Zoltán Szabó

Daniel Barenboim, then primarily a pianist, last visited Sydney in 1970. He and his wife, Jacqueline du Pré, performed the complete piano and cello sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven at the Sydney Town Hall. They also visited the site of the Sydney Opera house, which opened three years later ...

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s late-October subscription concerts offered an interesting juxtaposition by pairing the final symphonies of Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven. These masterworks illustrate the enormous changes that revolutionised symphonic writing within a few decades from the last decades of the eighteenth century.

Local interest in Scandinavian film and theatre seems to be rising, helped perhaps by the popularity of recent Scandinavian television noir. In the past two years, Belvoir Street Theatre has produced Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts (1882) and An Enemy of the People (1883) ...

Sydney Symphony Orchestra is renowned for its meaningful programs, where the individual items are connected through some historical, musical, or even technical thread. Whether most members of the audience notice that the program focuses on great Romantic masterpieces ...

This week’s subscription concerts of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra began with the Symphony No.1 in G minor by Russian composer Vasily Sergeyevich Kalinnikov; a decision by no means lacking reason or merit, yet certainly courageous. One could argue that seven decades after its last performance by the SSO in 1946 its time ...

The concept of combining the excellence of Australian musicians working around the globe and getting them together for an annual series of concerts, directed by some of the most renowned conductors, is a brilliant one. Brother and sister team Alexander Briger and Gabrielle Thompson, the ...

Dmitri Shostakovich’s rarely performed first opera, The Nose (1930), premièred in the Sydney Opera House on 21 February. To add to the ‘firsts’: this was Barrie Kosky’s début at Covent Garden in 2016, it is Kosky’s first work for Opera Australia in almost twenty years, and this is the first professional production ...

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra opened its 2018 season with three interconnected programs, presenting a cross-section of the mature orchestral compositions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s last seven years. All three programs followed the same structure, albeit with different works on each night. Piano concertos received ...

The year of J.S. Bach’s death, 1750, is usually considered to mark the end of the Baroque era in music. It only makes sense that the Classical period should start directly thereafter. But is that really so? Art and its history does not necessarily follow clear borderlines, and compositions written around the middle of the eighteenth ...