Category: The Diary

Selby & Friends

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Monday November 2 at 3 pm

On this occasion, these first things sponsored by Selby & Friends are from Brahms, who is going to enjoy a bumper month here in Melbourne. Kathryn Selby and her colleagues/friends at this piano trio recital – violin Andrew Haveron from the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s Timo-Veikko Valve – are playing instances of the composer making his initial forays into various chamber music genres. To start, Haveron and Selby perform the Violin Sonata No. 1 in G from 1879 which falls gently on the ear from its first easy-going lilt of a melody in 6/4 to the tranquillo coda at the end with its farewell elongation of the last movement’s first motif. Then Valve and Selby work through the ardent Cello Sonata No. 1 in E minor of 1865 with its riveting canonic dialogue starting at bar 57 of the first movement, not to mention its brilliantly solid counterpoint across the triplet-rich final Allegro. To end, all three players combine for the spirit-lifting Piano Trio No. 1 in B Major from 1854. In fact, we usually hear the revised version from 35 years later; its emotional warmth and fervour have made it a favourite with every ensemble working in this format, and a masterpiece that Selby has presented many times in this series, always with high success. A standard ticket costs $89, concession and student $69, Senior $87, child under 12 free – and always the transaction fee of between $4 and $8.50 for booking online or by phone. Hard to avoid this fiscal sting if you’re attending the popular afternoon performance.

This program will be repeated at 7 pm.

HAYDN’S OXFORD

Australian Haydn Ensemble

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Wednesday November 4 at 7 pm

It is, and it isn’t. The Sydney-based Australian Haydn Ensemble, finishing its first round of visits to Melbourne for the year, is presenting three Haydn symphonies – all latecomers in the composer’s output – but not in their original colours. No: we’re to hear these works in arrangements by the impresario Peter Salomon who was responsible for the composer’s last twelve essays in the form. The first we hear is outside the Salomon-commissioned dozen. The Oxford Symphony No. 92 of 1789 was not actually written for the 1791 conferral of a Mus. Doc. on the composer by the university, but recycled after premiering in Paris two years before. Then comes No. 95 in C minor, written in 1791 and the third in the composer’s chain of ‘London’ symphonies written for Salomon – the only one in a minor key. Last comes tonight’s best-known, the Drumroll No. 103 of 1795 and the second-last in Haydn’s total output. As for the Salomon format (which I’ve not seen for any of these works), the forces used are flute, string quartet and piano which are all present with some extras in our visiting ensemble: flute Mikaela Oberg, violins Skye McIntosh and Matthew Greco, violas Karina Schmitz and Rafael Font, cello Daniel Yeadon, and double bass Pippa Macmillan. A standard seat costs $65, Senior $55, concession $45. You also have to step up with the Recital Centre’s transaction charge of between $4 and $8.50 if you book online or by phone; as the event takes place in the limited space of the Salon, this extra charge is pretty unavoidable.

A LISTENING AIR AND MEXICO TOUR FAREWELL

Affinity Quartet

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Friday November 6 at 2 pm

A local not-for-profit organization, the Affinity Quartet comprises violins Shane Chen and Nicholas Waters, viola Josef Hanna, and cellist Mee Na Lojewski. All of them have put in their time at the Australian National Academy of Music, Lojewski founding the Affinity group the year after she ‘graduated’, in 2015. This afternoon, the players celebrate the release of their first CD for the Da Vinci Publishing label. A Listening Air is all-Australian its tracks including works by Brett Dean, Peter Sculthorpe, Thomas Misson, and Alice Chance, whose seven-minute contribution is being played here: Gifts from a Thieving Bluebird, written in 2024 for the Affinities and premiered by them in October of that year. As the group is touring Mexico, they are complimenting their hosts with Silvestre Revueltas’ one-movement Musica de feria of 1932 which lasts for a bit over nine minutes. Then the group hits the mainstream with Beethoven: his middle Razumovsky, No. 8 in E minor, published in 1808. This is the one that uses the same melody as Mussorgsky did for his Slava chorus at the Prologue’s end in Boris Godunov. Mind you, the composer’s interpolation of this theme russe is more than a little perfunctory, if not intentionally clumsy. The recital is scheduled to last for about 70 minutes and ordinary tickets are $65, concessions $55, students and Under 30s $30. You have to face up to the Recital Centre’s booking fee of between $4 and $8.50 which demonstrates that, while the Affinity group might be not-for-profit, the MRC can hardly claim the same.

This program will be repeated at 7 pm.

LATVIAN RADIO CHOIR & GENEVIEVE LACEY

Musica Viva Australia

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday November 7 at 7 pm

Not strangers to Australia, the Latvian Radio Choir definitely toured Sydney in 2015 for that city’s start-of-year festival. Here they are again, appearing for Musica Viva Australia under artistic director Kaspars Putnins, collaborating with Australian recorder virtuoso Genevieve Lacey in a mixed program that goes back as far as Palestrina for some diminutions (perhaps those constructed by Rognoni?) on the five-part motet Pulchra es anima mea of 1584, as well as Jacob van Eyck for one of Lacey’s party pieces: Engels Nachtegaeltje – a bird-imitation gem first published in 1644. As a passing reverence to ante-contemporary choral music, the choir presents Mendelssohn’s 8-part setting of Psalm 22, Mein Gott, warum hast du mich verlassen. from 1844. Then we hit the reasonably modern with Estonian writer Arvo Part and his Magnificat of 1989 and 2001 Nunc dimittis, alongside some home-grown Latvian music in Peteris Vasks‘ eight-line Our Mothers’ Names (written in 1877, revised in 2003) which has to do with pet bird names given in affection to women. A switch to America for Caroline Shaw‘s 2017 setting of Psalm 84 with some unexpected choral effects, including the final bars’ imitation of pattering rain. Then follow two new commissions. The first is Ceremony of Swans by another Latvian composer, Eriks Esenvalds, to lines from the third book by Australian author Alexis Wright. The other is a collaboration between real-life partners Australian-American Hollis Taylor and Australian experimenter Jon Rose. This is Bird on Byrd about which I can find out nothing but assume it will involve Lacey for some twitterings as Taylor is a well-known ornithologist. The tickets are the usual Musica Viva nightmare: dividing the Murdoch Hall into four sections, standard prices range from $65 to $163 (concessions move from $18, to $15, to $12 for the top three levels), Under 40s pay $49, Under 18s pay $20. As usual, you have to meet the transaction fee charged by the Recital Centre of between $4 and $8.50 if you order online or by phone. There are only a few seats left, so this expensive grift is unavoidable.

LA BOHEME

Opera Australia

Regent Theatre Melbourne

Saturday November 7 at 7:30 pm

Can’t wait to get back into the State Theatre. Meanwhile, Opera Australia has to cope with the wide-mawed Regent in Collins Street. Coming towards the end of what the company is laughably calling its Melbourne Season, we are faced with this very popular Puccini, given ten times across the month. The company presents two Mimis – Galina Cheplakova and Valeria Sepe, alongside two Rodolfos – Kang Wang and Paride Cataldo – in alternating performances. The rest of the cast is singular: Alexandra Flood (Musetta), Luke Gabbedy (Marcello), Stephen Marsh (Schaunard), David Parkin (Colline), Clifford Plumpton (Benoit and the Sergeant), Simon Meadows (Alcindoro), Tom Hamilton (Officer), and Benjamin Rasheed (Parpignol). Orchestra Victoria will be directed by Finnegan Downie Dear, the whole production in the hands of Constantine Costi, sets by Dan Barber, costumes from Sabina Myers, lighting controlled by Morgan Moroney. We all delight in the sweeping melodies of Act 1, that dazzling confusion provided by the Opera Australia Chorus and the Opera Australia Children’s Chorus throughout Act 2, the bleak staging and warm resignation in the Barriere d’Enfer scene, and the emotional misery at the opera’s end. But, to its eternal credit, the work moves swiftly in both its stage action and in a strikingly inventive score. Tickets range in an elephantine stretch from $40 to $295 and there seems to be a booking fee of $9.80 – nice work if you can get it.

This performance will be repeated on Sunday November 8 at 2 pm, Tuesday November 10 at 7:30 pm, Wednesday November 11 at 7:30 pm, Thursday November 12 at 7:30 pm, Friday November 13 at 7:30 pm,. Saturday November 14 at 7:30 pm, Sunday November 15 at 2 pm, Tuesday November 17 at 7:30 pm, and Wednesday November 18 at 7:30 pm.

BRAHMS FESTIVAL: FIRST SYMPHONY & PIANO CONCERTO

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Saturday November 7 at 7:30 pm

Here the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under chief conductor Jaime Martin begins a celebration of all things Brahms, beginning with two large-scale scores that dominated their fields for many years, not least because the C minor Symphony took about 21 years to emerge eventually in 1876, realizing expectations that had fallen on the composer to continue German dominance in the form and thereby maintaining a tradition that belonged more in popular imagination than in reality. For all that, the work is a massive construct and its broad paragraphs engross any fair-minded listener. When it comes to the D minor Piano Concerto of 1858, the sense of power, even in the central Adagio, is continuous, with several sterling outbursts that, once heard, are hard to forget. More than in many another concerto, this one depends on a sustained powerful delivery for the driving trills of the first movement and the hurtling punches of the finale which begin in the first bar and resurface across the length of this rondo. For soloist, we are offered Denis Kozhukhin, Russian-born and winner of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in 2010. As far as I can tell (and there’s only a recording of some Brahms solo works to jusge), he’s amply hard-hitting when required (also see his Prokofiev War Sonatas recording of 2013) and should hold his own in a hefty give-and-take with the MSO throughout this work. Tickets range from $79 to $136, concessions are $5 cheaper, and the MSO charges $8 if you order online or by phone. The only space that has a sizeable number of seats available is the balcony – a long way from the action.

AUSTRALIAN STRING QUARTET X PARVYN

Melbourne Recital Centre and Australian String Quartet

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Monday November 9 at 6 pm

Houston, we have fusion – in spades, actually. Fot this program of darts and dashes, the Australian String Quartet – violins Dale Barltrop and Francesca Hiew, viola Chris Cartlidge, cello Michael Dahlenburg – sit down with vocalist Parvyn and her husband, multi-tasker Josh Bennett, to present very little that I’ve heard, a few doses of the contemporary, and a swag of Punjabi songs. To begin, the quartet airs Canadian-based writer Marcus Goddard‘s Allaqi of 2009, followed by our own Erkki Veltheim and his What You See, which I assume will involve Bennett, given the composer’s sonority-seeking life trajectory. A little puzzling is the fact that this is also the title of a song by Parvyn, but I’m sure all will come clear on the night. Then we hear a shabad or hymn by Arjan Dev Ji, the fifth Sikh guru who flourished in the late 16th century; I think this is a single vocal line, to be given by Parvyn. Speaking of whom, we now hear four of her own songs: Divine and Huna Lai Jio from the album Maujuda released in 2024, alongside Jara and Anchor from her CD Sa published in 2021. A vault in time back to Schubert for the Andante variations movement from his Death and the Maiden D minor String Quartet of 1824: a bleak set of pages, but that might be the recital’s intended ambience, Last comes a piece by Melbourne-born producer and sound engineer (at least, I hope he is) Max Dowling: Something 29. It’s impossible to find out anything about this piece, even if you wade through the thousand-and-one samples of this artist’s work online. Anyway, all this fits into an hour’s duration, for which you pay $55, with concession holders and students both paying $50. As well, you face the Recital Centre’s transaction fee of anything between $4 and $8.50 if you book online or by phone; at the moment, there’s high availability, so I’d be tempted to turn up at the box-office with cash in hand.

85 SECONDS TO MIDNIGHT

Changing Wilds Ensemble

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Tuesday November 10 at 6 pm

This recital’s title refers to our position on the Doomsday Clock: a chastening realisation for us all and a call to arms from this sextet of performers. The Changing Wilds Ensemble is headed by Robert McIntyre (composer, co-artistic director, curator) and includes Georgina Lewis (piano, co-artistic director), Isabel Hede (violin), Gemma Kneale (cello), Jessica Aszodi (mezzo) and Savanna Wegman (poet). Reinforcing the ensemble’s dedication to environmental and climate consciousness, they are performing McIntyre’s Our Duty to Care song cycle from 2023 for soprano and piano trio with texts by Wegman. McIntyre is also represented by Time, a passage for solo piano written last year, as well as a ‘straight’ piano trio, enjoying its world premiere and taking impetus from the night’s over-arching title. We begin with some Arvo Part – Fur Alina for piano of 1976 that helped launch his tintinnabuli mode of expression. And we end in Iceland through Olafur Arnalds‘ Zero, a song coming from his 2020 album some kind of peace. Also in the middle of the evening appear three more Australian writers: Stuart Greenbaum with his 800 Million Heartbeats, probably in its piano trio version of 2007; his one-time student Laura Abraham‘s 2023 study for cello and piano, Tomorrow, and years away; and Alex Turley, represented by No. 6 from the eight movements in his Violin Sonata of 2024. The event lasts an hour and seating costs $55, concession $45, to which you add the Recital Centre’s excessive transaction fee of somewhere between $4 and $8.50.

CHAMBER MUSIC BY BRAHMS

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Tuesday November 10 at 7:30 pm

Three musicians only perform in this recital sponsored by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. For reasons that I can’t explain, we begin with some Mendelssohn. Guest pianist Denis Kozhukhin is playing selections from the Songs Without Words, written between 1829 and 1845; well, he’s got 48 pieces he can choose from and, with a bit of luck, he’ll pick some that we haven’t heard/played too many times. Then we come to the night’s main burden in two Brahms scores. To begin, Kozhukhin performs the Sonata No. 3 in F minor, composed in 1853 and a challenge to pianists ever since, requiring stamina and sensitivity in combination, especially in its outer broad-beamed movements. Then comes the composer’s Horn Trio of 1865 which always sounds to me as coming from much later in the composer’s life. Kozhukhin will be abetted by concertmaster Natalie Chee and principal horn Nicolas Fleury; the interesting factor will be whether or not the latter plays a valved or a natural instrument (Brahms preferred the latter). Tickets are unfathomably complicated; the Murdoch Hall is divided into four levels of expense, from $75 to $105, with concession holders and full-time students paying $5 less (following the MSO’s niggardly attitude to the very young and the very old), with Under 40s getting a seat anywhere for $20. We all face the Recital Centre’s transaction fee of anywhere between $4 and $8.50 if booking online or by phone. Apparently, the upper levels are not being used and there are currently over 200 stalls left. Tempting to risk showing up ticketless on the night . . .

BRAHMS FESTIVAL: SECOND SYMPHONY & CONCERTO

Melbouyrne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday November 12 at 7:30 pm

Round Three of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra‘s celebration of Brahms (why?) gives us some big next tries in the symphony and concerto forms. Again under chief conductor Jaime Martin, the orchestra will work its way through the summery haze of the comfortingly relaxed Symphony No. 2 in D of 1877, the most emotionally optimistic in the cycle of four and a splendid exhibition ground for the orchestra’s horns from the second bar on. The finale’s high spirits equal anything you hear in the serenades, the Academic Festival Overture for louts, or the St. Anthony Chorale Variations (well, the last one). Our evening’s first half is taken up with the large Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat of 1881, which also flatters the horn right from the start. Again, the MSO is making best use of guest Denis Kozhukhin who brings a brilliant technical armoury to this compendium score which resolves itself into the most amiable and sprightly of conclusions. Both symphony and concerto sit among the most approachable of Brahms’ works; a pity we rarely (never?) get to hear them matched. Yet again, seats cost between $75 and $127, with concessions a terse $5 cheaper; add on the MSO’s $8 booking fee if you go online or phone to be sure of hearing the concert live. There are more balcony and stalls seats available than for the first event in this series but, to avoid the surcharge by paying cash on the night, you need to keep an eye on the MSO website closer to the date.

BRAHMS FESTIVAL: THIRD & FOURTH SYMPHONIES

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Saturday November 14 at 7:30 pm

A double-whammy here to finish off the symphonic output of this great composer, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under chief conductor Jaime Martin not tempted to split the works and ally them with the two concertos that this festival eschews: the Violin and the Double. Anyway, we hear the Symphony No. 3 in F, quickly accomplished in 1883 and the shortest of the four. Its outer movements have storms and highly-organized outbursts, but each of them ends quietly, even placidly in the case of the reminiscing finale. With the last symphony in E minor, we come to a score that delights and astonishes (quietly) at every turn. Its first Allegro is a combination of tragedy and meandering warmth, moving to the consolatory Romantic for an Andante that honours the horn at its opening and closing bars. Suddenly, it’s Kermesse time for a pounding scherzo that also combines benign rusticity with sentimental warbling. But nothing surprises like the final passacaglia which is almost unrelievedly grim, even allowing for that Blessed Spirits flute solo at bar 97 which seems to me the core of this movement, if not the whole work, which stays remorslessly in E minor for the final cadence. You can keep your Mahlerian swoops and Brucknerian monoliths: this finale speaks to us with more eloquent simplicity and an assurance without bombast. Tickets continue to cost between $75 and $127, with that mealy-mouthed $5 reduction for concession holders. And you have to find the $8 flat transaction fee for ordering online or by phone. So perhaps don’t. This event has the most available seats – plenty all over the hall – at the time of writing (October 9), but then it has no soloist.

ANNE SOFIE VON OTTER & KRISTIAN BEZUIDENHOUT

Classical Music Australia

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Wednesday November 18 at 7:30 pm

Once again, the Classical Music Australia organization has brought some remarkable musicians to town for an audience that pays what it can. Tonight, we hear Swedish mezzo Anne Sofie von Otter, who is nothing if not versatile. She will be accompanied by pianist Kristian Bezuidenhout, a guest with the Australian Chamber Orchestra two years ago. As for what they’re performing, there’s lots of Schubert and a bracket from 19th century Swedish writer Adolf Fredrik Lindblad: Nattviolen, Varning, Man tro? Jo, jo!, Vaggvisa, and En sommardag – I’ve no idea when any of them were written. The opening Schubert catch-all begins with Der Einsame (1825), An den Mond (two versions, both from 1815), Der Wanderer an den Mond (1826), Erntelied (1816), Die Sommernacht (1815), So lasst mich scheinen (the third version of 1826), Gretchen am Spinnrade (1814), and Wiegenlied (1826). The second group all come from the Schwanengesang song-cycle of 1828: Liebesbotschaft, Standchen, Abschied, Die Stadt, Am Meer, Der Doppelganger, and Die Taubenpost. The event is scheduled to last for 105 minutes, including a 20-minute interval, and the prices occupy a wide spectrum with the top standard costing $145 and the lowest Supported ones costing $40; you can find out from the Recital Centre website where you fit in. What you can’t avoid is the obligatory and (in this context) nasty Recital Centre transaction fee of between $4 and $8.50 if you order online or by phone. At the moment, about half the stalls are available but that could be because of little publicity.

BRAHMS’ GERMAN REQUIEM

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday November 19 at 7:30 pm

The only element of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra‘s festival that gets a repeat, this work (finished in 1868) bears witness through its encore performance to Melbourne’s ingrained love of choral music. The extra run-through might also have come about because of the presence of Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel who will be singing the two solo interpolations for Herr, lehre doch mich and Denn wir haben hie keine bleibende Stadt. The Requiem‘s other soloist will be soprano Alexandra Flood, who will have the great joy of floating seamlessly above the MSO Chorus in the luminous Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit. Jaime Martin, the orchestra’s chief conductor, directs this and the bagatelles that precede: the traditional spiritual Deep River, Alma Androzzo’s gospel song If I Can Help Somebody from about 1945, At the River from the 1952 Set 2 of Copland’s Old American Songs, and the Welsh hymn Calon lan from the 1890s. I’m assuming that Terfel will sing these four; he’s recorded them all, some several times. Preceding all of this, we hear the brisk and bright Concert Overture by 20th century Welsh composer Grace Williams, written in 1932 and dismissed as worthless by the composer herself. All very entertaining, I’m sure, but an oddly miscellaneous introduction to Brahms’ choral masterwork. Seats range from $81 to $139, concessions $5 cheaper, and always you encounter the MSO’s booking fee of $8 if you book online or by phone. Currently, there are plenty of seats available in the balcony and stalls, if you read the MSO’s website counting of ‘100+’ for both levels as being an understatement.

