New Fashions Josie and the Emeralds with Lyra viol specialist, Sarah Mead (USA) Glebe Town Hall, 29 March 2014 For even the most enthusiastic of music lovers being confronted by five viol players (playing among them a variety of instruments from high treble to deep...
British Birds and Beasts and Bards, The Great Hall, the University of Sydney 25 and 26 March 2014 The Renaissance Players is one of the venerable musical institutions in Sydney. There have probably been hundreds of performers passing through its ranks over its more...
Ensemble Vinifera - Independent Theatre, Sunday 16 February 2014 And the ship sailed on… What does an ensemble do when a key player calls in sick on the morning of an afternoon concert? Answer: near desperate phone calls and plaintive begging. That was the experience...
Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung by Richard Wagner Conductor: Peitari Inkenen Director: Neil Armfield Opera Australia, Arts Centre Melbourne, November 2013 The Music If Wagner had been born a century later he may have been a great film composer....
In introducing this concert Guy Noble said he had questioned the sanity of Musical Director Sarah-Grace Williams when she announced that she was going to found an orchestra. It has managed to survive five years and has grown from a Chamber Orchestra to substantially...
This was the third and final of the series for 2013. The first had the theme of modernism. Alan Holley, the curator and one of the featured composers said there no theme in the third recital but I detected both modernism sitting alongside programmatic music with a...
Contemporary music can be challenge for many, for others it a declaration that music is for now and not just to be preserved an aural museum. Sometimes presenters of contemporary recitals make it more difficult by being entirely uncompromising in matters of...
There is something special about an a capella group that sings religiously-inspired music in a church with a generous acoustic, without too much reverberation. Thus it was at the Paddington Uniting Church on Friday 9 August. This group of experienced choristers under...
Britten’s Owen Wingate began life as a television opera that was completed in 1970. The production at the Carriageworks has a televisual quality about it, particularly its predominately matching the black and white debate between military and family duty, and the...
Philip Glass’s music is often misunderstood as repetitive. Superficially it is, but it shifts forward almost continuously. Maintaining its rhythmic progress is a challenge for instrumentalists and singers alike. Glass’ Akhenaten is of one of his three ‘portrait’...