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Music

Freiburg Baroque Orchestra 

Melbourne Recital Centre
by
28 March 2025

The pairing of two Australian soloists – Siobhan Stagg (soprano) and Kristian Bezuidenhout (fortepiano) – in top form with one of the world’s finest period music ensembles, and in an all-Mozart program, was always likely to be a winning concert combination, and so it proved to be. This second of two Melbourne concerts by the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra during their current tour was delivered with consummate style to a delighted and near-capacity audience at the Melbourne Recital Hall.

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Mahler Resurrection Symphony 

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
by
28 February 2025

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. 

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Follies 

Victorian Opera
by
03 February 2025
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. ... (read more)

Beethoven Festival 

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
by
29 November 2024
Ein Mißgriff – a mistake, a blunder. That was Beethoven’s own assessment of that great crowd-pleaser, the finale of his Ninth Symphony. The composer Vaughan Williams, avowedly not a Beethovenian, was with the crowds on this one, claiming the movement as one of the four great choral works of all time – and since he was a Bachian, we can take from this that he is putting the movement alongside the Mass in B and the Passions according to Matthew and John. ... (read more)

Beethoven Festival 

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
by
25 November 2024
A dominant seventh of F resolving onto an F major chord (a perfect cadence); a dominant seventh of C resolving onto an A minor chord (an interrupted cadence); a dominant seventh of G resolving onto a G major chord (another perfect cadence): thus begins Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C major. ... (read more)

Kaddish: A Holocaust Memorial Concert 

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
by
01 November 2024
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 history it explored ‘more conscious, identified and understood’. ... (read more)

Melbourne International Jazz Festival 

Melbourne International Jazz Festival
by
29 October 2024
This year’s Melbourne International Jazz Festival (MIJF) was heavy on Grammy winners and nominees – including Esperanza Spalding, Makoto Ozone, Antonio Sánchez, Brandee Younger, Marcus Miller – a sure sign of the festival’s growing international status and capacity to attract some of the biggest names in jazz. None come bigger than Herbie Hancock, fourteen-time Grammy winner, who returned to MIJF for the first time since 2019, to headline Jazz at the Bowl, alongside bassist Marcus Miller. ... (read more)

Angela Hewitt in Recital 

by
11 October 2024

In a deftly pitched introduction to the evening’s program of Mozart, Bach, Handel, and Brahms, Angela Hewitt mentioned in passing that her first visit to Adelaide had been back in 1991. A packed and responsive Elder Hall audience was quick throughout the evening to show their support and enthusiasm for the artist, her choice of works, and her individual performances. 

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Fauré Requiem 

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
by
02 September 2024

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 Australian pianist Jayson Gillham.

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Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony 

Sydney Symphony Orchestra
by
12 August 2024

On 4 September 2024, the classical world of music, and especially its Austro-Germanic heartland, will celebrate the bicentenary of Anton Bruckner’s birth. Australia’s homage to this symphonic Titan is relatively modest, though these months do include performances of his Ninth (Brisbane, QSO, Johannes Fritzsch), and Fourth (Melbourne and Geelong, MSO, Daniel Carter; Hobart, TSO, Eivind Aadland), along with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s four performances of the Eighth Symphony, under Simone Young. Her global reputation increasingly rides on dynamic interpretations of large later-Romantic works, by Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, as well as Bruckner.

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