This program will be repeated on Saturday November 21 at 7:30 pm.

BEETHOVEN’S PASTORAL

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Eliusabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday November 21 at 7:30 pm

Saying goodbye over this weekend to 2026’s national touring action, tbe Australian Chamber Orchestra takes us back to 2020 when it recorded the Beethoven Symphony No. 6 in F, a programmatic delight completed in 1808 and a source of Disney-inspired imagery for those of us born at a certain time, Not that Fantasia brings back universally happy memories: my father said it was booed off the screen by the troops in wartime New Guinea. Today, however, in these piping times of peace (ho ho), we’re quite inclined to indulge in cheerful feelings on arriving in the country – certain parts of it, anyway. As a preface, we’re to hear the Coriolan Overture from 1807, a score dripping with tragedy from its opening blasts to the muffled pizzicato ending. Artistic director Richard Tognetti plays the violin solo, ACO principal Timo-Veikko Valve assumes the collegial cello line and Konstantin Shamray takes on the piano part in Beethoven’s Triple Concerto of 1803-4 which became one of my favourite scores when the music audio channel on a flight back from Europe got stuck on this work and part of Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette– a repetition that seared into my brain for hours. That apart, this work is atypically buoyant and happy in its sharing of responsibilities between soloists, coming to a felicitous conclusion with its bounding polonaise finale. Tha Murdoch Hall is divided into five strata for price differentials, $199 at the top and $69 at the bottom; you can get $10 concessions in the middle three levels; full-time students pay $30 for the bottom three levels and Under 35s pay $35 for the same strata. It’s not apparent on the Recital Centre’s website for this event but the transaction fee of anywhere between $4.50 and $8 obtains if you order online or by phone; there aren’t many seats left for tonight so my cash-at-the-box-office option isn’t really a goer, more’s the pity.

This program will be repeated on Sunday November 22 in Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne at 2:30 pm, and again in the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall on Monday November 23 at 7:30 pm.

WATERSHED: THE DEATH OF DR. DUNCAN

Opera Australia

Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne

Saturday November 21 at 7:30 pm

It was a national tragedy, the Adelaide murder by drowning of law lecturer George Duncan in 1972. Exacerbating its effects, nobody was ever found guilty of killing the gay academic, although suspicion fell heavily on three members of the South Australia Police Vice Squad who were eventually acquitted. A half-century after the event, playwright Alana Valentine and author Christos Tsiolkas collaborated with Brisbane composer Joe Twist to construct this oratorio, presented here as part of Opera Australia‘s ridiculously small Melbourne season. In the twin roles of Duncan and state premier Don Dunstan, we hear South Australian baritone Mark Oates, while bass Pelham Andrews takes on three parts: Mick O’Shea (a constable for a while wrongly grouped with the three accused police officers), Cop and Lawyer. A Lost Boy is sung/acted by Swedish/Maori artist Blake Appleqvist. Brett Weymark conducts Orchestra Victoria and the Opera Australia Chorus, Neil Armfield directs, Ailsa Paterson is set and costume designer, Nigel Levings handles the lights, and Lewis Major is the choreographer – so it’s an oratorio with a difference. The work lasts 100 minutes, and you’d assume there’ll be no interval. Tickets range from $30 to $168, pensioners and students enjoy the same reduction (less than $20) and children pay about half-price. The booking fee for an online or phone transaction is about $10 for a good seat, but you’ve got to ask: why is there any surcharge at all? I’m sure of the dedication of all involved, and all credit to the state that first decriminalised homosexuality in this country as a partial result of this terrible event, and which also sponsored this work. But why make it so hard/expensive to see the piece?

This performance will be repeated on Sunday November 22 at 2 pm, Wednesday November 25 at 7:30 pm, Thursday November 26 at 7:30 pm, Friday November 27 at 7:30 pm, and Saturday November 28 at 7:30 pm

A CLASSICAL CHRISTMAS

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday November 26 at 7:30 pm

You’ll find plenty of classical music in this program from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the well-known Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan. He’s a big name in choral music, although we’ve heard precious little of his music here. Nevertheless, he’s taking on some mighty Christmas music, including bleeding chunks from Bach’s Chrismas Oratorio – those six cantatas clubbing together for the season, amalgamated by the composer in 1734 and taking us from Nativity to Epiphany. Preceding these bits, we hear some of MacMillans’s own 2019 Christmas Oratorio which takes in everything textual from the Bible to Milton, and a lot musical including mock-Renaissance, contemporary British choral, percussion bursts and Hollywood lavishness. The Scot’s best-known choral work follows: O radiant dawn of 2007, one of his Strathclyde Motets and a member of the ‘O’ Antiohons. Before the final brace of popularities in Berlioz’s L’adieu des bergers and Handel’s Hallelujah! Chorus, MacMillan has inserted Respighi’s Botticelli Triptych which qualifies for this occasion by having an Adoration of the Magi movement inserted between La Primavera and The Birth of Venus: a meditation between two fabulously orchestrated tone poems. The Choir of Trinity College Melbourne provides the singing; you hope it’s in an expanded form for this large room. And there’s little likelihood that the two oratorios will feature any solos as no individuals are listed on the MSO website’s bill of fare. For a standard ticket, you’re up for anywhere between $75 and $139, concessions an astounding $5 cheaper, with children (Under 18s) getting in for $20. You also have the $8 booking fee if you arrange your seats online or by phone; at the moment (October 10), you can find plenty of space on all three levels of Hamer Hall. Keep an eye on the website if you want to gamble on strolling up on the night with a fistful of shekels.

This program will be repeated on Saturday November 28 at 2 pm.

DRIFTING CURRENTS

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday November 26 at 7:30 pm

On this program, the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra, led by artistic director Sophie Rowell, has included two well-known scores for string orchestra. To begin the night, the ensemble plays Respighi’s Suite No. 3 of Ancient Airs and Dances, written in 1931 and comprising four movements: a floating Italiana, a multi-partite set of Arie di corte, a fluid siciliana, and a qudruple-stop rich passacaglia. At the end, we hear Suk’s 1892 Serenade for Strings which you don’t come across as often as you do the Tchaikovsky, Dvorak or Elgar. It’s very welcome for its felicitous E flat Major/B flat Major/G Major/E flat Major charm, encouraged in the young composer by Dvorak, his future father-in-law.. Another work for strings alone is Latvian writer Peteris Vask‘s Musica serena of 2015, a short congratulatory present written for the 70th birthday of his friend and proponent, the Finnish conductor Juha Kangas. At the centre of the exercise sits the Cello Concerto by Alice Humphries, a fresh commission for the Perth-originating composer and which is described in all the publicity material as ‘deeply moving’. Soloist is Blair Harris, who is the MCO’s principal chair. By my calculations, the new score will have to last about 80 minutes if the concert is to live up to its two-hour length. Ticket costs are the usual mess: standard seats on a division of the Mudoch Hall into four levels of auditory excellence move between $75 to $150; concessions and seniors pay $15/$20 less; full-time students and children can sit anywhere for $30, and Under 40s can get into the two lowest classes of seats for – you guessed it – $40. Never forget the unscrupulous transaction fee charged by the Recital Centre of between $4 and $8.50 if you’re booking online or by phone. About 170 seats still remain in the stalls; either the balcony-and-wings level is not being used, ot it’s already full; I suspect the former.

This program will be repeated on Sunday November 29 at 2:30 pm.

ZOE BLACK, CAROLINE HENBEST & MOLLY KADARAUCH

Melbourne Recital Centre

Peter and Ruth McMullin Beacon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Monday November 30 at 11:30 am

Where is the Beacon in this building? You’d assume it’s high up, given its name. Luckily, the Melbourne Recital Centre‘s website tells you that it’s on the building’s top level, where in former times the organization’s administration was reputed to frolic. If you find it, you can hear this string trio – violin Zoe Black, viola Caroline Henbest, cello Molly Kadarauch – with yet another version of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, published in 1741 and restored to prominence through Glenn Gould’s 1955 landmark recording. Since then, it hasn’t been left alone, enjoying translation into all sorts of instrumental combinations, and even a Jerome Robbins ballet in the early 1970s. Anyway, these three players are ready to treat you to their realization of the composer’s brilliantly inventive feast in G Major/minor, although it’s scheduled here to last an hour which raises questions about their observance of repeats. A standard ticket costs $50, but there are three kinds of seats: dining table seating four, hightable with stools for four, table with banquette lounge for four – which is one way of making you bring along three friends. Or trusting in the kindness/sociability of strangers. At this point (October 10) only hightable seats are available. You still have to face the Recital Centre’s transaction fee of between $4 and $8.50 if booking online or by phone; in this instance, the fee is $7. Good luck to all concerned, not least the audience.

DUSKLIT

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday October 1 at 7:30 pm

A definite gloaming reference appears in this program via a freshly-written work by New Zealand/Australian composer-academic Miriama Young ; DuskLit Meditations, commissioned by the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra. Furthering the composer’s standing as head of composition at the University of Melbourne’s Conservatorium of Music, students from that body will also be sitting/standing alongside regular MCO members as a sort of support group for their creative queen. In a score not really associated with eventide, the combined forces will take on Mendelssohn’s sun-drenched Italian Symphony, written in 1833 and, throughout its first movement, giving us a most benevolent and endearing musical picture of the country as it might have been when the composer first saw it in 1830 – not the wretched Bicycle Thieves reality it has become over the last century. In the evening’s centre stands Andrea Lam, beloved of the ABC’s television programmers, who will be soloist in Mozart’s 1785 Piano Concerto No. 21 in C which holds a central andante of melting emotional depth, on a par with the quiter moments in the last act of the following year’s The Marriage of Figaro. A potential relationship to dusk, then, if overshadowed by its surrounds which are well outside any suggestions of so tief im Abendrot country. Tickets range from $75 to $150 per adult, concession/senior come in at $15 or $20 less, full-time student and child are $30 across the hall, and the Recital Centre’s transaction fee of anywhere between $4 and $8.50 continues to blight your financial landscape if you book online or by phone.

This program will be repeated on Sunday October 4 at 2:30 pm.

SIOBHAN STAGG + QUATUOR AGATE + JONATHAN WARE

Melboiurne Recital Centre

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Tuesday October 6 at 7:30 pm

Here’s an essay in filling out your acquaintance with Genesis – the book, not the band – from a female perspective. Australian soprano Siobhan Stagg allies herself with the Quatuor Agate from France – violins Adrien Jurkovic and Juliette Beauchamp (recently taking over from Thomas Descamps who has moved into conducting, poor sod), viola Raphael Pagnon, cello Simon Iachemet – as well as American pianist Jonathan Ware. Each half of their program opens with a Hildegard reponsory and antiphon – O vis aeternitatis and O quam mirabilis est – both dealing with the wonder of the creation of man (in the first, woman gets a sort of guernsey). The night’s first half continues with Faure’s ten-part song cycle La Chanson d’Eve, written in 1906-10 and offering an oscillation between the first woman’s perceptions and meditations on nature. Then Ukrainian composer Anna Korsun‘s Last Flight of 2023, commissioned by the Agates, followed by our own Anne Cawrse‘s 2020 Advice to a Girl for mezzo+string quartet (or it could be the piano trio version), with Chausson’s 1899 Chanson perpetuelle (actually about 6′ 30″ to 7′ in length) for all participants ending the first half of the evening. After the antiphon, we hear some Australiana in settings of Judith Wright: John Rodgers‘ Failure of communication from 2015, Andrew Ford‘s brief After the Visitors of 2014, and David Hirschfelder‘s 2015 To a Child – all for soprano and string quartet. Then a detour to Sri Lankan/Canadian musician Dinuk Wijeratne for his The Disappearance of Lisa Gherardini of 2022 concerning a heist of the Mona Lisa and which provided a fruitful prize for the Agates at a Banff competition in 2022. Another rarity arrives in Sibelius’ Luonnotar of 1913 in the composer’s own arrangement for soprano and piano; bringing the program’s message home fully, it concerns the creation of the earth by a Finnish goddess. Finishing us off is Medtner, beginning with his Op. 1bis The Angel, the vocal version of a piano piece; followed by the first of his 1924 Op. 46 Seven Songs, Praeludium, to a Goethe text. Tickets fall between $79 and $139, concessions $20 cheaper for middle-of-the-road seats, Under 40s paying a flat $49 for the same middling seats. Everyone who orders online or by phone pays the Recital Centre’s transaction fee of anywhere from $4 to $8.50. The Hall’s upper level is not being used and the stalls are possibly half full at the moment (September 19), so I’d be tempted to turn up on the night with cash.

MARSHALL MCGUIRE EMERGING COMPOSER COMMISSIONS

Melbourne Recital Centre/University of Melbourne

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Wednesday October 7 at 2:30 pm

Named in honour of the recently departed (from the job) director of programming at the Melbourne Recital Centre, these commissions celebrate new Australian compositions; in this case, we hear from Nicole Brady and Arie Madden Welti, both University of Melbourne graduates and both yet to decide on what to call their new scores. We’ll be hearing from the two-person ensemble Bronzewing, comprising Katie Yap‘s viola and voice, and Donald Nicholson on harpsichord and electronics. Charlie Sdraulig is the program’s host. I’d suggest that these two new works will be substantial as the program is scheduled to last for 90 minutes (with or without interval isn’t clear). It’s not possible to recommend this event because the content is clouded in mystery, made no clearer by the Bronzewing group’s claim to play everything from Hildegard to Jarre, and with no indication as to where on that spectrum we find Yap and Nicholson tonight, let alone Brady and Welti. On the positive/negative side, tickets are $10 only but you have to find almost half as much again for the Recital Centre’s $4 transaction fee if you order online or by phone. It’s a very specialized event, so I’d be tempted to risk turning up on the afternoon wih lots of 10 cent coins.

ISATA KANNEH-MASON

Melbourne Recital Centre

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Friday October 9 at 7:30 pm

This scion of the clan, Isata Kanneh-Mason, is a complete unknown to me – unlike her cellist brother Sheku who distinguished himself by playing a solo at the surprise-on-every-corner wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. His older sister Isata is a pianist and is featuring three well-known masterworks from the repertoire in her recital. She begins and ends with Beethoven: the Moonlight Sonata No. 14 of 1801, then the Waldstein Sonata No. 21 of three years later. Not sure why she has decided to give us these well-worn works, unless she has found a new interpretative vein. In between she is presenting Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit triptych, written in 1908 and a very difficult score for any pianist, in particular its rapid-fire Scarbo conclusion. As well, Kanneh-Mason will perform two works by Bulgarian-British composer Dobrinka Tabakova: a short Nocturne from 2008 which is sextuplet doodling with few melodic traces, and the more substantial three-part Halo of 1999 – an exercise in piano harmonics. Tickets range from $79 to $139, with concessions for middling tickets coming in at $20 cheaper, while Under 40s get these middle-level seats for a flat $49. But really, nothing’s flat with the Recital Centre, which charges a transaction fee of anywhere from $4 to $8.50 if you book online or by phone. The upper level of the Murdoch Hall isn’t being used on this occasion, and the stalls are at the moment close to half-empty. Once again, I’d be tempted to front the box office on the night.

CHRISTIAN LI PLAYS BRAHMS

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Saturday October 10 at 7:30 pm

Soloist in this program is Australian violinist Christian Li – all of 18 years old and taking on the formidable Brahms concerto of 1878. This work is a major element of the repertoire and we’ve heard some brilliant performances, both live and recorded. Is Li going to open our eyes/ears with a new view of this score that many of us know all too well? Give him the benefit of the doubt: he may show us something new or unexplored through his interpretation. He’s appearing under the heading of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Young Artist in Association, which strikes me as being a powerful sponsorship. On either side of this, Tianyi Lu, the organization’s ex-assistant conductor, conducts Elfrida Andree’s Andante Quasi Recitativo of 1877, and a suite from Tchaikovsky’s 1876 ballet Swan Lake. About the Swedish composer, I know nothing, to quote Manuel, but her Andante is brief – for strings only, with divisi cello from the start (nobody else); 57 bars long and playing for less than five minutes; in E Major and a focused exploration of its opening violin motif; the material striking its creator as good enough to be used several times in different compositions. As for the Tchaikovsky collation, the suite published after his death could have been determined by him, or perhaps not. It usually comprises six excerpts, although there’s one floating around which takes in nine chunks of the score. Standard tickets move from $75 to $127, concessions are a whole $5 cheaper, Under 18s pay $20 – and everybody faces the MSO’s supercharge of $8 if ordering online or by phone. From the MSO website, you can see that there are very few seats available, apart from 70 or so in the unliveable balcony, so you probably have to give in to this body’s voracious appetite for money.

PEKKA KUUSISTO: LEGENDS & LUMINARIES

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday October 10 at 7:30 pm

Finnish violinist and composer Pekka Kuusisto returns to the Australian Chamber Orchestra as guest director and soloist, opening his account with Mozart’s The Magic Flute; well, bits of it as arranged by the visitor. I’m imagining a sort of harmoniemusik for strings with a big dab of Papageno/Papagena. Then Kuusisto plays the solo in American writer Nico Muhly‘s Shrink: Concerto for violin and strings, a co-commission by the ACO and recorded by the violinist in 2021 with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, although it enjoyed its world premiere in 2019 in this hall when the ACO Collective accompanied Kuusisto. All of this is rather odd as the work is listed in the composer’s catalgue as being composed in 2021. Anyway, we rush on to another American with Ellen Reid‘s West Coast Sky Eternal, a fifteen minute score from 2023 that begins and ends in the clouds after a hectic trip downwards. Then we conclude with another arrangement, this time an anonymous one, of Mendelssohn’s 1845 String Quintet No. 2 in B flat, originally written for the usual format of two violins, two violas and cello and here taking in the reinforcement of a double bass or two. So it’s a zig-zag of a program that begins and ends in orthodoxy and moves to the recent/present in its middle, which is just how Kuusisto likes it, they say. The Hall divides into five sections for the ACO, tickets starting at $49 and climaxing at $166; full-time students can get into the lower three ranges for $30 while Under 35s pay a fitting $35 for the same limited areas. Booking by phone or online costs $7 for top-price seats which is close to unavoidable in a smallish space like this one. And, of course, it’s unfair, even if the fee goes down for cheaper seats.

This program will be repeated on Sunday October 11 in Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne at 2:30 pm, and again on Monday October 12 in the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm.

