Peter Tregear
Peter Tregear is a performer, academic, and critic. Published works include Ernst Krenek and the Politics of Musical Style (2013).
Sometimes an orchestral program proves to be meaningful in ways that were never intended when it was first devised. Such was the case last Thursday and Saturday, when the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra gave its first local outing since the onset of public and internal turmoil last month sparked by the orchestra’s management’s cancellation of a planned concerto performance on 15 August by Austral ... (read more)
Since its first iteration in 2005, the annual Woodend Winter Arts Festival has grown to become one of the more successful regional arts events in Victoria. The picturesque town of Woodend is less than an hour away from Melbourne, and now also has a significant and growing population of tree-changers and retirees. Founding Artistic Director Jacqueline Ogeil has developed a program of literary, comm ... (read more)
Famously, Gustav Mahler once told Jean Sibelius that ‘[a] symphony must be like the world – it must contain everything.’ Running for more than ninety minutes, indeed often cited as the longest symphonic work in the standard orchestral repertoire, his third essay in this genre (first performed in its entirety in 1902, conducted by Mahler) arguably gets closest to realising such an ambition. T ... (read more)
What fortuitous programming it was by Victorian Opera to have a new production of Candide (1956) open just as interest in the composer of its delicious score peaks in the wake of Bradley Cooper’s biopic Maestro. Just as fortuitously, the production is a triumph; an auspicious start for incoming artistic director, Stuart Maunder. It makes as strong a case as one might for the value of opera compa ... (read more)
Sophie Rowell’s first year as Melbourne Chamber Orchestra’s Artistic Director continues to impress with its attractive and intelligent programming and strong musical leadership on stage.
Finnish virtuoso and current Artistic Director of the Australian National Academy of Music, Paavali Jumppanen, provides the core of the orchestra’s latest offering by performing (and directing from the keyb ... (read more)
Biographica, an opera in twelve scenes for one actor, five singers, and eleven musicians, was premièred to considerable acclaim by Sydney Chamber Opera at Carriageworks as part of the 2017 Sydney Festival. The creative team of composer Mary Finsterer and librettist Tom Wright subsequently had another success there with Antarctica as part of the Sydney Festival 2023; Finsterer and Wright can now b ... (read more)
Barry Humphries loved telling a story concerning a visit he and the painter David Hockney made to an art exhibition held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991. What drew them there was a reconstruction of the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition the Nazis had assembled in Munich in 1937 to help validate and promote their racial ideology. The crude argument it promoted was that the ... (read more)
It was not so long ago that Dietrich Buxtehude (1637–1707) was best known in classical music circles for the fact that a young J.S. Bach once made a 400-kilometre trek on foot to the North German Hanseatic city of Lübeck to hear him improvise on the organ. But Buxtehude also left an impressive oeuvre of liturgical music. Chief among it are the seven short cantatas he composed in 1680 for Holy W ... (read more)
After a welcome return to something approaching a pre-Covid normal season of training camps and concerts, the Australian Youth Orchestra has finished the year with a grand public concert at the Melbourne Town Hall.
Led by London-based Australian conductor – and AYO alumnus – Matthew Coorey, the program included another alumnus, Pei-Sian Ng, currently Principal Cellist of the Singapore Symphon ... (read more)