Music
Maria Callas Live: Remastered recordings 1949–1964 (Warner Classics) ★★★★1/2
Some singers – a gifted few – have voices that are so sumptuously individual that even one note instantly identifies them to the listener. In opera, Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti have that status, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in lieder, Elvis Presley and Louis Armstrong in rock and jazz. But none more so than Maria Callas ...
... (read more)Woyzeck In Winter (Landmark Productions / Galway International Arts Festival) ★★★★
The jukebox musical is a fairly recent phenomenon on theatre stages, but has proven to be a popular, and lucrative, method of stringing together a group of popular songs loosely held together by a sometimes attenuated narrative. Mamma Mia! – the collection of ABBA hits that has been running in London since 1999 – is one of the most ...
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It seemed apt that Adam Simmons chose to perform his large-scale suite The Usefulness of Art in a space generally devoted to art and theatre, rather than in one of Melbourne’s jazz clubs. Incorporating visual design by Christine Crawshaw and Diokno Pasilan – wooden chairs hung from ...
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Equally welcome was the second opportunity to hear Massenet’s opera Thaïs (1894) within a matter of weeks. Once again it was a concert version – a ‘mid-season gala’ from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. ABR Arts wrote about Opera Australia’s recent concerts in the Sydney Town Hall ...
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Since 2011 many senior Australian musicians from international orchestras have gathered each year to form the Australian World Orchestra. This year’s project included a national tour of a chamber ensemble of eight (AWO Chamber 8), with masterclasses and lessons to young ...
... (read more)Das Lied von der Erde and Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony (Melbourne Symphony Orchestra) ★★★★
Schubert’s most famous ‘unfinished’ work, the Eighth Symphony, is unconventional in a number of ways, its B minor key and the opening movement’s 3/4 pulse not least of them. Mahler’s grand Lied is a match in strangeness – setting, as it does, a miscellany of ancient ...
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It is not every day that Sydney audiences witness the première of a composition by a major twentieth-century composer, yet this is what happened on 30 June in the Opera House: one of Igor Stravinsky’s earliest works, the Funeral Song, op.5, received its first performance on ...
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As one of the jewels in this year’s program by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, rarely performed in Australia, has finally returned to the Sydney Opera House. This is not the first time that the SSO has ventured into opera ...
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It has been almost forty years since Robyn Archer first performed A Star is Torn, her one-woman cabaret honouring the too-short lives of female singers from Bessie Smith to Janis Joplin. Playing for a year on the West End, and spawning both an album (in 1980) and a book ...
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Marking its twentieth anniversary, the Melbourne International Jazz Festival (MIJF) had much to celebrate in 2017. I can vividly recall the first Festival in 1998, a weekend-long event attended by what seemed like a handful of us, moving in unison between city venues ...
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