SCHUMANN AND FAURE PIANO QUARTETS

Melbourne Recital Centre and Kristian Chong

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Monday October 12 at 7 pm

We hear two pieces only in this hour-long recital from Kristian Chong and three of his Melbourne Symphony Orchestra friends – assistant concertmaster Tair Khisambeev, principal viola Christopher Moore, and assistant principal cello Elina Faskhi. So far, so familiar. And so is what they’re all presenting. First up comes Faure No. 1 in C minor of 1879, which I’ve found is more popular on chamber music programs than the more involving second essay in the form by this composer but the earlier work shows an impressive lyrical sweep, an amplitude that shines through in the finest Romantic chamber works. Complementing this score, we hear Schumann in E flat, the 1842 companion piece to the composer’s more immediately appealing Piano Quintet, yet this four-movement gem seems more concise, less packed with busy work than its partner, also in E flat. I know it’s another ad hoc congregation of musicians banded together for this event, but they all have impressive qualifications and Chong is the most amiable of catalytic musical agents. A standard ticket costs $55, a concession $45, a student $20. For the top price, if you book online or by phone, you pay a transaction fee of $7 which strikes me as unduly inflated, especially as concession and student tickets attract the same charge. How can this be? I know the Salon has limited places but why penalise students by imposing such a ridiculously high impost?

PAUL LEWIS: MOZART+

Muisca Viva Australia

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Tuesday October 13 at 7 pm

The eminent British pianist, perennially circling around specific composers, has centred on Mozart this year. Paul Lewis will be playing two of the composer’s piano sonatas: No 10 in C from 1783 and No. 14 in C minor written in the following year – one of only two in the catalogue not in a major key. They’re an interesting choice, celebrating the composer’s versatility: in the first, all delight and elegance; the second, a Beethoven precursor with a florid central E flat Major adagio . Between these two investigations, Lewis plays some French music. The more familiar is Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse of 1904 which tests every pianist’s ability to weld material into a coherent unit and which I’ve never heard better achieved than in Gieseking’s reading recorded in 1954 (or been stunned by a reading more rapidly completed than his version of 1938). As the evening’s complete unknown, Lewis is giving us extracts from Poulenc’s 15 Improvisations pour le piano written between 1932 and 1959. Don’t know why he’s not playing the lot: they all add up to about 23 minutes. Add that to the Debussy’s 6′, Mozart No. 10 averaging 19′ and No 14 coming in at about 20′ and you have a total of 68 minutes playing time. Even with a 20-minute interval, that comes in at about 90 minutes but the recital is scheduled to last 2 hours and 40 minutes; perhaps Lewis is going to do a lot of talking. The ticketing is a riot: Musica Viva divides the Murdoch Hall into four, prices starting at $65 and apexing at $163, concessions applying to the top three brackets and cutting off $18, $15 and $12 respectively, while Under 40s pay $49 and Under 18s $20. There are very few seats left (25 stalls, 10 circle), so you have to face up to the Recital Centre’s offensive transaction fee of anywhere between $4 and $8.50 for online and phone booking.

MOZART SALIERI & PLEYEL

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday October 15 at 7 pm

Paul Dyer and his Australian Brandenburg Orchestra have found some older scores to precede the major work on this program: Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 in E flat, written in 1788 and less frequently heard than its companion symphonies, Nos. 40 and 41. But it is a brilliantly enticing work, packed with surprises from adagio introduction to chattering final allegro. For their first creaking novelty, the orchestra gives the Australian premiere of Salieri’s Sinfonia to the opera Cublai, gran kan de’Tartari, which the composer wrote in 1788. Because of its satirical content relating to monarchies, the work was censored out of performance potential, so never heard in Salieri’s lifetime. And Mozart thought he had it tough two years earlier with Figaro. It’s a short experience because the sinfonia lasts less than four minutes. But we next enjoy a world premiere in Pleyel’s Concerto for violone in E flat which musicologists are almost prepared to date as being written in 1779, the work long misattributed to contrabass virtuoso Johannes Mathias Sperger. Tonight we hear the ABO’s own double bass Robert Nairn as soloist and wish him well as he takes us on this completely novel journey, through Pleyel’s Allegro, Adagio and Rondo with the soloist tuned to a scordatura D for that little bit of extra Viennese spice. Ticket details are a nightmare: the ABO divides Murdoch Hall into six levels of aural excellence with $45 the lowest and $167 the premium. Concessions come in at $61 off for the top rank and $31 remission for the fourth layer – no concessions for the bottom two strata. Seniors get much less discount, students are charged $20 for the five lesser sets of seats, while Under 40s pay $36 for places in the second level. Everybody has to negotiate the Recital Centre’s transaction fee of anything between $4 and $8.50 which, as always, is too much for the miniscule service provided for booking by phone or online.

This program will be repeated on Saturday October 17 at 5 pm and on Sunday October 18 at 5 pm.

HOPE & BRAVERY: SHOSTAKOVICH & TOMASI

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday October 15 at 7:30 pm

You won’t find a stranger mix than this two-work program. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra plays under American Jonathon Heyward, presently conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra after having packed a wealth of musical experience into his 34 years. The night’s soloist is American saxophonist Steven Banks who is about the same age as Heyward and will be fronting Tomasi’s two-movement Concerto for Alto Saxophone of 1949. A score with underlying jazz suggestions, it’s notable for its first movement irregular rhythms with a penchant for 5/4, and an accompanied cadenza. Then interval and back for the Shostakovich Symphony No. 7, Leningrad, which the composer wrote most of in that besieged city during 1941. The composition has gone through several evaluations – as patriotic sincerity, Soviet propaganda, secretly anti-Stalin, overtly anti-Hitler, a low point in the composer’s output, one of his most universally inspiring achievements. Spare yourself all the angst. The score’s long progress to its powerful conclusion is an engrossing experience, even without the various contexts and programs that have been attached to it. Standard tickets cost between $75 and $139, concession holders enjoying a liberal $5 reduction in cost, Under 18s getting in for $20, with everyone paying the MSO’s transaction fee of $8 per order online or by phone. As usual, the booking website states that there are only 100 seats left in all three levels of Hamer Hall; those numbers turn up too often to be credible and I don’t think there’s a ravenous appetite for Tomasi or Shostakovich.

This program will be repeated on Saturday October 17 at 2 pm.

SARAH GRUNSTEIN: BACH’S GOLDBERG VARIATIONS

Jacqui Bonner Marketing & Management

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Salon

Wednesday October 21 at 7 pm

An Australian-born pianist, Sarah Grunstein is making her assault on Bach’s marathon keyboard work tonight. I’ve not come across this performer before, probably because she spends a good deal of time in America, possibly because she is linked more to Sydney where she studied first with my last piano teacher, Nancy Salas. Because this recital is scheduled to last for 90 minutes, it is pretty clear that she will be playing all the repeats, each half of each variation heard twice. That’s something you can’t be sure of these days; in fact, the last three or four readings of the Goldbergs that I’ve heard proved to be half-arsed affairs with either no repeats or indulgence in a select few. So, to have an artist go the extra 45 minutes to give us a compleat picture is worth celebrating. Of course, Grunstein follows a long line of keyboard experts who have recorded these variations, canons and quodlibet but her background both here and in the USA is reassuring. Tickets are simplicity: standard $80, concession $40; no allowance for children – in fact, the Recital Centre blurb recommends that anyone in 15 should stay away. Couldn’t agree more. As for the notoriously changeable transaction fee for booking online or by phone, it’s $7 for both prices; great to see bare-faced avarice in action.

SIR STEPHEN HOUGH IN RECITAL

Classical Music Australia

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Wednesday October 28 at 7:30 pm

Pianist Stephen Hough was made a Knight Bachelor in 2022 and, looking at this night’s title, would seem to be proud of the honour; sort of endearing in these times of (the former) Prince Andrew’s disgrace, the uncertainty surrounding an unprotected Sussex household, and the nasty revelations by a one-time brother-in-law about King Charles’s treatment of and attitude towards his first wife. Rising above this tawdry set of scenarios, Hough jumps all over the repertoire in his proffered program. He begins with Drei Klavierstucke by Schubert from 1828 which I have never come across in live performance; remarkable, considering their position in the composer’s output as written just before the last three piano sonatas. Another neglected piece comes in the final Intermezzo, that in E flat minor, from Brahms’ 6 Klavierstucke of 1893. Then a vault to Schoenberg’s 1911 Six Little Piano Pieces for which the title couldn’t be more appropriate. Come back a little – from the 1790s to the 1820s – for the Op. 110 Bagatelles by Beethoven, specifically the brief No. 10 in A Major; followed by the composer’s Waldstein Sonata No. 21 of 1804 where we settle in for something substantial after a bevy of brevities. Keeping up with the standard repertoire, Hough continues (after interval, you’d hope) with Schumann’s Carnaval from 1835 which moves from the declamatory to the pompous with everything in between. To end, the pianist presents his own arrangement of three excerpts from the Sherman brothers’ music for the 1964 film Mary Poppins which he produced for a 2022 Lang Lang CD. At this event, the Murdoch Hall is split into three price levels: standard seats are $90, $110, $140. After that come four other price ranges, depending on how much you’re willing/able to pay; don’t know if your candidacy is means-tested. In the end, you have to pay the Recital Centre’s transaction fee of between $4 and $8.50, which rather saps at Classical Music Australia’s aim at accommodating the penury of us all in these straitened times.

MOSTLY MOZART – PIANO CONCERTO NO. 21

Melbourne Recital Centre & the Australian National Academy of Music

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday October 29 at 11 am

This concert lasts an hour only. We begin with an Australian piece: Nigel Westlake‘s 1984 Omphalo Centric Lecture quartet for marimbas, with punctuation from log drums with three pitches, a splash cymbal and a shaker. The piece seems rather cheerful in character when you consider the cosmic view of existence proposed by Paul Klee who painted the canvas from which this music takes its impetus. Having dealt with the Australian National Academy of Music‘s percussion section, conductor Philip Arkinstall takes another orchestral group or two through Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments, written in 1920 as a memorial for Debussy. The original calls for three flutes, alto flute, two oboes, cor anglais, three clarinets, three bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, and tuba; a later version omits the alto flute. It lasts less than ten minutes, like Westlake’s score. Then comes the main work which will be the inevitable total Mozart: his Piano Concerto No. 21 in C with Stefan Cassomenos as soloist and, if I read the publicity material correctly, he will also direct from the keyboard – which will probably be the case with Andrea Lam who plays this same concerto with the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra on October 1 (see above). The work asks for flute, pairs of oboes, bassoons, horns and trumpets, with timpani and the usual string band. And I’d definitely be expecting some original touches from this gifted, adventurous pianist. Standard tickets cost $59, concession a whopping reduction to $52, students and Under 40s both enjoying another startling decrease in cost to $49. You also, if ordering online or by phone, have to produce the Recital Centre’s transaction fee of between $4 and $8.50, imposed for inexplicable reasons when you consider the work involved.

VOYAGER

Australian String Quartet

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday October 29 at 7 pm

For its latest excursion, the Australian String Quartet – violins Dale Barltrop and Francesca Hiew, viola Chris Cartlidge, cello Michael Dahlenburg – is presenting two formidable works from its format’s repertoire. The last time I heard the ensemble was in Brisbane at the Library attached to the Queensland Art Gallery where they played Bartok, but I can’t recall if it was the same as they’re essaying here: No 4 of 1928 in five movements and circumscribed by a massive arch form. After interval come more big guns with Beethoven’s String Quartet in B flat Op. 130, with the original/now-alternative Grosse Fuge finale to follow – or I hope so as it’s listed separately on the program. That makes up quite a task, getting through the quartet’s six movements, including that profound central cavatina, then fronting up for the jagged 16 minutes-plus fugue. Prior to their Bartok, the Australians are performing Irish violist-composer Garth Knox‘s Satellites, written in 2015 for the Kronos Quartet. This score falls into three movements: Geostationary, Spectral Sunrise, and Dimensions. Its language is an amalgam of perfectly assimilable motifs and string-specific effects, as in the first pages which involve a regular pizzicato ‘bass’ with a mesh of sound-delivery techniques and scraps that abruptly shine out; the Sunrise is strong on harmonics and suspense, while the final movement, like the first, is steady, here in a march-like rhythm, but throws around its mobile semiquavers with a frolicsome abandon that you sometimes come across in a snug, although probably not those moments (including the last) where all players flail at the air with their bows. Tickets go for $95, with $25 off for concession holders; Under 40s pay $40 and students get in for $15. All very reasonable but you have to meet the Recital Centre’s transaction fee of anywhere from $4 to $8.50 if you book online or by phone. At the moment, available stalls seats number about 300; the upstairs level of the Murdoch Hall isn’t being used. But a student ticket attracts a fee of $7; that’s the way to encourage the young – slug them half their ticket price for nothing.

BEYOND BOTANY BAY

Excelsis

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Friday October 30 at 7:30 pm

A choir that has been operating in this city for over a decade, Excelsis throws its talents around lavishly among the city’s Catholic parishes with the intention of brightening up their Sunday masses. Tonight, under musical director Tom Buchanan, the singers will take us through 14 Australian choral pieces in a program scheduled to last for 2 hours 30 minutes (which includes interval). They start with Paul Stanhope‘s This is our home from 2014, followed by Daniel Brinsmead‘s A Soft Day (written some time before 2015), then John Rotar‘s Tune my heart (also a probable date – 2022). A touch of Anzac Day nostalgia comes next with Eric Bogle‘s 1971 And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda as arranged by Nicholas Buc; Hush: On the Death of a Bush Church by Iain Grandage in 1993, the Benedictus from Dan Walker‘s 2014 Mass of Deliverance, and Joseph Twist‘s demanding Lux aeterna from 2011 all add up to a semi-liturgical triptych. Four works by Paul Jarman appear next: Warri and Yatungka of 2002, his 2019 Magna Est Veritas, Pemulwuy from 2006, and the premiere of The Heroes of Gundagai which I believe will be conducted by the composer. Sally Whitwell‘s Byron setting of She walks in beauty (probably a 2007 product), Across the Dark composed by Ben van Tienen (no date available: what is it with these choral composers?) to Michael Leunig’s words, and Ruth McCall‘s 2007 take on Banjo Paterson’s Waltzing Matilda lines bring this impressively catholic program to a close. But will it last for 150 minutes? Somewhere along the night’s progress, Wiradjuri guest soprano Shauntai Abdul-Rahman appears; don’t know where, don’t know when because I can’t track down all the scores. A standard ticket costs $40; the lavish reduction for concession holders is $5; and you have to cope with the Recital Centre’s transaction fee of anywhere between $4 and $8.50 if you book online or by phone. I’ve just checked on concession tickets and the fee is $7. The upper level(s) are not being used and the stalls are at the moment half-empty; I’d be tempted to turn up on the night with the smallest denominations you can get.

EDWARD SCISSORHANDS IN CONCERT

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Friday October 30 at 7:30 pm

I’ve seen this 1990 Tim Burton fantasy once but not in a cinema theatre, so I can’t speak to its effect on a viewer as part of the main. But I do remember feeling manipulated, and not in a welcome tonsorial way. Is Danny Elfman‘s score worth resuscitating? It doesn’t strike me as being exceptionally creative or striking and the more glutinous moments involving a choir tread a well-worn sentimental path. Still, there are three Tom Jones songs interpolated in the film and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra strings will get a good work-out. But you have to wonder if there’s a substantial audience for this tale, which at least comes to a satisfyingly unhappy end. Nicholas Buc conducts. Tickets range between $83 and &127; both concession holders and children pay $5 less, but everybody will pay the transaction fee of $8 per order if booking online or by phone. Which seems to me to be asking for a lot of money for going to the pictures. At the moment, seats are available on all three levels of Hamer Hall, less in the Circle than in the stalls or balcony. And I note that there are not the usual three, if not four, airings available. Still, there are doubtless fans out there who revel in the sight of Johnny Depp with his eyes wide open.

This program will be repeated on Saturday October 31 at 7:30 pm.

NIGHT MUSIC

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday October 31 at 7:30 pm,

After some out-of-town performances in Sale and Cowes, this program arrives at the Recital Centre for its final iteration. Across half the night, our Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under concertmaster Natalie Chee will be playing music by Joe Chindamo, this year’s composer in residence with the MSO. Their program begins with his Fantasie auf Nachtmusik which is a re-imagination/re-evaluation of Mozart’s ever-popular serenade for strings of 1787. Composed in 2019 to a commission by the Perth Symphony Orchestra, this vision uses the original with glee, interleaving it with Chindamo’s abrasive flights of fancy. This will be followed by the jazz master’s new Flute Concerto with soloist Eliza Shephard, ABC Young Performer of the Year in 2022. I can’t find any information about Chindamo’s new score except that the MSO commissioned this concerto and it will have to be a substantial piece lasting about half an hour to help flesh out an event scheduled to last 100 minutes, including a 20-minute interval. The evening’s final offering is Mozart’s Linz Symphony No. 36 of 1783, brightened texturally by the presence of a pair of carefully employed trumpets and blessing the listener with vital delight in every one of its four movements. Standard tickets cost between $57 and $105, the concession cost coming in at a staggering $5 cheaper. Under 18s can get a seat for $20 but they, like everybody, will have to pay the MSO’s inordinately high transaction fee of $8 if ordering online or by phone. The event is selling well with only 76 places left in the Circle and the usual noncommittal ‘100+’ in the stalls.

BUSH, BORSCHT & BONN

Selby & Friends

Ptimrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Wednesday September 2 at 2 pm

Nearing the end, I’m trying to find relevance in the titles of programs: an interest I’ve avoided for many years but which has come to be fascinating in recent times. For its latest touring program, the Selby & Friends ensemble – in this instance featuring piano Kathryn Selby, violin Susie Park, and cello Julian Smiles – will play trios by Australian senior writer Ross Edwards, Novgorod-born Anton Arensky, and Germany’s pride, Ludwig van Beethoven. Edwards’ work (of either 1998 or 1999, which has now been followed by a newly-composed score in this format) has featured on a Selby & Friends program before: back in 2021, when Selby and Smiles toured with Smiles’ Goldner Quartet (of happy memory) colleague, violinist Dene Olding. You’d have to assume that this translucent work of three movements, lasting about 15 minutes, represents the ‘Bush’ because the composer has certainly laboured to bring that national presence into his work. It’s followed by Arensky’s Piano Trio No. 2 in F minor of 1905. Nowhere near as popular as the writer’s first work in this form, it’s slightly more substantial, lasting about 35 minutes, and notable for its final set of six striking variations and muffled reprise. Perhaps this is where the borscht comes in,although that’s usually considered a Ukrainian dish. As for Bonn’s most famous son, his Piano Trio in E flat Op. 38 of 1803 is an arrangement of his highly successful Septet, with the piano taking over the string lines, the violin substituting for the arrangement’s preferred clarinet, while the cello takes up most of the original’s bassoon line. Whichever way you hear it, the Septet/Trio lasts for about 40 eloquent, mainly optimistic minutes. Tickets are $89 (concession $69), Seniors $87 (not any advantage, then, relying on that card), and students $69; and you have the Recital Centre’s $4-to-$8.50 money-grubbing transaction fee to shell out if you order by phone or online.

This program will be repeated at 7 pm.

MOSTLY MOZART – PLAY WITH FIRE

Australian National Academy of Music

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday September 3 at 11 am

An incendiary morning from those artists-in-completion-mode working at the Australian National Academy of Music, directed by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s associate principal cello (and ANAM alumnus/a), Sharon Grigoryan. Lots of fire to be heard, then, but not so much Mozart who is represented by one of his more obstreperous and brilliant-sounding symphonies: No. 35 in D, the Haffner of 1782. This happy score ends the program, and Haydn begins it with his Symphony No. 59, written in the Esterhaza residence years sometime between 1765 and 1769. It is nicknamed the Fire, because some of its movements were used as incidental music to a play called The Conflagration. After this follow several pieces with more obvious connotations. Manuel de Falla’s Ritual Fire Dance from El amor brujo will be heard in its original 1915 gitaneria version; in the only performance I’ve heard, this calls for a chamber orchestra rather than the richly padded readings that come with the composer’s later re-vamps. We’ll hear the last of Debussy’s Preludes for piano, his 1913 Feux d’artifice, which you’d have to guess will be given to us in Colin Matthews’ orchestration. Or is it Peter Breiner’s version? Or that by Francis Gorge? Concluding the night’s semi-theme comes another glittering piano original in Scriabin’s Vers la flamme of 1914 – in Leytush’s odd orchestration, you’d suppose. Anyway, it will be a packed hour of music-making which Grigoryan may direct from the first cello desk. Tickets are simple: $59 standard, $52 concession (be still, my beating heart), students and Under 40s $49. Don’t forget the $4-to-$8.50 booking fee that the Recital Centre imposes, milking its clients of more cash with dubious justification.

