Zoltán Szabó
Zoltán Szabó is a cellist and musicologist. Having migrated from his native Hungary to Australia in 1985, he worked with the Australian Chamber Orchestra in Sydney until 1991, when he became Principal Cello with Opera Australia. In 2017, he was awarded with a Doctor of Philosophy degree (PhD). Currently, he is teaching music history and musicology at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
The Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s late-October subscription concerts offered an interesting juxtaposition by pairing the final symphonies of Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven. These masterworks illustrate the enormous changes that revolutionised symphonic writing within a few decades from the last decades of the eighteenth century.
Haydn chiselled the form to achieve extraordinary finesse in ... (read more)
Local interest in Scandinavian film and theatre seems to be rising, helped perhaps by the popularity of recent Scandinavian television noir. In the past two years, Belvoir Street Theatre has produced Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts (1882) and An Enemy of the People (1883).
Ibsen is actually mentioned in Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, adapted from film to theatre by Joanna Murray-Smith and pre ... (read more)
This week’s subscription series of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra included the world première of a new Australian cello concerto by Brett Dean, bookended by venerable late-nineteenth-century works by Edward Elgar and Johannes Brahms.
Elgar’s Serenade in E minor for strings, Op.20, with its nostalgic sonorities, opened the program. Like Richard Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll (written some twenty y ... (read more)
Sydney Symphony Orchestra is renowned for its meaningful programs, where the individual items are connected through some historical, musical, or even technical thread. Whether most members of the audience notice that the program focuses on great Romantic masterpieces, a particular year in history, or the works of one composer is another matter. The program of this week’s subscription concerts, h ... (read more)
This week’s subscription concerts of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra began with the Symphony No.1 in G minor by Russian composer Vasily Sergeyevich Kalinnikov; a decision by no means lacking reason or merit, yet certainly courageous. One could argue that seven decades after its last performance by the SSO in 1946, its time has come again. There is also a subtle link in the programming, since the o ... (read more)
The concept of combining the excellence of Australian musicians working around the globe and getting them together for an annual series of concerts, directed by some of the most renowned conductors, is a brilliant one. Brother and sister team Alexander Briger and Gabrielle Thompson, the artistic and administrative leaders of the Australian World Orchestra (AWO), forged an enviable brand which has ... (read more)
Dmitri Shostakovich’s rarely performed first opera, The Nose (1930), premièred in the Sydney Opera House on 21 February. To add to the ‘firsts’: this was Barrie Kosky’s début at Covent Garden in 2016, it is Kosky’s first work for Opera Australia in almost twenty years, and this is the first professional production of this grotesque and satirical opera in Sydney, and possibly Australia. ... (read more)
The Sydney Symphony Orchestra opened its 2018 season with three interconnected programs, presenting a cross-section of the mature orchestral compositions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s last seven years. All three programs followed the same structure, albeit with different works on each night. Piano concertos received a particular emphasis in this series, with two of them being performed every nigh ... (read more)
The year of J.S. Bach’s death, 1750, is usually considered to mark the end of the Baroque era in music. It only makes sense that the Classical period should start directly thereafter. But is that really so?
Art and its history does not necessarily follow clear borderlines, and compositions written around the middle of the eighteenth century may not fit comfortably behind these well-known labels ... (read more)