Music

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.

I recall the first time I saw pianist Paul Grabowsky play. The occasion was the launch of his debut album Six by Three, recorded with his then trio of bassist Gary Costello and drummer Allan Browne. The recital took place on a Sunday afternoon, in 1989, if memory serves, in a downstairs gallery in Flinders Lane.

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.

Monday evening saw a curious pairing of repertoire and performers at the Melbourne Recital Centre. Part One was a program of English consort music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries played by the local viol ensemble Consortium, while Part Two featured Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

What is Gurrelieder? Arnold Schoenberg’s massive cantata, or oratorio, or symphonic psychodrama, is technically a song cycle, presenting ‘Songs of Gurre’, a small Danish settlement best known for its crumbling medieval castle. A five-part sequence of naturalist poems, by the Danish ‘Modern Breakthrough’ writer and botanist Jens Peter Jacobsen, became the text of Schoenberg’s cycle, in a lacklustre German translation by Robert Franz Arnold, to which Schoenberg made few revisions.

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. The composer suggested, furthermore, that the work was inspired by the contemplation of a soul’s journey from the natural world to the spiritual, no less.

Given the unalloyed delight of hearing the English pianist Paul Lewis’s magnificent traversal of the late sonatas of Schubert, it is hard to believe that these pieces, now so central to the piano repertoire, were once so peripheral, so neglected, as to be considered at worst non-existent or, at best, gemütlich items of curiosity. The latter view was neatly encapsulated by the great Schubert virtuoso, Alfred Brendel. In the early 1960s, he was on a recital tour of South America when Pope John XXIII died. In Buenos Aires, Brendel was politely asked if he could change his program to rid it of the Schubert Sonata in A. The reason: ‘It could arouse frivolous associations because of Lilac Time.’ Brendel explained that the sonata was ‘a profoundly tragic piece’, and played it as planned.