ORGAN GALA

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Melbourne Town Hall

Thursday September 3 at 7:30 pm

These days, it’s not hard to guess what you’re going to get when you put an orchestra and organ together. Yes, it’s Saint Saens’ Symphony No 3 of 1886, the finale of which was used to risible effect in Chris Noonan’s 1995 Babe film. While the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is conducted by Finnish-born Emilia Hoving, currently associate with the Royal Philharmonic, the attention-grabbing organist will be English-Australian Joseph Nolan whom I have never heard in action but who is a notable Widor expert. Before the blasts and rumbles from the Town Hall’s fabulous instrument under Nolan’s hands and feet, Hoving takes us through a farrago, beginning with Four Dances from Ginastera’s ballet Estancia, presumably the suite that the composer organized first in 1943. Continuing the earthy motif comes the Suite No. 1 that Guiraud arranged for publication in 1885 from Bizet’s Carmen opera of 1875. This involves the fate theme from the opera’s prelude, the Aragonaise before Act 4, the Intermezzo preceding Act 3, the heroine’s Seguedille, the Dragons d’Alcala interlude anticipating Act 2, and the Toreadors music from the Prelude and Act 4. Even more Latin colour arrives with the atmospherically rich 1994 Danzon No.2 by Mexican composer Arturo Marquez, nicely complementing Ginastera’s concluding Malambo. Bringing the Hispanic/pseudo-Iberian segment to a close, there’s a horn-led tour of the Athenian forest by way of Mendelssohn’s Nocturne extracted from his 1842 incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This event comes as part of a three-day Organ Festival sponsored by the MSO that also includes the Durufle Requiem (see below) and a recital from Nolan. Tickets for this particular concert range between $45 and $105, concessions $5 cheaper, Under 18s paying $20. Also, the MSO imposes an $8 transaction fee if you book online or by phone; you could try just turning up with cash in hand, although the current state of play (or so the organization would have you believe) is that there are 100+ seats available in both the stalls and in the gallery.

This program will be repeated on Saturday September 5 at 2 pm.

Melbourne Town Hall

Friday September 4 at 7:30 pm

This is the second major component of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra‘s short-lived Organ Festival. As you can tell from the title, it will involve the MSO Chorus but our local body will be joined by some visitors: the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra Chorus. If you know the Requiem, you’re aware that there are some sections reserved for two soloists; in this case, mezzo Sally-Anne Russell and baritone Simon Meadows. You’d also be interested to know that the MSO itself won’t be in attendance; the only musical support will come from English-Autralian organist Joseph Nolan. Well, that’s all fine; Durufle wrote his Requiem originally in 1947 for vocal forces and organ accompaniment (with a cello obbligato, apparently). Alongside this major work, we’re to hear Faure’s brief (barely six minutes) Cantique de Jean Racine, composed by a still-teenage Faure in 1865 for SATB choir and organ (or piano). Just before the 45-minute-long Mass for the Dead, the choirs will present some more Durufle in his Quatre motets of 1960, composed for a cappella SATB choir, although this disposition swells to seven lines in the opening Ubi caritas, six in the second all-female Tota pulchra es, and stays in the four regular parts for Tu es Petrus and Tantum Ergo – all of them based on the Gregorian chants so familiar to Catholics of a certain generation (mine). This event lasts a little over an hour, so tickets are cheaper than those for the preceding night’s program: standard moves between $50 and $84, concessions are a staggering $5 cheaper, and Under 18s still have to pay $20 – all of it encumbered with the MSO’s $8 transaction fee if you book online or by phone. And wouldn’t you know it? According to the MSO website, there are 100+ seats left in both stalls and balcony!

THOMAS DUNFORD

Melbourne Recital Centre, Utzon Music/Sydney Opera House & Van Diemen’s Band

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Friday September 4 at 7:30 pm

Sticking around for some solo recitals after his Musica Viva tour with cellist Nicolas Altstaedt, lutenist Thomas Dunford is being sponsored by three organizations, appearing three times in Tasmania (Hobart, Launceston, Burnie), once here, then once more in Sydney’s Utzon Room: an impressive five appearances in six days. What he’s performing here lasts about 75 minutes non-stop and it’s remarkably ‘clean’ – that is, relatively free of arrangements . . . well, except for the last piece which is our old friend, the Chaconne from Bach’s D minor violin Partita (written sometime between 1717 and 1720), and we’ve become used to that on a similar instrument, thanks to Segovia’s guitar transcription (which he recorded to generous acclaim – except from guitarists – in 1959). Dunford begins with Dowland; well, the performer’s British and why give us anything second-best? A praeludium, Fortune My Foe, A Fancy, Semper Dowland Semper Dolens, Mrs. Winter’s Jump, A Dream, The King of Denmark’s Galliard, Lachrimae, and the Frog Galliard make for an impressive opening bracket and one that is too tiring to date individually (ah, the delights of sloth). Then follow Kapsberger’s Toccata No. 6 published in 1604, Joan Ambrosio Dalza’s Calata alla Spagnola printed in 1508, a sarabande and chaconne by de Visee (although these could have been originally written for guitar; who knows without some solid provenance?), Les voix humaines by Marais presumably based on the original piece for viol(s) published in 1701, and the Bach to end. Tickets fall into four groups, ranging from $79 to $139, with concessions of $20 for the middle two, and $49 for Under 40s sitting in those same middle two seat groupings. You pay between $4 and $8.50 for booking online or by phone but, at time of writing (August 8), there are nearly 500 seats available and the Circle/Wings level is not being used. So I’d be tempted to risk turning up on the night at the box office with lots of small change.

NEW LIGHT

Flinders Quartet

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Wednesday September 9 at 7 pm

It’s not the first all-female string chamber ensemble to feature in this country’s musical life – from memory, the Astra Society was an all-women orchestra – but the current members of the Flinders Quartet have a wealth of experience between them that speaks volumes for their interpretative maturity. For their latest program, the members – violins Elisabeth Sellars and Wilma Smith, viola Helen Ireland, cello Zoe Knighton – begin with some new lights working in the form with an as yet unnamed premiere construct from Australian writer Naomi Dodd, who was the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Cybec Young Composer in Residence for 2024 and who writes in an amiable, accessible semi-contemporary voice. Then we hear Grazyna Bacewicz’s String Quartet No. 3, a three-movement score written in 1947 when the Polish composer was living in Paris and still able to pursue her career as a solo violinist. It comes in at an average of about 18 minutes. Finally, we hope to have a fresh vision of one of the string quartet repertoire’s staples; Beethoven Op. 127 in E flat. Sitting at the beginning to the composer’s late products in this form, this 1825 work is rarely heard; like the Bacewicz which precedes it, the piece is highly regarded but neglected – I believe I’ve heard it only once or twice in live performance. So this recital has considerable merit for its rare content. Tickets are $55, with a concession/student cost of $10 less. The transaction fee imposed by the Recital Centre for online or phone booking for both is $7; I’d be tempted to risk showing up on the night to avoid this charge, but the group is a popular one, enough so to fill the Salon.

JUSSEN BROTHERS PLAY POULENC

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday September 10 at 7:30 pm

Dutch duo pianists Lucas and Arthur Jussen have made a considerable impact online, thanks to their tapes on YouTube which show the brothers as superlatively synchronised and empathetic in everything from Bach transcriptions to Bartok’s Concerto for Two Pianos, Percussion and Orchestra. On this occasion, with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra they are presenting Poulenc’s Concerto of 1932 which is an ideal vehicle for these musicians’ reliable dexterity and subtlety of inflexion in the work’s middle Larghetto movement. Before this, Nodoka Okisawa, chief conductor of the City of Kyoto Symphony Orchestra, takes the MSO through Three Film Scores by Takemitsu which is a strring orchestra compendium of music for Jose Torres (1959), Black Rain (1989), and The Face of Another (1966); it lasts about 12 minutes. A bit more from Japan after interval in Takashi Yoshimatsu’s And Birds Are Still . . . for strings of 1997; an appealing, sentimental piece written with some eloquence in a smooth contemporary idiom. To end, Okisawa brings us back to Poulenc through his four-movement Sinfonietta of 1947 for small orchestra (double woodwind and brass without trombones/tuba, harp, timpani, strings). Janacek, it isn’t; closer to Dorian Le Gallienne, if more intentionally chic. Tickets follow the usual pattern: standard between $75 and $139, concession $5 cheaper, Under 18s $20 – and the MSO’s reansaction fee of $8 per order online or by phone. Whaddya know? The website tells us yet again that there are 100+ seats available on all three levels of the hall; when you’re on a good thing, stick to it – apparently.

This program will be repeated on Saturday September 12 at 7:30 pm.

BRAHMS REQUIEM AND SZYMANOWSKI STABAT MATER

Melbourne Bach Choir and Zelman Symphony

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Friday September 11 at 8 pm

Didn’t we hear the 1868 Brahms work from this body some years ago, in 2018?? Well, it’s eight years further on and tonight the Melbourne Bach Choir will be enjoying the support of the Zelman Symphony Orchestra rather than its own instrumentalists, all of them under the control of the choir’s artistic director Rick Prakhoff. On that previous occasion, the massive Brahms score was complemented by Szymanowski’s Stabat Mater, as it is here. The night’s soloists will be soprano Helena Dix and baritone Warwick Fyfe for the Brahms, and both these artists with mezzo Belinda Paterson in the Polish composer’s 1926 score. Even with a necesssary infusion of new voices as generational change takes effect, you’d anticipate that enough survivors remain from the earlier performance. Of course, there was a time when the Requiem proved a staple for many choirs, particularly in this country’s major capitals; nowadays, it enjoys an occasional airing and is immensely rewarding for all concerned, especially the solo soprano with that wrenchingly fine Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit choir-escorted aria. Szymanowski’s work shows an expressive depth that proves most welcome from a composer who walks the fine line between diatonicism and dissonance. I hope the singers put in the extra mile and articulate the Polish text, in which language the composer conceived his score. But the program gives an intriguing contrast between some often opaque polyphony and striking, clear textures. Ticketing is more of a Brahmsian character tonight; the hall is divided into four grades, prices ranging from $69 to $119, top seats earning a $20 concession while the remaining three only attract a $10 reduction. Students pay between $59 and $99, depending on their cash flows. Everyone is susceptible to the $4-to-$8.50 Transaction Fee imposed by the Recital Centre, but I’d be tempted to avoid booking online or by phone as, at the time of writing (August 10), less than a third of the hall is occupied.

PIETER WISPELWEY WITH PIERS LANE – NIGHT I

Melbourne Recital Centre

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Tuesday September 15 at 7:30 pm

Here’s the first of three recitals from Dutch cellist Pieter Wispelwey and our own Piers Lane as the sometimes-requisite pianist. If the programs have a running theme, it comes from the scheduling of all three cello suites by Benjamin Britten, the first of them in C from 1964 ending tonight’s offerings. These works were written for Rostropovich and have no escorting line, so Wispelwey will be front-and-centre for this exposition. Mind you, Britten’s scores must be very familiar to him by now; he recorded all three in 1992, then again in 2001, taking another bash at No. 3 in 2008, and putting his talents to the British writer’s service once more with a re-visit of No. 1 in 2010. Tonight’s Britten is in nine movements, most pretty brief apart from the Fuga and Marcia. As for the pairing with Lane, that will give us Prokofiev’s 1949 Cello Sonata in C Op. 119; this is in three movements, was also written for Rostropovich, and lasts the same as the Britten suite – about 25 minutes. Furthering the voice of not-very-Soviet Russia comes the Shostakovich Op. 40 Cello Sonata in D minor of 1934 in four movements, not dedicated to Rostropovich, also coming in around the 25-minute mark on a good day. Wispelwey recorded both this and the Prokofiev sonata with Dejan Lazic in 2003. Lane also recorded them way back in 1988 with Alexander Baillie. Tickets, set on four levels of expense, move from a top of $139 to a low of $79; concessions of $20 are available only in the middle two grades; likewise Under 40s are restricted to the central gradations, both costing $49 for some inexplicable reason. You have to meet the Recital Centre’s Transaction Fee demands of anywhere between $4.50 and $8 but, at the time of writing (August 10), there are about 500 places available, and this recital is not using the Circle and Wings of the Murdoch space. Keep an eye on the Centre’s website; I’d be tempted to speculate in cash on the night.

PIETER WISPELWEY WITH PIERS LANE – NIGHT II

Melbourne Recital Centre

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday September 17 at 7:30 pm

In the middle night of the three recitals being offered by Dutch cellist Pieter Wispelwey and partly-Australian pianist Piers Lane, the Britten theme persists with his Suite No. 2 from 1967, its five movements premiered the following year by dedicatee Rostropovich. The work’s impetus leads persuasively to a concluding Ciaccona, one of the composer’s most convincing Bach homages across the sequence of three suites. No. 2 lasts a few minutes less than the first of the composer’s essays in this form. On either side, Lane accompanies Wispelwey in two repertoire stalwarts. First is Schubert’s 1824 Arpeggione Sonata which the cellist has recorded three times: 1996, 2009, and 2019. Lane also recorded it – with cellist Tim Hugh in 2015. Although it wasn’t written for the cello, this instrument is the most commonly heard playing Schubert’s string line in the three-movement, 20-minutes-long work, so there’s no sudden desecration involved. To end the night, the musicians play Mendelssohn: Sonata No. 2 in D minor of 1843 which holds four movements and lasts for about 25 minutes. Wispelwey recorded this work in 2011 but, as far as I can tell, it will be new to Lane, who will doubtless take delight in the composer’s active keyboard part. Ticketing follows the same pattern as for the previous recital in this series: standard seats range from $79 to $139; concessions of $20 are available in the middle-of-the-range seating, while Under 40s pay $49 for the same spaces. Everyone has to pay the $4-to-$8.50 transaction fee if ordering online or by phone but currently there are a little over 450 stalls (the only part of the hall being used) on offer.

PIETER WISPELWEY WITH PIERS LANE – NIGHT III

Melbourne Recital Centre

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Friday September 18 at 7:30 pm

Concluding this series of three recitals featuring Dutch cellist Pieter Wispelwey and London-born pianist Piers Lane, we hear the last of Britten’s three cello suites, that from 1971 and the most scouring of them all in dramatic terms. This appears to be programmed at the centre of tonight’s proceedings; it might have been better placed at the end because the composer’s language and landscape are as fatalistic and final as he would ever achieve. As pointed out above, Wispelwey has recorded this work several times: in 1992, 2001 and 2008. In this respect, he has joined an illustrious crew including Steven Isserlis, Alexander Baillie, Truls Mork, Rohan de Saram, Julian Lloyd Webber and a slew of others whose names mean little to me. The duo work together at the evening’s start in the Cesar Franck Violin Sonata from 1886, heard here in (you’d have to assume) the famous transcription by cellist Jules Delsart which was heartily approved by the composer. Wispelwey recorded the work in 2002, as did Lane in 2017 with violinist Tasmin Little. Finishing the night, we hear Chopin’s Cello Sonata in G minor, finished in 1847 and quite solid in its four-movement structure (in particular, the hefty initial Allegro moderato) which takes about half-an-hour to accomplish. Wispelwey recorded the work in 1997, the second movement only in 2000, then the whole thing again in 2011. A limited research indicates that Lane hasn’t recorded it at all. Ticket prices have remained the same: they move between $79 and $139 in four divisions, with concessions of $20 available in the central two sectors; Under 40s can get $49 seats in those same middle ranks. You have to pay somewhere between $4.50 and $8 if you order online or by phone but currently (August 10) there are over 500 stalls spaces available (no Circle or Wings seats are being used). Makes you think.

HANDEL AND BACH

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday September 19 at 7:30 pm

A rare Baroque outing for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, working under the direction of harpsichordist Kristian Bezuidenhout who was born in South Africa and raised here, now a London resident. The evening starts with Bach’s Suite No. 1 in C, probably written closer to 1724 than 1731 when all four of the composer’s orchestral suites were completed. This one calls for a pair of oboes, a bassoon, and your normal strings/continuo set-up. It has seven movements, lasts for a little over 20 minutes, and is the one that I know least. Bezuidenhout then gives us his own version of the Contrapunctrus XIV, the incomplete one (which this player has finished for us in his own sweet way) from Bach’s Art of Fugue that emerged between 1740 and 1746. A change of pace to Handel brings us the Overture to Admeto, a 1727 three-act opera, its quick opening pages calling for oboes and strings only. We then continue the D minor setting with the Concerto grosso Op. 3 No. 5 for two oboes, bassoon and strings/continuo; five movements in all, about ten minutes long, coming from a set of six concertos published in 1734 and compiled from different sources, then appearing without the composer’s authority – and today’s musicians complain about copyright crime. A little Bach filler follows with the Sinfonia from a 1726 cantata, Falsche Welt, dir trau ich nicht. This set of 84 bars turns out to be the first movement of the composer’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 1, complete with two horns, three oboes, bassoon and the usual body of strings and continuo; ah, the joys of recycling. Finally, Bezuidenhout takes his forces through Handels’ Water Music Suite No. 1 in F Major and Suite No. 2 in D Major of 1717, all fourteen movements with a few very familiar items among them: in Suite 1, the waffling horns-rich third movement, the elegant Air and buoyant Bouree alongside Handel’s idea of a Hornpipe; to follow, a more convincing Alla Hornpipe from Suite 2. Prices for seats are a nightmare: standard moves from $43 to $115 across five levels of differing auditory value (really?); concession holders and full-time students pay $5 less in all areas except the worst where there’s no price change; children pay $20 for all but the top-level seats; and don’t get me started on the Groups of 10 schedule which is not available in the cheapest sector. You’ve got to meet the Recital Centre transaction fee of between $4 and $8.50 if you order online or by phone; it’s unavoidable, more’s the pity, because today (August 11) there are only ten seats available across the Murdoch Hall.

CHAMBER MUSIC FOR STRINGS

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Iwaki Auditorium Southbank

Sunday September 20 at 11 am

This event from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chamber sub-grouping (no surprises there) has been curated by one of the body’s violas: Jenny Khafagi. The MSO musicians that she has involved swell to their largest number for the Brahms String Quintet No. 2, a highly appealing and summery work of 1891 which asks for two violas (Khafagi and Fiona Sargeant) alongside two violins (Matthew Tomkins and Freya Franzen) and a solitary cello (Rachael Tobin). Coming in at over thirty minutes in length, this work puts a formal capstone on a morning which, up to its appearance, has been American experimental in character, featuring two string quartets. First comes California-born and co-founder of the Bang on a Can collective David Lang‘s brief (about five minutes) wed; originally a memorial piece for piano from a set of eight written in the 1992-97 span, it was not much later co-opted for a 1997 production of The Tempest. What follows is a score that has appeared in local programs several times across the last few years; Caroline Shaw‘s Plan and Elevation from 2015 which was a product of her time (2014-15) as the inaugural music fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks estate. She gives musical interpretations of five aspects of the buildings and (mainly) grounds in the Harvard University research centre: The Ellipse, The Cutting Garden, The Herbaceous Border, The Orangery, The Beech Tree. All five movements add up to an average of 17 minutes. Tickets are $50 standard, $50 concession, Under 18s $20. For this event, staged on its own premises, the MSO is charging an $8 transaction fee for online or phone bookings. Sadly for those among us trying to avoid this ridiculous imposition, the Iwaki room is not large and sells out pretty quickly, especially to those of us who like to see orchestral musicians grappling with close-order, intimate music-making.

