Peter Tregear
Peter Tregear is a performer, academic, and critic. Published works include Ernst Krenek and the Politics of Musical Style (2013).
One consequence of the popular success of Bradley Cooper’s biopic Maestro (2023) may well be that it helps to reinforce the cultural significance of Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony (Resurrection) for another generation. In the film we witness a faithful recreation of the final moments of Leonard Bernstein’s legendary performance of the Resurrection in Ely Cathedral in 1973. Apart from being ... (read more)
A year after their production of Bernstein’s Candide, Victorian Opera has made another winning foray into the masterworks of American musical theatre with this finely wrought and brilliantly executed new staging of Follies at the Palais Theatre in St Kilda.
Based on a book by James Goldman, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, the musical is loosely inspired by the Ziegfeld Follies, a da ... (read more)
This concert was the fourth, and perhaps most immediately relevant, in a series of concerts conceived over the past six years by artist-in-residence Christopher Latham for the Australian War Memorial. As with the Diggers’ Requiem (2018), Vietnam Requiem (2021), and the Prisoners of War Requiem (2022), Latham has created a narrative to accompany a series of musical works intended to make the hist ... (read more)
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)
