque material to the new works but to Hughes’s impossibly pure soprano so tastefully illuminated by lute and viol, every note here floats not in aspic but in aether.

0 Comments
Read more about the article Schumann’s Cello Concerto (West Australian Symphony Orchestra)
Ivan Karizna, conductor Otto Tausk and the West Australian Symphony Orchestra. Picture © Daniel James Grant

Schumann’s Cello Concerto (West Australian Symphony Orchestra)

Lovers of Robert Schumann’s lieder – and I count myself among those happy multitudes – will find song in everything he wrote. Judging by this intimate, lyrical performance, Belarusian-French cellist Ivan Karizna, conductor Otto Tausk and the West Australian Symphony Orchestra certainly seem to have done so in the composer’s Cello Concerto in A minor, Op. 129.

0 Comments
Read more about the article Festa Italiana
HIP Company in recital. Picture Tallulah Chong

Festa Italiana

What better way to wile away a winter’s hour than to feast on the music of spring? Even if one might sometimes wish for less warmth, more fire, in this program of Italian Baroque monodies, ground basses and chamber music, the proof is in the pudding. And what fine fare it is.

0 Comments
Read more about the article Poetry, Pianism & Pattern
Album cover for Charles Rosen Plays Modern Piano Music. Picture: Supplied

Poetry, Pianism & Pattern

Rosen insisted that to understand music in particular, and art and literature in general, one must take a historicist viewpoint, as well as engaging with it on many levels simultaneously.

0 Comments
Read more about the article It is enough
Wells. Picture: Will Yeoman

It is enough

The democratising and destructive nature of 12-tone music, whereby the selected tone row is both liberating and tyrannical, and its relationship to architecture, literature, and the visual arts, has long fascinated me. And, conceptually speaking, the Gesamtkunstwerk that is the Christian cathedral and its sonorous rites.

0 Comments