TOUR DE FORCE #3

Corpus Medicorum

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Sunday August 2 at 5 pm

Doctors and their medical accomplices are back for what I think is a final Corpus Medicorum musical exercise for this year, raising funds for research into lung cancer at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. Conducted by Fabian Russell, the body presents a two-pronged program – concerto and symphony, omitting the once customary overture. Violinist Anna da Silva Chen is a member of the Australian Chamber Orchestra and here gets the chance to bring her own insights to the Mendelssohn E minor Concerto which had – for this composer – a long gestation: 1838-44. It’s one of those works that most of us know very well but, despite the fact that every soloist has played it, there’s an inevitable pleasure in crossing those familiar pages once more. As for the symphony, settle in for the sprawling Bruckner 8 which can last for 80+ minutes. It’s the composer’s last completed symphony and it also took a long time to finish: 1884-92. You can experience the work in many editions as musicologists have built careers on their re-interpretations and re-formations. The forces required are extensive, no matter which of the two ‘original’ versions you use. A standard ticket costs you $70; concession $40 (that’s what I call considerate); student $30. You have to find some spare cash for the Recital Centre’s variable Transaction Fee of anywhere between $4.50 and $8. Currently (end of June), seats are readily available, so . . .

SHEKU KANNEH-MASON PLAYS FINNIS

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday August 6 at 7:30 pm

Cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason played at the wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, a show that was watched by millions and illustrated trans-Atlantic vulgarity with breathtaking cultural obtuseness. Still, if that’s a stepping-stone to stardom, seize it with both hands because such a chance won’t come again – rubbish: of course it will. Anyway, here he is, eight years after running through some royal lollipops, doing a tour of Australia and fronting the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under chief conductor Jaime Martin in a new concerto, co-commissioned by the MSO with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Dresdner Philharmonie, and the London Symphony. This new score has been written by British composer Edmund Finnis (no: I don’t know him, either) and was premiered by our guest in LA last November. It was to have been played in Dresden a month ago but Kanneh-Mason hurt himself and couldn’t perform. So we’ll hear it second, before its London airing in October. So lucky. As a preface, Martin conduct’s Debussy’s Prelude a l’apres-mid d’un faune from 1894, after which not much was ever the same in music or ballet, although to look at Terpsichoreans today, you’d think that Nijinsky’s erotic thrusts had never existed. We complete the night with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E minor of 1888: always popular and reassuring, even with its Paul Hogan-reminiscent slow movement – a test for any principal horn. That andante will bring us a welcome sample of Australian monocultural adaptation – using the foreign-grown in service of our own once-great cigarette advertising industry; makes you proud of the Farrer electors (some of them). Tickets cost between $75 and $139; concessions are $5 cheaper; Under 18s pay $20. And then there’s the $8 transaction fee if you order online or by phone. You could probably get a seat from the box office on the night; the MSO website information about availability is much the same for whatever event you look up, which makes me suspicious.

This program will be repeated on Saturday August 8 at 2 pm.

ANAM 30TH GALA WITH SIMONE YOUNG

Australian National Academy of Music

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Friday August 7 at 7 pm

For some reason, the Australian National Academy of Music has only been in operation for thirty years. I would have sworn it was longer, with all those memories of having to trek out to the South Melbourne Town Hall in the organization’s heady early days. Well, not so early; I can’t remember the years when Trevor Green and Ronald Farren-Price began the exercise as its first artistic directors, as I only became aware of ANAM in the reigns of Frank Wibaut and John Harding, followed by the Dean brothers’ halcyon terms. Anyway, Paavali Jumppanen has been in control since 2021 and has settled his institution into its Abbotsford premises. From which domicile it is emerging for this celebration, the body’s orchestra here under the control of Simone Young, who was well into her career when ANAM opened. Tonight, she takes her young forces through, to start, Gubaidulina’s 1971 Fairytale Poem about a piece of chalk which eventually realizes its ambition of drawing landscapes rather than formulae. Then comes a test for first-desk players in John Adams‘ Chamber Symphony of 1992 for 15 soloists, similar to Schoenberg’s Op. 9. After interval (I assume) for inexplicable reasons, the orchestra will play the few seconds that constiutute the Epilogue to Gyorgy Kurtag‘s Beckett-based opera Fin de Partie of 2018.Then, we finish with something more or less traditional: Strauss’s Tod und Verklarung tone poem from 1889 which requires large forces, including two harps, and a belief in the Artist as Hero which is stretching it in this composer’s case. Entry ranges from $65 to $95, concessions $20 cheaper at all levels; Under 30s and Seniors pay between $55 and $85. You also have the Recital Centre’s Transaction Fee of anywhere between $4.50 and $8 which you’ll have to come up with, venal as the whole business is, because there are only a few seats left.

NICOLAS ALTSTAEDT & THOMAS DUNFORD

Musica Viva Australia

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Tuesday August 11 at 7 pm

Here is an eccentric duet appearing for Musica Viva Australia: German-French cellist Nicolas Altstaedt and French lutenist Thomas Dunford. As you’d expect, the pair combine for a program heavy in French Baroque – Marais (six pieces) and Forqueray (three) – with some excerpts from the Bach Cello Suites in G Major and C minor. For something closer to our time, we hear the Lento from Duparc’s 1867 Cello Sonata and that modernist carry-all, Spiegel im Spiegel, written by Arvo Part in 1978 for violin and piano with the string line able to be played on viola or cello; the piano bits on lute, I’m not so sure. Viol master Marais is represented by La Reveuse, Le Tourbillon and Le Badinage from Book 4 of the Pieces de viol published in 1717, Les Folies d’Espagne and Les Voix Humaines from the 1701 Book 2, as well as a Grand Ballet that seems to be a generic title possibly arising from something in that 1991 film Tous les matins du monde. As for Forqueray, his gamba trifecta – La Leclair, Fetes champetres, La Buisson – all come from the only source of his compositions: a volume of 32 pieces published in 1747 (two years after Forqueray’s death) by his son, Jean Baptiste. The ticketing is complicated. Adults can choose from four levels that range between $65 and $163; concessionaires and students enjoy reductions of $18, $15 and $12 in the top three levels; Under 40s get in for $49, while Under 18s pay $20. As well, you have to contribute anything between $4.50 and $8 for the Recital Centre’s Transaction Fee – hard to avoid as already (July 4) there are only about 100 seats still available.

NIGHT SONGS

Ensemble Liaison

Hanson Dyer Hall, Ian Potter Southbank Centre

Thursday August 13 at 7 pm

It might be under the auspices of the Melbourne Recital Centre, but this particular recital is being held next door in the new building (well, new to some of us) that is part of the Victorian College of the Arts/University of Melbourne Conservatorium of Music complex. As for the night’s title, that comes out plainly in a 2009 called Nocturnes by Australian writer Iain Grandage. A two-poem setting for soprano, clarinet and piano, this will involve Sydney-based guest artist Chloe Lankshear as well as Ensemble Liaison regulars David Griffiths and Timothy Young. Before this, we hear Andre Previn’s brief Vocalise of 1995 for soprano (Lankshear), piano (Young) and cello – the Liaison’s Svetlana Bogosavljevic. Putting the singer to more extended use, the Ensemble (well, Lankshear and Young) presents Debussy’s 1887 Ariettes oubliees, six Verlaine settings of exceptional empathy, followed by the composer’s Cello Sonata of 1915, first in a projected series of six such works, now one of the string instrument’s repertoire staples. To end, the players perform Osvaldo Golijov‘s Three Songs for Soprano (and Orchestra) of 2002 which will probably be mounted in an arrangement, although the only one I can find is for string orchestra which is at cross-puposes with the composer’s large percussion battery in the original. Anyway, ticket details are simple: standard is $53, concession and student $42. As well, the Recital Centre is charging between $4.50 and $8 as a Transaction Fee if you order online or by phone. I’d front up on the night, preferably with fee-avoiding cash, even if the venue holds only 400, as opposed to next door’s Murdoch Hall catering for 1,000.

JAIME CONDUCTS MAHLER 6

Melbourne Symphony orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday August 13 at 7:30 pm

Settle in for a long bout with this night’s title work; it can take up to 90 minutes to get through and you’d have to assume that Jaime Martin, chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, won’t introduce a substantial break along the way. The MSO itself should still be familiar with this score, having recorded it under Mark Wigglesworth for a 2005 release. Although . . . no: not many of those players from 21 years ago will have survived. What will be interesting – in a way – will be Martin’s choices on the two vexed questions about this score: in which order to play the two central movements, and whether to have two hammer-blows in the finale, or three as Bernstein did in his three recordings. Mahler dithered at length about the order of the Scherzo and Andante and his widow got involved in the argument after his death, claiming spousal authority – which you’d have to question, considering the lady’s credentials where facts are concerned. The composer himself cut the hammer-strokes from five, to three, then to two; Alma identified three tragedies in the composer’s life as being represented by these dull smashes, which strikes me as putting the cart before this 1904 horse. At all events, here is Mahler’s largest purely instrumental work in terms of resources needed (possibly four harps!) and it makes for a riveting narrative, which is hard to say about its successors. Before this, and possibly the only work before interval (shades of Stenz putting Ives’ The Unanswered Question before Mahler No. 2), we hear a ‘new work’ by the orchestra’s initial Cybec First Nations Composer in Residence, James Henry. With a background in pop, rock, house and techno, this fresh score will make an ideal introduction to the Austrian writer’s psychological excoriation. The usual ticket prices apply: standard between $75 and $139, concession a whopping $5 cheaper, Under 18s $20. Add on the MSO’s own $7 transaction fee per phone or online order. Once upon a time, Mahler 6 would pack them in; will it today? I’d be tempted to show up on the night, bearing lots of coins.

This program will be repeated on Saturday August 15 at 7:30 pm.

VIVALDI’S LEGACY

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday August 20 at 7 pm

In this concert program, the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra is putting itself under the control of guest director and Baroque violinist, Augusta McKay Lodge, an Ohio-born musician resident in Paris. She is attempting to shine a light on Anna Maria della Pieta, a Venetian musician for whom Vivaldi might have written a plethora of works including the per Anna Maria Violin Concerto in E RV 267a, which score sits at the heart of this concert. Lodge also takes part in Vivaldi’s Concerto for violin and organ (which part will most likely be undertaken by the ABO’s artistic director, Paul Dyer) RV 774 which was recently discovered in the Anna Maria Partbook – well, the solo violin line was found – and the rest (all of it) was reconstructed by Federico Sardelli. We hear a solo violin sonata by Pisandel, the A minor JunP IV.2. This composer was much admired by Vivaldi but did Anna Maria play this piece? I don’t know; does anyone? Finally, we hear a Tartini violin concerto in G minor GT 1.g01 which could come from anywhere between 1725 and 1735. Was Anna Maria conversant with this score? Possibly: she lived to be about 86, dying in 1782 and outliving all three composers we hear tonight. Also scheduled to play solo is Baroque flautist Melissa Farrow; can’t tell where her contribution comes into play. As for tickets, these are of mind-blowing complexity. Somehow, the modest Murdoch Hall has been divided into an improbable six regions; your standard seat price ranges from $45 to $167; concessions for the top four of these six come in at between $31 and $62 cheaper; Seniors range in the top four areas from $77 to $151; full-time students in all divisions except the top pay $20; Under 40s pay $36 but it’s unclear where they can sit except for the second-top spot. You have to come to the Recital Centre’s bloated Transaction Fee party of anywhere between $4.50 and $8; at time of writing (July 5), there are over 150 seats still available.

This program will be repeated on Saturday August 22 at 5 pm, and on Sunday August 23 at 5 pm. Tickets are more expensive for both of these performances but their availability is about the same.

METROPOLIS: SOUNDS OF CINEMA

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Friday August 21 at 7:30 pm

This one-off celebrates Australian-born film composers; three of them – Thomas Meadowcroft, Bryony Marks, and David Hirschfelder. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra shows a fair deal of dedication to this project by being the commissioners of the program’s opener: Meadowcraft’s Hollywood Parsifals for Foley Artists and Orchestra in which the Berlin-based composer celebrates the makers of film sound effects. How will he achieve this? No idea but a Foley artist, John Simpson, is listed among the concert’s soloists; God knows what he makes of being classed among a group of perfect fools. Marks wrote the soundtrack for the first film directed by her husband, Matthew Saville: Noise, a 2007 thriller which concerns suburban Melbourne murders investigated by a detective with tinnitus. We’re to hear Their World – an extract of about ten minutes from that soundtrack. Finally, we hear three suites from films for which Hirschfelder provided the music: The Dressmaker, Legend of the Guardians, and Strictly Ballroom. These have all been arranged by Jessica Wells, a formidable name in her field. Benjamin Northey conducts and other participants include percussionist Eugene Ughetti, guitarists Slava and Leonard Grigoryan, and Hirschfelder himself playing piano as he has throughout his career for luminaries like Little River Band, the Peter Cupples Band, John Farnham and David Hobson. Adult tickets cost between $59 and $99; concessions are a ridiculous $5 cheaper; Under 18s pay $20, but everyone pays the MSO’s transaction fee of $8 if ordering online or by phone. At the moment, plenty of seats are available, even though the Hamer Hall Balcony is not being used.

ENSEMBLE Q PLAY BARTOK & BRAHMS

Ensemble Q

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday August 22 at 7 pm

On a national tour, the Brisbane-based Ensemble Q presents an amiable enough entertainment in the Recital Centre’s smaller space. They begin with Bartok’s Contrasts, the composer’s 1938 trio for clarinet (Paul Dean), violin (Adam Chalabi) and piano (Daniel de Borah). Enjoying the restrained ebullience of several Hungarian and Romanian dance tunes, this score is a splendid display piece for all three participants, packed with striking dissonances and requiring an unfailing rhythmic versatility, especially in its rapid finale. Chalabi and de Borah collaborate in Margaret Sutherland’s brief 1944 Nocturne that illustrates rather well this venerable Australian composer’s occasional fusion of dissonance and quiescence. To end this 75-minute recital, we hear the Brahms Piano Quartet No. 3 in C minor from 1875 – the last one and the least played in live performance, possibly because of its emotional bareness or its internal complexity. Anyway, we know Chalabi and De Borah are involved; British violist Benjamin Roskams is taking on the tenor part, but the cellist is unidentified. You’d have to expect that Trish Dean, the Ensemble’s co-artistic director, will be the chosen party for this role. Tickets are $75, concession $65, student $30. As well, the Recital Centre’s transaction charge comes in somewhere between $4.50 and $8, for a service that is grossly over-valued. Currently, plenty of tickets are available, but you can’t count on that remaining the case because the Salon only holds an audience of between 130 and 140.

LUCAS AND ARTHUR JUSSEN

Melbourne Recital Centre

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Monday August 24 at 7:30 pm

I suppose most of us would know these Dutch brothers from YouTube, on which site you can observe their duo skills easily enough. As you’d expect, their empathy borders on the extraordinary, especially in two-piano works like the Mozart concerto K. 365 of 1779 but more obviously in four-hand pieces where the interweaving of dynamic and line is flawless. Plaudits to the Recital Centre for snapping up Lucas and Arthur Jussen as they pass through town on their New Zealand/Australia tour. To begin, they perform the Mozart four-hand Sonata in D K. 381, allegedly written in 1772, possibly for performance by the lad himself and sister Nannerl. Then we hear another four-hand repertoire staple in Schubert’s F minor Fantasia of 1828 which is one of the more challenging duets because of its chameleonic character. After interval (I assume), we move to the 20th century and works by two friends. First comes Ravel’s choreographic poem La Valse, completed in 1920, perhaps in the composer’s own two-piano transcription of that year, but more likely in Lucien Garban’s version, also from 1920. To end, the brothers play Stravinsky’s seminal The Rite of Spring ballet of 1913, its first published version being the composer’s own four-hand transcription. While you can see the Stravinsky, Mozart and Schubert works from this pair on YouTube, I don’t believe they have recorded the Ravel, so that guarantees about 13 to 14 minutes of novelty value. The cost of standard tickets ranges across four levels, from $79 to $139, with concessions of $20 available only in the middle two strata; Under 40s can access the two lowest tiers for a flat $49. You also have to find the Recital Centre’s fee for handling your credit card details if you book online or by phone – that’s an extra $4.50 to $8, depending on your financial status. I don’t think the Circle/Wings seats are available (or in use), but there are over 300 seats left today (July 6) in the stalls. Worth the gamble of turning up, cash in hand, on the night? Keep an eye on the Recital Centre’s website.

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2 IN CONCERT

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday August 27 at 7:30 pm

This franchise has escaped me – and most of my grandchildren as well. But there must be something in it that appeals – all that left-over Game of Thrones angst, perhaps. Also, as a sequel, it’s rated highly by those who should know – children and film critics. Obviously, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra administration and artistic gurus see merit in taking on the film and supplying the soundtrack in real-time; so much so that they’re doing it four times and the middle two performances have not many seats left. Dean DeBlois’ 2014 film features (mainly) music by John Powell who used a 120-member orchestra, a 100 voice choir, and some odd instruments like the Celtic harp (bring back Mary O’Hara), uilleann pipes, Highland bagpipes, tin whistle (for that James Galway touch) and a bodhran – which rounds out the odd national image that this film’s scenario projects: north and west of Hadrian’s Wall, as well as the Norse part of Scandinavia. All’s well, however, because the country’s favourite actor/actress Kate Blanchett is in the vocal cast; rest easy, Australia, with this secondary consolation for not getting anywhere in the World Cup (as usual). Our own Nicholas Buc conducts but there’s no sign of the MSO Chorus or any of the vocalists needed for the score’s songs. Adult tickets cost between $89 and $167; children and concession holders pay $5 less. Fancy taking your three kids to good seats for nearly $500? Add on the usual $8 transaction fee and you’re in for an expensive night out. The cheapest DVD version at JB Hi-Fi costs $14.98.

This program will be repeated on Friday August 28 at 7:30 pm, Saturday August 29 at 7: 30 pm, and Sunday August 30 at 1 pm.

FIRST VOICES SHOWCASE

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Iwaki Auditorium, Southbank

Wednesday June 3 at 6:30 pm

Not what I was expecting. The voices aren’t those of writers who are having their first pieces played but members of the First Nations who have been around for a while, like Aaron Wyatt who is a Noongar man from Western Australia and a pretty old hand at conducting in Perth. Which is just what he’s doing this evening: taking the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra through three scores, one of them his own. This will be The Things Which Are Most Important Don’t Always Scream the Loudest, written in 2023 for the opening of a performing arts centre in Subiaco named after Bob Hawke, from whom the title comes – perhaps. It’s a fanfare that lasts three minutes, could begin in D minor, and appears to pack in an awful lot of indigenous references. Wyatt also conducts Nyrrimar Ngamatyata/To Lose Yourself at Sea by James Howard, a Jaadwa composer who possibly composed this work last year; it was certainly premiered by the MSO in that year, if ABC Radio National is to be believed. As well, we hear a fresh MSO piece: Mutations by Nicholas Astill, a Gamilaraay writer and researcher who is here presenting his first orchestral commission from the people playing it. So he is an actual first voice in both senses, I suppose. Tickets are a flat $15, but the MSO also charges almost half that in its $7 transaction fee, which is fiscally insane in these trying times.

WHERE SONG BEGAN

Bowerbird Collective

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday June 6 at 7:30 pm

The principle behind this recital from the Bowerbird Collective is that song began with birds. Well, I suppose it’s one way of looking at it – I would have preferred ascribing its origin to angels but that’s being uncharacteristically optimistic. In any case, the ensemble is an odd one. In the Recital Centre publicity for this event, the co-founders of the group – violinist Simone Slattery, cello Anthony Albrecht – are listed as separate guests; on the Bowerbird website, you can find a solid list of artists that have indulged in collaborations with the fundamental duo. Not tonight. Slattery and Albrecht themselves will present a nine-part unescorted program from all over the shop. We kick off with Arvo Part: his 1977 Fratres for violin alone. That will be fun as the only arrangement I know of this work in solo form is for piano. Brisbane-based Sarah Hopkins‘ Reclaiming the Spirit comes from 1993 and exists in many arrangements, but you’d have to guess the violin/cello one will emerge here. Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending from 1917 somehow will enjoy a release in what you’d have to anticipate will be a skeletal shape. Chris Williams wrote birds, songs, seas in 2017 specifically for these two musicians, extracting it from a larger work to do with convicts. A welcome dose of Maninyas comes with Ross Edwards‘ 1990 Ecstatic Dance No. 2, once again in a violin/cello format. Hurtle back temporally to Schmelzer’s Cucu Sonata in A minor of 1664, then nudge forward 50+ years into some Bach: the well-known opening to his Cello Suite No. 1 which comes (probably) from somewhere between 1717 and 1723. Anthochaera carunculata by David John Lang was written for Slattery – and this program – in 2017 and celebrates the red wattlebird. To end, a traditional (really?) indigenous hymn, Ngarra Burra Ferra, which has become a part of the Yorta Yorta contemporary culture because they wrote its lyrics. Tickets range from $69 to $89; Under 30s pay $30; everybody stumps up the MRC fee of between $4 and $8.50 per online order – the best argument I can think of for cash at the box office on the night.

DANIEL HOPE IN RECITAL

Classical Music Australia

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Tuesday June 9 at 7:30 pm

The highly enterprising South African-born violinist Daniel Hope is back after a twelve-year gap, collaborating with pianist Marie Sophie Hauzel in a strange program that has one solid work as its conclusion after some odd predecessors, a few of them more easily seen as encore scraps. The duo begin with Enescu’s triplet-rich Impromptu concertant in G flat Major (that’s a key you don’t see much of) from 1903, then move to Faure’s Andante in B flat of 1897. Both pleasant show-pieces, both fine salon music. I’ve encountered the Sonatine of 1893 by Dvorak in a transcription for flute and piano and its four movements stretch to about 20 minutes’ uncomplicated playing time; it was written for the composer’s children and shows it. Then come two Mendelssohn bagatelles in transcription: the eloquent On Wings of Song from 1834, which you sometimes hear in its original vocal format; and Witches’ Song, one of the Op. 8 set of twelve lieder written between 1824 and 1827. Hope balances his Dvorak with Elgar’s Violin Sonata: a three-movement construct lasting about 25 minutes, generated in the grim year of 1918 and recorded by Hope 25 years ago. Your normal tickets range between $95 and $140. Then there’s a selection of others; a Pay What You Can (a bit extra topping up the top price), a reduced price (down $20), a lower-priced ($30/$35 under the regular), and a $30 for the $95 regular seats if you’re struggling. No matter: everybody will have to cope with the Recital Centre’s $4-to-$8.50 transaction fee for online/phone orders – Congregavit nos in unum . . .

HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS IN CONCERT

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Wednesday June 10 at 7:30 pm

As we all know, this is the second in J.K. Rowling’s celebrated series of tales about the boy wizard, and in it she documents the next bout in his ongoing struggles against Voldemort, this time in the persona of an old Hogwarts boy, Tom Riddle. Apart from enjoyable jaunts like the flying car, the mandrake transformations, and the encounters with Moaning Myrtle, the film is enlivened by the presence of Kenneth Branagh, playing the magnificently egotistical Gilderoy Lockhart: a Dark Arts teacher for the ages with absolutely no talent for much except self-aggrandisement. And there’s lots of seat-edge mayhem in Harry’s final confrontation with the basilisk as he saves his future wife from death, with suitably gripping musical support from John Williams‘ score, in which construction he was assisted by William Ross, following the centuries-old precedent of Renaissance painters and sculptors. And they say you can’t teach a new dog old tricks. This project is selling very well for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, which will be directed by Filipino veteran of these events, Gerard Salonga. Admission costs you between $86 and $161; concession card holders and children are treated with equal contempt by being given a $5 discount. Everybody has to meet the MSO’s $7 transaction fee for each online or phone order – passable if there are ten of you, totally unreasonable for a single-ticket booking.

This program will be repeated on Thursday June 11 and Friday June 12 at 7:30 pm, and on Saturday June 13 at 1 pm.

DORIC STRING QUARTET & LLOYD VAN’T HOFF

Musica Viva Australia

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday June 16 at 7 pm

Since they were last here, the Doric String Quartet members have changed. No: that’s not quite right. Two of them are new: Maia Cabeza is now first violin, and Emma Wernig is the current viola. Ying Xue continues as second violin and foundation member John Myerscough has been cellist since the group began in 1998. Will that make a difference to the ensemble’s ‘sound’? Of course it will, particularly as we have no grounds of comparison: as far as I can see, the ensemble hasn’t issued any CDs since this personnel realignment. They’re banging the nationalist drum with Britten’s Three Divertimenti of 1936, a ten-minute work the group recorded in 2019. Furthering the patriotic cause, we hear Thomas Ades‘ Alchymia of 2023 which will bring Lloyd Van’t Hoff into the mix for this four-movement sequence of transformations; the Australian musician will be playing a basset clarinet because nothing says alchemy like that instrument. It’s back to your old-time repertoire for the night’s second half with Beethoven’s Razumovsky No. 1 in F: the composer’s self-launch into a new and challenging style of writing in this form, after which nothing was ever the same for both audiences and performers. Normal tickets cost between $65 and $163; concession holders and students pay $18, $15 and $12 less in the three top seating divisions; Under 40s cough up $49, Under 18s $20. As with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, there is a transaction fee charged of a flat $7 which you might avoid by turning up on the night, although the space is currently (May 9) pretty full.

ITALIAN SERENATAS

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday June 18 at 7 pm

The publicity for this Australian Brandenburg Orchestra event is heavy on hype, light on detail, but we make what we can of what’s on offer. The program moves across the Italian Baroque, focused on four cities: Venice, Florence, Naples and Rome. Leading us on this pilgrimage will be a baritone expert in this period, Renato Dolcini, and the Brandenburgers’ director-from-the-harpsichord, Paul Dyer. We joyfully encounter several significant names: Vivaldi (that covers Venice), Corelli (so Rome is accounted for, but did he write any vocal music that has survived?), Brescianello (a Mass, an opera, two cantatas but he stayed pretty much all of his professional life in Stuttgart), Falconieri (Naples-Parma-Rome-Naples producing quite a few vocal works), Giulio Caccini and his daughter Francesca (both active, if not dominant, writers for voice in Florence). The bumf’s adjectives fly in superlative directions – ‘bold, stylish, unforgettable’, ‘vibrant’, ‘lavish’, ‘opulent’, ‘expressive’ – but you have to regain your feet with the realization that the concert is un-staged: what you get is pure singing and playing – of a high calibre, to be sure, but not as colourful as it sounds . . . unless you’re a Baroque aficionado, in which case, rapture awaits. Seat prices differ between performances but tonight’s are cheaper, starting at $45 and swooping to $167, with some substantial reductions for concession holders, less handsome for seniors, $20 anywhere except the top stratum for students, $36 for Under 40s with the same proviso. You still pay between $4 and $8.50 if booking online or by phone; currently, about a quarter of the hall is available.

This program will be repeated on Saturday June 20 at 5 pm and on Sunday June 21 at 5 pm.

ABC CLASSIC 100 IN CONCERT

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Friday June 19 at 7:30 pm

Has the ABC’s annual quiz stopped already? The one where you’re asked to nominate what you think is the greatest piece of music (this year, ‘of All Time’)? It would seem so because the cast of participants is set out on the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra‘s website. Strange, as the cut-off date for entries is actually on May 28. Still, going with the flow, we note that Benjamin Northey will be conducting and no doubt relishing his other function as creative director, which probably means he gets to talk. As well, the ABC proposes one of the presenters/hosts of its The Piano series: Andrea Lam. Billed for her participation as a ‘vocal’, Koa, Kuku Yalanji and Wakka Wakka soprano Nina Korbe is doomed to perform operatic highlights. Another face from The Piano, pianist CJ Jones visits from across Bass Strait to perform who knows what. MSO concertmaster Natalie Chee and associate principal cello Rachael Tobin will enjoy solo exposure, and the MSO Chorus will participate, probably in such deathless numbers as I Still Call Australia Home and Up There, Cazaly. I’ve not been to one of these events (this is the fourth) but I’ve seen a televised version and it struck me that an awful lot of chatting went on – for a concert. Anyway, the organizers are presenting the program twice, which means there’s an audience for it. Tickets are still available, but not many. Standard seats cost between $59 and $109; concession holders pay a munificent $5 less. Everybody has to meet the $7 transaction fee if you book online/by phone. Sorry but, if they’re going to broadcast the concert live, why drag yourself out on a Melbourne winter’s night for a program packed with pieces that you might not like and which you will be hearing in (generally, based on my one experience) truncated form, anyway?

This program will be repeated on Saturday June 20 at 2 pm.

JAMES EHNES WITH ORION WEISS

Melbourne Recital Centre

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Friday June 19 at 7:30 pm

I’ve always had a lot of time for James Ehnes, the personable Canadian violinist: for his prodigious repertoire, for his fluidity of production, for the restraint and depth he brings to his interpretations. Is he alone in these respects? No, but he is also ever-reliable; it’s impossible to think of one occasion when his playing sounded sub-par, and par for him is a level that few can sustain. Anyway, here he is in recital with Orion Weiss, a well-travelled American pianist who has collaborated with Ehnes in past years. Tonight, the pair collaborate in three major sonatas: the benevolent Brahms No. 1 in G from 1878-9, Debussy’s short and sprightly exercise from 1917 which was his last major composition, and the Grieg No. 3 in C minor which was finished in 1887 and is his most popular work in this form. All are three movements long, which is not that remarkable as only Brahms wrote a four-movement violin sonata. To introduce themselves, Ehnes and Weiss play Korngold’s Suite from his 1919 music for Much Ado about Nothing: four movements of brilliant scene-setting that prove to be touching and amusing by turns – which alternating reactions strike me as typical of the play itself. Tickets cost between $79 and $139 full price; concessions for middling seats can be bought for $20 less; Under 40s pay $49 for the same mid-price places. Everybody pays the $4-to-$8.50 transaction fee imposed by the Recital Centre if they book online or by phone. At the moment (May 10), the hall is half-empty and I don’t think the gallery is in use on this occasion.

SPOTLIGHT

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday June 25 at 7:30 pm

You have two forces in the spotlight during this program from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under German conductor Anja Bihlmaier who, judging from her website, isn’t that engrossed by her Australian tour that takes in four nights in Sydney, three nights here, and two in Perth. The focus in this night’s second half is on the ensemble which essays Bartok’s 1943 Concerto for Orchestra, one of the composer’s more popular scores and a showcase for its performers, especially in the second movement’s instrumental duets. Also something of a fabulous fabric, Bihlmaier opens this brief program with Strauss’s Rosenkavalier Suite of 1945; well, sort of Strauss’s but more probably put together by conductor Artur Rodzinski who directed the first performance. All the opera’s hits are there, including the ‘Mit mir’ waltz. As for an individual spotlight, that will shine on the MSO’s principal oboe Johannes Grosso who will give us the solo line in Mozart’s Concerto in C Major of 1777, a work that many of us know as a flute concerto that the composer transcribed in a vain attempt to flesh out a commission. For all that, it’s a sterling work for oboe and one of the two that defines/confines the instrument’s repertoire in that form. Seats cost between $51 and $139; concession holders get in for a game-changing $5 cheaper; children are admitted for $20; everyone pays the $7 fee if booking online or by phone. At the moment (May 10), plenty of good and poor seats are available, especially in the stalls.

This program will be repeated in Costa Hall, Geelong on Friday June 26 ay 7:30 pm and back in Hamer Hall on Saturday June 27 at 2 pm.

THE CORONATION OF POPPEA

Victorian Opera

Palais Theatre, St. Kilda

Tuesday June 30 at 7:30 pm

It’s been a number of years since I last saw this Monteverdi opera. I can vaguely recall a production carried out in South Melbourne decades ago that obfuscated more than enlightened, thanks to its directorial oddity. Then came an Opera Australia production in 1993 that brought out the Italian composer’s inner punk. Now comes a new production from Victorian Opera that has several daunting prospects dangling. The original score of 1643 has been revised by Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin, to a stage where there are infusions of jazz to brighten up an otherwise pedestrian night at the Baroque. Further, the time has changed from the 62 CE court of Nero to a mafioso club of the 1980s; surprising they’ve left the environment in the same country, but then, the singers will be working in Italian. The bright minds behind this re-incarnation are conductor Chad Kelly who has ‘realised’ the performing edition in use; the text and vocal lines have been adapted by Alan Hicks; Sam Strong directs; sets and costumes come about through Anna Cordingley. Good luck to them all. And even more kind wishes for the cast headed by Samuel Dundas (Nero), Meechot Mareero (Poppea), Jeremy Kleeman (Ottone), Margaret Trubiano (Ottavia), and David Greco (Seneca). As well, there’ll be three others, you assume, to impersonate the god/goddesses who clutter Busenello’s libretto. In its original form, this is a lengthy opera and definitely gains from aggressive staging; this production lasts two hours, which includes an interval. If you’re happy with all of this, tickets will cost you between $39 and $175 – one of the more sensational spreads I’ve come across anywhere (except opera). You also have a ‘handling fee’ of ‘from $7.80’ which to my ears sounds menacing; more so than usual.

This production will be repeated on Thursday July 2 at 7:30 pm and on Saturday July 4 at 7:30 pm.

BEETHOVEN, MOZART & MORE!

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hanner Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Saturday May 2 at 7:30 pm

You’ve got Beethoven and Mozart; how much more can you stand? Yet again, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra plays some substantial works complemented by a few fragments as make-weights. British conductor Chad Kelly moved to this country five years ago with a glowing reputation in opera and early music; he played with Solomon’s Knot, for God’s sake! So we are anticipating some highly refined period output in works like CPE Bach’s Sinfonia in D Major of 1775 (well, the first movement of its three) and the Curtain Music/Tune from Locke’s incidental music for a 1674 production of The Tempest; this extract depicts the storm raging as the play begins. Kelly conducts two symphonies: Haydn’s La Passione No. 49 in F minor of 1768, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 in D Major of 1801 – brilliant and buoyant music from a time when the composer’s deafness was becoming more pronounced. As for the Mozart content, that takes the form of the 1783 Horn Concerto No. 2 K. 417 from which we all know the Rondo, if not its precedents. Soloist here will be MSO principal Nicolas Fleury, an able master of this temperamental instrument. Standard seats cost between $75 and $127; concession holders can revel in tickets a whole $5 cheaper; children get in for $20. Every order attracts a $7 transaction fee; can’t wait for the day when that rip-off device is thrown out.

A truncated version of this program will be repeated on Monday May 4 at 6:30 pm in the Quick Fix at Half Six series. The Haydn symphony and Mozart’s concerto will be omitted.

LEONKORO QUARTET

Melbourne Recital Centre

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Monday May 4 at 7:30 pm

Here comes another ensemble that’s completely new to me. But then, the players in the Leonkoro Quartet have only been together since 2019, even if they have won a number of awards since then, a few of which mean something in the grand scheme of chamber music operations. The group’s name comes from Esperanto and it means ‘lion heart’ – a choice that could be courageous or weird, depending on your appreciation of English kings. The players – violins Jonathan Schwarz and Emiri Kakiuchi, viola Mayu Konoe, cello Lukas Schwarz (yes, top and bottom are brothers) – begin with Dutch pianist/composer Henriette Bosmans’ highly neglected String Quartet of 1927. We then hear Mendelssohn No. 2 in A from exactly a century earlier and through which the shade of late Beethoven looms large. To end, the Leonkoros bring out the big guns with Schubert’s Death and the Maiden in D minor from 1824. They don’t come any fiercer than this intensely moving masterpiece which engrosses the listener across its 40-minute length. Tickets range from $79 to $139 full price; middle-of-the-road seats go for $20 less if you’re a concession holder; Under 40s can get into the cheaper sections of the hall for $49. And everybody pays the peculiar MRC ‘Transaction Fee’ of anywhere between $4 and $8.50 per order online or by phone. I’d be tempted to avoid this by showing up at the box office on this night; currently, only half the stalls have been sold.

SIDE BY SIDE: MELBOURNE YOUTH ORCHESTRA

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday May 7 at 7:30 pm

Yet another operatic grab-bag up for inspection here with members of the Melbourne Youth Orchestra playing alongside Melbourne Symphony Orchestra professionals in support of three soloists from the Melba Opera Trust. Most of the program is familiar, even to those of us who eschew the delights of opera. The combined orchestral forces under Nathaniel Griffiths take on the Overture to Verdi’s Nabucco of 1841; the Intermezzo (depicting the heroine’s journey to imprisonment in Le Havre) out of Puccini’s first success, the 1893 Manon Lescaut; and the Galop infernal that brightens up Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld from 1858 and which made the Moulin Rouge dancers semi-immortal. As for sung excerpts, soprano Sophie Blades and mezzo Chloe James collaborate in the Flower Duet from Delibes’ opera from 1882, Lakme; Blades treats us to the brief O mio babbino caro that momentarily stills the mayhem in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, finished in 1918; and James takes on the taxing Una voce poco fa which introduces the heroine Rosina in the second scene of Rossini’s brilliant The Barber of Seville of 1816. James continues along the popular trail with the Act 1 Habanera that brings to the stage the heroine of Bizet’s Carmen from 1878, after which baritone Lachlan Higgins enjoys his first outing with more Barber in the title character’s opening self-introduction, Largo al factotum. Blades moves away from the well-known with Rose’s What Good Would the Moon Be from Weill’s 1946 Street Scene, then Higgins presents the Papagena! solo that brings a welcome dose of comic humanity to the Masonic pretensions of Mozart’s The Magic Flute – his last opera, written in 1791. This event runs non-stop for 75 minutes and tickets are a uniform $35 with the customary MSO $5 reduction for concession-holders, never forgetting the $7 ‘transaction fee’ for coping with the mysteries of your credit card.

OVERGROWN PATHS

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday May 7 at 7:30 pm

You can’t mistake one of the components on this program from the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra. Janacek’s two-volume piano collection On an Overgrown Path, written between 1900 and 1911, is rarely heard entire, and that observance fault will continue this evening as the MCO is playing selections only from the Daniel Rumler arrangement for string orchestra which also, in its original form of 2017, involves texts by the Israeli writer Maia Brami. Australian actor Helen Morse is scheduled to read the prefatory sonnets that Vivaldi wrote for his The Four Seasons, which concertos from 1718-23 conclude this program with director Sophie Rowell handling the solo violin part. Morse is also taking part in a work by London-based writer Libby Croad: the five-movement Portraits of 2020 which also have prefatory poems by Eleanor Percy (this can’t be the 16th century Duchess of Buckingham, can it? Perhaps it’s the American 19th century writer Eleanor Percy Lee?). Not the whole work (of course) but more selections. So possibly Morse will be giving us some of those Brami poems during the Janacek. All of this will be prefaced by Wolf’s Italian Serenade, which is a stand-alone, non-poetry-accreting piece for string quartet, arranged by the composer for string orchestra in 1892. As usual with some organizations who perform at this venue, ticket prices are labyrinthine in their details. Normal tickets cost between $75 and $150; concession prices are $15 to $20 cheaper; full-time students and children can get anywhere for $30; Under 40s get access to the poorer seats for a flat $40; group bookings of ten or more are a whole new ball-game. Whatever your stratum, you’ll fork out between $4 and $8.50 for ordering online or by phone because somebody has to pay for the over-stretched MRC accounting system.

This program will be repeated on Sunday May 10 at 2:30 pm.

BEETHOVEN’S GHOST

Musica Viva Australia

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday May 12 at 7:30 pm

It seems like a random grouping but the three artists involved in this Musica Viva Australia recital have well-established links – just not all together. Pianist Aura Go has collaborated with cellist Timo-Veikko Valve for quite a few years. She has also performed with violinist Kristian Winther. So that link should guarantee the success of this amalgam, right? We’ll see. These musicians are bookending their program with masterpieces of the piano trio format. As a casual observer could predict from the night’s title, they begin with Beethoven in D, the Ghost, published in 1809 and never out of favour since. To end, we hear the vibrant Ravel of 1914; in duration, probably the most substantial offering of the evening and a gift for Go in particular. In between the males come two female writers. First is Lili Boulanger’s D’un soir triste, the French composer’s last completed piece of 1917-18 and originally scored for violin/piano duet although the first performance I can find was given as a piano trio with the composer’s sister Nadia playing piano. As well, there’s a new commission (from Musica Viva, you’d assume) by University of Melbourne lecturer Melody Eotvos; perhaps a successor to the composer’s Sericulture of 2016 but I can’t find any mention of anything definite online. Adult tickets cost between $65 and $163, with deductions of between $12 and $18 for concession holders and students; Under 40s pay $49, while Under 18s pay $20. There’s no mention of the online booking fee of between $4 and $8.50; Musica Viva might be showing the way to everybody else. Or was it just an oversight?

CZECHMATE – MEETING AT THE CROSSROADS

Melbourne Recital Centre

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Friday May 15 at 6 pm

This is a run-straight-through hour’s worth of Baroque music-making from a new group – CzechMate – filled with senior musicians who specialize in period performance. These are two violinists in Czech national Helena Zemanova and our own Julia Fredersdorff, home-grown dulcian expert Jane Gower, and Danish harpsichord master Lars Ulrik Mortensen. As for their offerings, they are currently nine in number. We hear Sonatas 9 and 10 by Dario Castello, published in 1621 and employing all four players; Giovanni Battista Fontana’s Violin Sonata II, which I assume is the D Major from the composer’s 1641 collection of 18 Sonate; the 1657 keyboard Toccata VII by Michelangelo Rossi; a brace of ricercars from Diego Ortiz’s Trattado de Glosas, published in 1553 and which all appear to be written for the bass viol; Sonata 19 by Francesco Turini, which I assume is one of the trio sonatas that might have been published in 1621; then Johann Balthasar Erben’s Sonata sopra ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la which seems to be pitched in B flat and is another trio sonata, probably from the mid 1650s; a sonata a tre with prime place for Gower appears in Philipp Friedrich Buchner’s Sonata 8 published in 1662; and we end with the euphonious-sounding Johann Heinrich Schmelzer and his Polnische Sackpfeifen; yet another trio sonata, his No. 10 published between 1682 and 1688, imitating the unforgettable sound of Polish bagpipes. We’re assured of a wild, unstructured musical escapade as these early Baroque writers cavort intellectually and emotionally all over the place; maybe, but the music on paper looks well-organized to me. Tickets are $55 flat, with a $10 concession discount. You also have to pay the MRC’s transaction fee of somewhere between $4 and $8.50 if you order online or by phone; the recital is being held in the Salon, so there’s not much choice in the matter.

STRING SPECTACULAR

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday May 16 at 7:30 pm

Concertmaster of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Natalie Chee takes the reins for this program which will end with one of the fundamental masterpieces for string orchestra: Tchaikovsky’s Serenade of 1880 which still manages to test its executants’ balance of timbre and dynamic. As an opening gambit, Chee leads her forces in the brief three-movement Mozart Divertimento K. 136 in D, written in 1772 when the composer was 16 and already producing those superbly shaped melody lines that make the products of his peers sound vapid by comparison. Another delight from the string orchestra repertoire comes with Grieg’s Holberg Suite, written in 1884 for piano solo but arranged for the larger force a year later. It’s hard to imagine it as a keyboard work, so accustomed have we become to the rich bellyfuls of string output from its Sarabande and Air, and the sprightly momentum of its outer movements. As a nationalistic nod, we’re to hear Ella Macens‘ The Lake in its 2019 format rather than the original for recorder, cello and chamber organ of a year earlier. Amiable and soulful, the Latvian-Australian writer’s piece sits contentedly in G Major and, alongside its rich divisi scoring, holds solo lines for Chee and whoever is playing principal cello tonight. Standard tickets range between $57 and $105; concession holders are charged $5 less while, if you’re under 18, the fee is $20. And don’t forget the MSO’s $7 fee if you book online or by phone; probably unavoidable, more’s the pity, as the event is selling well with only a little over 160 seats left at the time of writing (April 18).

MASS OF DELIVERANCE

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Sunday May 17 at 12 pm

Dan Walker is an Australian composer, conductor and performer, and I’ve never heard of him. Others have, clearly, because (a few members of) the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and its Chorus are presenting his 2014 Mass of Deliverance which asks for 8-part choir, piano, brass quintet and percussion. From what I’ve read, the work lasts about half an hour, and so this 60-minute program is being fleshed out by two other choral works. One is John Rutter‘s Gloria of 1974 which calls for roughly the same instrumentation and choral forces as Walker uses, apart from an organ substituting for the piano and some soprano and alto soloists in the middle movement. Also, it has to be said, Rutter’s setting leaves out quite a bit of the text set down for your everyday Mass. But the Australian writer deliberately pays homage to the British master in his choice of forces – and probably in other ways as well. Between these two pieces, the Chorus will sing another work by Rutter: his ‘Hymn’, which I presume refers to the Hymn to the Creator of Light from 1992 to texts by Lancelot Andrewes and Johann Franck for double SATB choir; it is, in effect, another Gloria. The concert will be conducted by Warren Trevelyan-Jones, director of the MSO Chorus. Standard seats range from $57 to $105; concession holders pay a whopping $5 less; children under 18 get admission for $20. Everybody will pay an extra $7 for ordering by phone or online; you could risk fronting up just before midday but there are only about 140 seats available currently.

GRAN PARTITA

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Sunday May 17 at 6 pm

A little later on this Sunday, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra appears in partial form again for this chamber music recital comprising two works only. But the concert has an interval so you’d have to think that the scores in question are substantial. Well, the MSO winds begin with the Wind Sonatina No. 1 by Richard Strauss of 1943, subtitled From an Invalid’s Workshop. This calls for 16 players: pairs of flutes, oboes, and bassoons; three clarinets and a bass clarinet with a basset horn for a fleshy middle to the texture; a contrabassoon, and four horns. This lasts over half an hour but its three-movement stretch is good-humoured and far from realizing any morbid suggestions inferred from the auxiliary title. Then comes the 1781 Mozart Serenade No. 10 K. 361, the Adagio of which featured so strongly in the Forman film Amadeus when Salieri first comes across his colleague’s music. This asks for 13 musicians: pairs of oboes, clarinets, basset horns, bassoons, as well as four horns and a double bass. And it lasts for about 50 minutes – Gran in the sense of substantial and in running through seven movements. Not all of it is as inspired as that miraculous third movement yet the work is a brilliant melange of textures and an organizational marvel. The MSO’s principal oboe Johannes Grosso and its principal clarinet David Thomas share directorial duties. If you want to hear these works, you pay between $57 and $105; concession holders have to stump up $5 less; if you’re under 18, you get in for $20. All bookings attract the MSO’s $7 transaction fee but you might gamble on getting a ticket on the night at the box office; there are over 200 still available.

VOICES BETWEEN WORLDS

Flinders Quartet

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Monday May 18 at 7 pm

After some personnel jolts and jumps, the Flinders Quartet has settled into a steady composite: violins Elizabeth Sellars and Wilma Smith, viola Helen Ireland and cello Zoe Knighton. Now 26 years old, the ensemble maintains two founding members in Ireland and Knighton; both violinists have been constants in Melbourne’s musical life for many years. These musicians are presenting three works with distinct characteristics. Melbourne writer Nicole Brady‘s Ricochet is a straight string quartet, commissioned and performed by the Flinders ensemble in 2024 and, in its slightly more than ten minutes’ length, it lives up to its name, the material/note-stabs bounding between the interpreters to disorienting effect. We’ll also hear Ravel in F Major from 1903, one of the semi-modern foundation stones of quartet writing. The evening’s surprise comes with Eric Avery‘s Wirringintungiyil, here receiving its ‘premiere’. The composer is a Ngiyampaa, Yuin, Bundjalung and Gumbangirr man from New South Wales and his piece is a lullaby which he has previously performed with his father on didjeridu while he himself played violin and sang the original melody. I’d assume that this new version involves the Flinders people and so might be more sustained than the barely-five minutes of the earlier duo rendition. It’ll need to be if the two hour scheduled duration of this event is to be realized. Tickets cost $55, with concessions $10 cheaper. And the Recital Centre charges you between $4 and $8.50 for booking online or by phone – a fee you will probably have to meet because the Salon has limited seating.

INTERWOVEN

Australian String Quartet

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday May 21 at 7 pm

This body has also been through some drastic changes in participants over the years but seems to have settled on its current population: violins Dale Barltrop and Francesca Hiew, viola Chris Cartlidge, cello Michael Dahlenburg. Can’t remember if I’ve heard them in this format; the last time I encountered the Australian String Quartet was probably four years ago in a room attached to the State Library of Queensland but have no memory of Cartlidge. Anyway, these musicians are presenting four disparate works tonight from all over the repertory shop. We begin with a piece of Australiana (of sorts), a score that gives the occasion its title and which was written by Elizabeth Younan in 2017, then revised in 2019. The composer is (still?) pursuing doctoral studies at the Juilliard and has garnered prizes from here and in America. Her quartet is in three movements, written to disparate commissions. Next comes Haydn Op. 20 No. 6 in A, the last of the 1772 group that set the composer up as master/creator of the string quartet form. After interval comes the second of Prokofiev’s two quartets, written in 1941 at a wartime refuge and using Kabardino-Balkar folk tunes, as directed by a government official who clearly thought it a fine idea to respect the culture of that autonomous republic. Finally, the group plays Clara Schumann’s Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann: her last piano work and given to her husband on his last birthday with the family in 1853. These seven variations are based on the No. 4 Albumblatter 1 from her husband’s Bunte Blatter collection and have been set up for string quartet by that fertile arranger, Eric Mouret. A standard ticket costs $95, concession price $75; Under 40s pay $40, students cough up $15. Everybody has to find the $4-to-$8.50 transaction fee imposed by the Recital Centre money-changers if ordering online or by phone. There are currently over 300 seats available in the stalls (I think the circle and wings have been closed off for this event), so it might be worth your while showing up on the night and being a real nuisance by paying cash.

GREAT PASSIONS

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday May 21 at 7:30 pm

These particular passions are Russian ones but not the Tchaikovsky/Rachmaninov/Rimsky types of white-hot Romanticism. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra‘s chief conductor Jaime Martin will take his colleagues through Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 4 of 1935-6. The composer was engaged with this large-scale work when the infamous Stalin-endorsed Pravda attacks on him began in January 1936 and the first performance was deferred until 1961, well after the homicidal dictator’s death. The forces required to handle this symphony are impressive, notably in the number of strings – at least 64, at best 84 – and it is emphatically loose-limbed throughout its powerful three movements; settle in for a Mahler-length construct, one that you’re not likely to hear again for many years. Prior to this symphony, Serbian musician Nemanja Radulovic will be soloist in the colourful Khachaturian Violin Concerto of 1940. A feast of Armenian lyricism, this work was very popular here (and everywhere else) in the 1960s but I can’t recall a recent performance beyond the recording that James Ehnes made with the MSO under Mark Wigglesworth twelve years ago. At all events, it’s a soloist’s showcase and is apparently a signature piece for Radulovic, even if he hasn’t managed to persuade a company to let him record it. Above all, it offers a splendid contrast between a composer who stuck by his own truths (if in private) and another who gained Party approval for this attractive sample of populist art. Standard tickets cost between $75 and $139, concession prices are $5 cheaper, Under 18s pay $20. Everybody has to find the MSO’s $7 transaction fee if ordering online or by phone; according to the MSO website, there are 100+ seats available in all three divisions of the hall, which seems like an unlikely spread statistically. But it’s up to you if you want to call their bluff and show up on the night, cash in hand.

This program will be repeated on Saturday May 23 at 7:30 pm.

SCHUBERT’S FANTASY AND OCTET

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday May 23 at 7:30 pm

Here’s another program with only two works, only this time they’re by the same composer. For reasons best known to himself, the Australian Chamber Orchestra‘s artistic director Richard Tognetti has seized upon Schubert’s late Fantasy in C of 1827, a substantial continuous seven-‘movement’ work for violin and piano, arranging it for members of his ensemble – the same ones who will later participate in the much longer Octet of 1824. This latter will involve violins Tognetti and Helena Rathbone, viola Stefanie Farrands, cello Johannes Rostamo, bass Maxime Bibeau, with three guests for the wind parts: clarinet David Griffiths bassoon Todd Gibson-Cornish, and horn Carla Blackwood. The Octet holds six movements and lasts about an hour, nearly all of it a melodic delight up to the unexpectedly banal final Allegro – but then, by that stage, I’ve usually had enough of what is often a duet for violin and clarinet. No idea what the Fantasy arrangement will be like; the piano part will resist any sort of realignment from the opening tremolo backing, through the Impromptu-reminiscent Andantino variations and that melody’s Allegretto return just before the final scramble, not to mention all those contrary motion passages that scream out for one-person control. Tickets fall between $49 and $166, concession rates for middle-of-the-range seats are $10/$11 cheaper, Under 35s pay $35 for mediocre-to-poor places, while full-time students get to the same sites for $30. I thought we’d avoided a transaction fee but there is one: $7. Trouble is there are about 60 seats left in both stalls and circle/wings so gambling on getting a place on the day is far from a sure thing.

This program will be repeated in Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne on Sunday May 24 at 2:30 pm and in the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre on Monday May 25 at 7: 30 pm.

TOUR DE FORCE #2

Corpus Medicorum

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Sunday May 24 at 5 pm

Melbourne’s doctors and ancillary staff are at it again as the Corpus Medicorum presents its second program for the year under the direction of Fabian Russell. This enterprise is one that raises funds for the treatment of lung cancer at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, which sets it apart from most other enterprises gracing the Murdoch Hall. The players begin with a foxtrot from venerable American composer John Adams: The Chairman Dances. This was extracted from the composer’s Nixon in China opera and dates from 1985. Its distinction is that it calls for a massive percussion section; I counted 18 separate instruments, not including piano and harp. Soloist in Mozart’s luminous Clarinet Concerto of 1791 is Frank Celata, for over thirty years associate principal with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and a real acquisition as guest artist for the Corpus. Finally, the performers take on Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances from 1940, the composer’s last major work and somewhat nostalgia-driven with quotes from a few previous compositions in the two outer movements. Again, you need quite a few percussionists to handle this score, although I can only see ten separate instruments alongside piano and harp. Don’t know about you but I find this the most engrossing of the composer’s symphonic works, particularly its jubilant finale. Ticketing is simple: standard $70, concession $40, student $30. And there’s the sliding transaction fee from the MRC of $4 to $8.50 for booking online or by phone. Currently, a third of the seats have been sold, so you could probably gamble pretty safely on getting a ticket at the venue.

THE LIVING TRADITION

Selby & Friends

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday May 28 at 2 pm

This time, Selby & Friends brings to the table (or desks) two familiar faces from previous excursions, as the President would say. Alongside the founding luminary of this enterprise, pianist Kathryn Selby, we are to hear violinist Alexandra Osborne, associate concertmaster of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and American cellist Clancy Newman. The recital reaches its climax with the melody-rich, confident Piano Trio No. 1 in B flat by Schubert of 1827-8; it’s hard to think of another score in this repertoire which fills the ear so fully and with so many rewards for performers and audience. As a series of prefaces to this lengthy masterwork, Selby and her guests play an Elena Kats-Chernin piece: Variations on Schubert Trauerwaltz (which I assume refers to the well-known A flat Op. 9a No. 2). This score offers two variations: a big one of about 4 minutes, and a mini of 45 seconds; you can play them in any order (of the two possible). Fanny Mendelssohn’s 1846-7 Piano Trio in D minor follows: four movements of surging lyricism in its outer movements and refined contentment in its middle, the whole running for about 25 minutes. Last in this group are Beethoven’s Kakadu Variations, originally from 1803 but revised in 1816 and possibly revisited eight years later. With ten variations in all, the final two sound incongruent with their predecessors but it’s always worth the 18 minutes or so that it lasts to watch the composer build some mini-mountains and a concluding alp on the slightest foundation. Standard admission is $89; concession and full-time students $20 less; Seniors get in with a $12 reduction. You also have to find cash for a Transaction Fee which, for a standard seat, is $7 if you book online or by phone. As the event takes place in the small Salon, there’s not much choice but to pay up.

This program will be repeated at 7 pm.

JAIME CONDUCTS DVORAK, SMETANA & COLL

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday May 28 at 7:30 pm

Here’s something of a change back to the tried and true for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra whose programs get more singular and innovative as the years move on. The organization’s chief conductor Jaime Martin gets star billing here as he conducts a sort of overture in Smetana’s 1874 Vltava, still popularly known as The Moldau and one of your great pre-cinema documentary scores tracing the path of a Czech river from its spring sources to its junction with the Elbe, proposing plenty of graphic scene-painting along the way. After interval, Martin directs the Dvorak Symphony No. 7 in D minor, written in 1885 and slowly gaining a concert hall place despite the overwhelming popularity of the composer’s Symphony No. 9 which sounds bombastic when its outer movements are put alongside this more refined product. For a concerto, we’re offered the premiere performance of a piano concerto commissioned by the MSO. This has been written by Francisco Coll, a Spanish composer/conductor and trombonist who has been awarded several prizes in his home country and the United Kingdom. Soloist in this new work will be Russian/American Kirill Gerstein, last seen here in a 2024 recital tour for Musica Viva although he did appear with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 2019. Now it’s Melbourne’s turn; lucky us. Seats cost between $51 and $139; concessions are the usual lavish $5 cheaper; children pay $20; everybody pays the MSO’s $7 transaction fee for booking online or by phone. As I said up the top, can’t wait for the day . . .

This program will be repeated on Friday May 29 in Costa Hall, Geelong at 7:30 pm and on Saturday May 30 in Hamer Hall at 2 pm.

MOSTLY MOZART – MANNHEIM TO PARIS

Melbourne Recital Centre & Australian National Academy of Music

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Wednesday April 1 at 11 am

Full credit to the Australian National Academy of Music, some members of which organization, under the control of horn player Carla Blackwood (herself a one-time ANAM member), will be presenting two Mozart chamber works that very few of us have experienced in live performance. First off is the Quintet in E flat for Piano and Winds K. 452 of 1784, the specific winds being oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn. There’s no indication who is the lucky pianist, but the work has a fine collegial ambience which extends to a combined cadenza for everyone but that keyboard in the finale. At the recital’s end, Blackwood performs – with a violin, two violas and cello from the ANAM personnel – an earlier Mozart from 1782: the Quintet for Horn and Strings K. 407, also in E flat. A good deal shorter than the other Mozart on the program, this work gives more prominence to the wind player and exploits the instrument’s middle register in sympathy with the rich viola output. In the middle of these benign scores comes Louise Farrenc’s 1852 Sextet in C minor for piano, flute, oboe, clarinet bassoon and horn. This is dramatic and often turbulent in the best Romantic mould, but you’d be hard pressed to retain much of its material. Anyway, she’s the Paris end of the morning’s title, but why is Mannheim mentioned? Both the Mozart works were written in Vienna, as far as I can tell. Entry is $59, with a concession rate a whole $7 cheaper; students and Under 40s get in for $49 – and don’t forget the Recital Centre’s ‘Transaction Fee’ of anywhere between $4 and $8.50 if you book online or by phone. So I wouldn’t.

ST. MATTHEW PASSION

Melbourne Bach Choir

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday April 2 at 2:30 pm

Good to see that Rick Prakhoff and his singers continue to mount major choral works, in particular this supreme masterwork of 1727 through which I first made the acquaintance of the Melbourne Bach Choir over twenty years ago. The ensemble has generally proved highly competent, ably abetted by a ‘Melbourne Baroque Orchestra‘ that I can’t remember appearing in support of any other choral forces. This year, the ripieno lines in the opening and closing choruses of Part 1 are to be given to us by the Yarra Voices, a children’s choir based in Fitzroy North. Prakhoff’s soloists are headed by tenor Andrew Goodwin, an Evangelist sans pareil. Adrian Tamburini will be singing Jesus; the soprano is Lorina Gore, Sally-Anne Russell the alto. Our tenor will be Henry Choo, while Simon Meadows and Christopher Hillier share the recitatives and arias for bass. If you’re going to do Easter with all the bells and whistles – and for Christians, this is the highpoint of the liturgical year – there’s no going past this experience, made all the more affecting because its composer was the beau ideal of a true believer. Every stage of this solid drama is intensely moving, Bach’s depiction of Christ’s route to Calvary purposeful and vivid. Seat prices fall into four grades: $139, $119, $99, $79; concessions $125, $99, $89, $69. Students pay $125, $89, $69 and $55. Everybody has to put in the Recital Centre’s fee of between $4 and $8.50, depending on the price of your ticket, if you book online or by phone. No possibility of avoiding this grasping impost as the event is usually booked out; there are only 92 seats left at the time of writing (March 20).

SEVEN LAST WORDS

Affinity Quartet

Good Shepherd Chapel, Abbotsford

Thursday April 2 at 3 pm

A much smaller scale offering than Bach’s marathon for a Passiontide observation, Haydn’s sequence of slow meditations (and a presto earthquake to finish) is an exemplary study in emotional restraint and studied simplicity. Obviously, the Affinity Quartet players are presenting the composer’s 1787 version, written at his publisher’s request and much more popular (and easier to mount) than the earlier orchestral or the later choral versions. Nothing is spelled out for you, apart from the stimulus offered by the actual words that Christ spoke in extremis. As well, there’s no getting away from the sombre effect of so many adagio movements in a row. But the end result is more refreshing than funereal. As for the performers, the quartet will be without its first violin, Shane Chen, whose place will be taken by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s principal first violin, Holly Piccoli. The rest of the Affinities remain intact: violin Nicholas Waters, viola Josef Hanna, cello Mee Na Lojewski. All of them – including the transient import – are past ANAM members. Ticket prices seem to be a matter of engaging with the purchaser’s conscience. There’s A Little Extra for $65; Standard is $45; A Little Less comes to $25. But, no matter what you decide you can pay, there’s a booking fee of $5 at every level – the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. . . .

BEETHOVEN’S SEVENTH

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Robert Blackwood Hall, Monash University

Thursday April 2 at 7 pm

Here’s the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra going back to its roots. We have a collaboration between said MSO and the Zelman Memorial Symphony Orchestra, named after the first MSO leader/founder. As far as I can make out, the MSO will set the ball rolling with one of its favourite lollipops from years ago: Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture – the jolliest of quick romps and the only section we know of the 1837-1842 opera. This will be followed by the Meditation from Massenet’s opera of 1894, Thais, with concertmaster Natalie Chee outlining the soulful top line. More opera bursts upon us with the Carmen Suite No. 1, arranged from Bizet’s 1875 opera by Ernest Guiraud in about 1885. This comprises the last part of the Prelude, the Aragonaise, Intermezzo, heroine’s Seguidilla, interlude before Act 2, and Toreador theme from the Prelude and Act IV crowd scene. After this collation of popular hits, members of the current Zelman Orchestra will sit down with the MSO and take on Beethoven’s A Major Symphony. than which there is nothing more exhilarating in the composer’s output that doesn’t involve voices. Benjamin Northey conducts. As for entry prices, standard seats cost $50, concession ones are a whole $5 cheaper, and children pay $20, while everyone is oblige to yield a $7 transaction fee for ordering online or by phone. Here also, it’s an unavoidable grift because the night is selling rapidly with only 89 seats available as of tonight (March 21).

ECHOES OF VIENNA

Ensemble Liaison & Friends

Hanson Dyer Hall, Ian Potter Southbank Cntre

Thursday April 9 at 7 pm

Well, it’s not the gemutchlich Vienna of Strauss and Franz Josef but the later one of Freud and Mahler that is being celebrated here. And not just in the form of Austrian writers. True, the Liaisons will be playing some Webern, but not the hard stuff: from 1905 comes the Langsamer Satz for string quartet which, despite the commentators, is mainly in E flat Major, not C minor and an exemplary spin-off from Verklarte Nacht. Speaking of the Schoenberg circle, we also get to hear Zemlinsky’s Op. 3 Trio, written in 1896 and originally a half-hour long work for clarinet trio – which will probably be the form it takes tonight because of the Liaison foundation personnel – clarinet David Griffiths, cello Svetlana Bogosavljevic, piano Timothy Young. For no apparent reason, the ensemble presents Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes of 1919, written for an ensemble then playing in New York. This calls for clarinet and piano as well as a string quartet. For that Antipodean touch, the group gives the premiere of a work that it commissioned: Stuart Greenbaum‘s The Drowned World, a five-movement score for the Liaison trio lasting about half an hour which takes its impetus from the Ballard dystopian novel dealing with climate change. As for the Friends, these are violins Sophie Rowell and Jasmine Milton, with viola Hanna Wallace. Tickets are simple: standard $53, concession and students $42 – but don’t forget that $4-to-$8.50 transaction fee that the Recital Centre imposes on every online or phone order. You might have to come up with this odious extra as the players are now working in the building next door to the MRC in which the Hanson Dyer space seats only 400, compared to their former base of operations: the 1.000-seater Elisabeth Murdoch Hall.

DISNEY’S BEAUTY AND THE BEAST IN CONCERT

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Friday April 10 at 6:30 pm

We’re coming up to 35 years since this Disney film came out but it’s stayed in the public eye, I’d suggest, due to the familiarity of the Broadway musical version that has been a dollar-spinner for quite a few companies since the original bastardization of 1994. Still, like Snow White, it’s been a Disney mainstay and will doubtless engage with young Melbourne audiences. Speaking of which, standard entry ranges from $88 to $136; concession holders and children pay $5 less (ah, the joy of a blatant money-grab), and you have a $7 booking fee if you order online or by phone. Which you might have to do because the event is selling fast. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra will be directed by Jen Winley, currently the West Australian Symphony Orchestra’s associate conductor and one of the few musicians endorsed to conduct Disney in Concert undertakings. I’ve seen the film a few times but cannot recall any of Alan Menken‘s songs or set pieces, not even the Academy Award-winning title song. But I reckon I’d be in a minority on this night, especially after the rousing finale to this tale of a love that supposedly transcends appearances, only to smooth out differences in the end – something like what we hope will happen with the Iran excursion.

This program will be repeated on Saturday April 11 at 1 pm and at 8 pm.

CHORAL SPLENDOUR

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday April 16 at 7 pm

You’ll get some fine Baroque majesty in this program from the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra under artistic director Paul Dyer, as well as a good dollop of Baroque instrumental power. Employing the additional services of his Brandenburg Choir, Dyer directs two of Handel’s 1727 Coronation Anthems: the inevitable Zadok the Priest, and the The King shall rejoice which was meant to be sung at the actual moment of the monarch’s crowning. Preceding these powerful D Major statements come excerpts from two Bach cantatas. The first is Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, from which 1723 work the well-known Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring chorale appears under its original title of Jesus bleibet meine Freude. There’s also the opening chorus to consider; I don’t think the singers will give us the mid-work chorale, Wohl mir, dass ich Jesum habe which is simply a pre-repeat of Jesus bleibet. Then comes the second cantata: Wir danken dir, Gott of 1731and here you have only the opening titular chorus and a monumental final chorale in Sei Lob und Preis. For the secular scraps, we’re promised Bach’s gripping D minor Double Violin Concerto from around 1730 headed by Shaun Lee-Chen and Ben Dollman, and Telemann’s difficult-to-date Overture in D which is actually a suite comprising the overture, two minuets, a passacaglia, an air, a trumpet duet called Les Postillons, and a concluding Fanfare. As usual with the Brandenburg organization, seat prices are all over the place, with standard ones ranging from $45 to $167 with reasonable reductions for concession holders and seniors, even better for students and Under 40s. And you can’t ignore the Recital Centre’s $4-to-$8.50 transaction fee that is piled onto your expenses.

This program will be repeated on Saturday April 18 at 5 pm and on Sunday April 19 at 5 pm. Seat prices are considerably more expensive for these.

MAHLER & TCHAIKOVSKY

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday April 16 at 7:30 pm

Kahchun Wong, principal conductor of the Halle, takes the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra through Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 of 1888 in the later stages of tonight’s program. This is one of the composer’s most approachable works; even the slow movement is a kind of quiet laugh with its Frere Jacques opening on a solo double bass, and you’re spared the emotional wrenches of later symphonies’ adagio segments. The orchestral resources aren’t too far over-the-top, although you need 15 woodwind and 17 brass to meet the composer’s requirements. Still, the last movement is always in danger of tipping into excess-climax country – in fact, I can’t recall a performance where it hasn’t, Starting the night is an Australian work from the MSO’s Cybec Young Composer in Residence, Andrew Aronowicz: his newly-minted The Erl-King, which the orchestra commissioned. This has nothing to do with Schubert – well, not much. It’s based on a short story by Angela Carter telling of a maiden ensnared by the woodland murderer; she turns the Goethe plot around and kills him. For a concerto, we have Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme with flugelhorn player Sergei Nakariakov replacing the usual cello soloist: it’s offering the sort of altered perspective that brings me out in hives. This Russian/Israeli musician has recorded Tchaikovsky’s defenceless work, so you’d have to assume that some recording gurus think the exercise was worth it. Your normal tickets range from $75 to $139, concession tickets are a whole $5 cheaper, children under 18 enter for $20; everybody pays the $7 transaction fee if you dare to book online or by phone.

This program will be repeated on Friday April 17 at 7:30 pm and on Saturday April 18 at 2 pm. Friday is a ‘relaxed performance’ – $35 for everyone except children who get in for $15 – and that nomenclature seems to suggest that any kind of behaviour is tolerated – even doing a Berlioz and shouting out ‘Where is the cello?’

JURASSIC PARK IN CONCERT

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday April 23 at 7:30 pm

Two films in one month? Overkill? Well, you can’t really apply that term to this saga of prehistoric mayhem in which too many characters get away from the claws and teeth of the ravening re-created to generate credibility. For all its scientific and narrative nonsense, Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster still keeps you on tenterhooks, especially when the kids are threatened by a gang of velociraptors. The score, to be played by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under Nicholas Buc, was not one of John Williams ‘ more memorable products; for my money, it never improves on the spaciousness suggested in the credits theme, although this gets worked to the limit through its wearyingly repetitive C-B-C motif. Yet the score is mildly imaginative when illustrating the behaviours of the island’s various animal denizens although I’m sorry but, when those computer-generated images trot or wing into view, I can’t help chortling at the cast’s various reactions. So what? This will be sold out: a financial, if not a critical success for the MSO. Standard seats fall between $89 and $165; concession holders and children get in for $5 less, which must be galling for the elderly and parents. Add to that the $7 transaction fee per order and it’s an expensive night out, especially for a film that lasts only a bit over two hours although the powers-that-be have determined that there will be an interval.

This program will be repeated on Friday April 24 at 7:30 pm and on Sunday April 26 at 1 pm.

SONOROUS XIII: ROS BANDT & VIJAY THILLAIMUTHU

Melbourne Recital Centre and Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio Limited

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday April 30 at 7 pm

Nothing concrete is scheduled for this exercise which lasts for two hours without interval. The cunning have already booked out the available beanbags; everybody else has to cope with your normal Primrose Potter Studio seating for $45 ($40 concession; yeah, I’m panting at the door) along with the Recital Centre’s flexible $4-to-$8.50 transaction fee. It’s No. 13 in the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio‘s series called Sonorous and nobody can doubt that it will be because we’re promised octaphonic sound as the many electronic instruments on offer are manipulated by Ros Bandt, a veteran in the field, and Vijay Thillaimuthu – a younger gun who is one of the supervisors at the MESS site. Bandt has a wide field of expertise; my main experience of her work was through her participation in the early music group La Romanesca. But that was decades ago and streets away from this evening’s form of music-making. If you’re up for a couple of hours being exposed to Sensurround with a strong emphasis on the auditory rather than the intellectual, I’d suggest this recital could be revelatory. You’d hope that the two sound manipulators have a far-reaching repertoire; that’s a helluva long time to sit passively.

JEAN-YVES THIBAUDET

Melbourne Recital Centre

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Tuesday March 3 at 7:30 pm

A popular visitor, the French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet has appeared here as soloist and fronting concertos. Apart from his craft, he brings to the stage a peacock’s couture. Does it make a difference that parts of him glitter? Not really; if you’re offended by such quiet flamboyance, you can always look at the Murdoch Hall ceiling or ponder the ushers perched on the side walls. Tonight he is playing all the Debussy Preludes (written between 1909 and 1912) and his expertise is unquestionable; after all, he has recorded the two volumes twice – in 1996 and notably in 2023 with a cover design by Vivienne Westwood. You’d have to anticipate that Thibaudet is going to take his time over the 24 pieces, as the Recital Centre publicity refers to a length of one hour 50 minutes. Even if that includes a 20-minute interval, we’ll have a leisurely view of these atmospheric studies. But that seems to be his way; where younger players take about 75 or 77 minutes in their readings of both livres, this pianist’s earlier recording brings them in at 82 1/2 minutes. Still, he’s getting faster: his 2023 double LP performances come in at 81 1/2 minutes. Full adult tickets range from $79 to $139; concession holders can get a $20 deduction in the middling-quality seats, while Under 40s can get into the same sections for $49. As usual, you face the Recital Centre’s sliding transaction fee of between $4 and $8.50 – the organization’s peculiar form of book-keeping where no books are involved.

2026 SEASON OPENING GALA

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday March 5 at 7:30 pm

Starting the year proper after those Myer Music Bowl shenanigans, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra settles into staid mode under its chief conductor Jaime Martin. Tonight’s flavour is American, aiming for the popular jugular with the Star Wars: Suite for Orchestra by that Hollywood colossus, John Williams. It was published in 2000 when the composer was in the throes of coping with Lucas’ second trilogy and the melange of themes has become part of our consciousness. The evening’s guest is French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet who plays the solo role in Gershwin’s Concerto in F of 1925, which he recorded in 2010. Despite its creaking structural bones, especially in the final Allegro agitato, this score is appealingly brash and sentimental in turns with some energetic bravura passages for the soloist. To end, Martin directs Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances of 1940, the composer’s only work written completely in America. Always harking back to his past experiences, this three-movement construct is eventually a buoyant joy, showing the same high spirits as you hear in the Paganini Rhapsody. Tickets range from $81 to $139, with concession holders getting in for $5 cheaper. You also have a $7 transaction fee which always strikes me as particularly grasping when you consider the capacity of Hamer Hall. But you have to front up the cash to be sure of a seat as it’s bound to be a popular event.

This program will be repeated on Saturday March 7 at 7:30 pm.

MOZART’S SPRING

Australian Haydn Ensemble

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Wednesday March 11 at 7 pm

As far as I can tell, the Australian Haydn Ensemble is a string quartet comprising violins Skye McIntosh and Matthew Greco, viola Karina Schmitz and cello Daniel Yeadon. These members all appear to have their professional lives in Sydney and this recital will be their first collegial Melbourne appearance. Welcome, brothers and sisters, to town. What are you offering? Haydn? Oh, great. We’re to hear the Op. 33, No. 3 of 1781 nicknamed The Bird because of some acciaccaturas in the first violin part of the opening movement’s first bars. Nonetheless, it’s 19 to 20 minutes of sparkling C Major magic. Then Mendelssohn’s early E flat, written when he was a tyro teenager in 1823, two years before the superb Octet; it lasts for about 24/5 minutes. Finally, Mozart K 387 in G, nicknamed Spring although it was written in the Vienna December of 1782. The first of the ‘Haydn’ quartets, the work is a model of the composer’s genius at melodic curvature, and it comes in at a little under 30 minutes. All of which, even allowing for an interval, lies well below the specified two hours’ duration of this event. Perhaps we’ll have lots of talk; oh joy. Your tickets cost $60, $45 concession, or $55 if you’re a Senior which seems generationally odd. Also, you will cope with the Recital Centre’s graduated transaction fee – anywhere between $4 and $8.50 – if you book online. It might be worthwhile just showing up at the box office on the night.

ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday March 12 at 7:30 pm

Don’t know about you but I find the most energising part of Strauss’s long exercise of 1896 in musical philosophizing comes at the start when the orchestral tutti cuts out and you’re left with the full organ C Major chord. How they’ll achieve this effect in the organ-less Hamer Hall will be a delight to watch and hear. Even better will be the machinations to get a decent blast in Costa Hall. Anyway, it’s downhill all the way after that powerful opening as the composer tries to illustrate selections from Nietzsche’s rambling tome. Preceding this exercise, a less-swollen Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under chief conductor Jaime Martin escorts Maria Duenas through Beethoven’s Violin Concerto of 1806. A young Spanish musician, Duenas has recorded the work and may be playing her own cadenzas to the second and third movements. At the night’s start, for an overture we hear a 2020 work by Australian writer Melody Eotvos: her The Deciding Machine of 2020 which serves several purposes. It’s a memorial to the centenary of women’s suffrage, a celebration of the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, and holds a titular reference to Ada Lovelace who wrote the first computer algorithm for Babbage’s projected ‘analytical engine’. Your standard tickets range from $51 to $142, with concession holders relishing a $5 discount. Children are charged $20 and you have to pay $7 if you book online or by phone. About this last, I wonder what would happen if you questioned exactly where this fee goes; e.g., which employee is paid for handling your credit card details, especially if you’re a regular client.

This program will be repeated in Costa Hall, Geelong on Friday March 13 at 7:30 pm and again in Hamer Hall on Saturday March 14 at 2 pm.

SHANGHAI SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Friday March 13 at 7:30 pm

In a welcome display of camaraderie, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is presenting a large group of visitors in the form of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, conducted by music director Long Yu who has held this position for 17 years. Half their one-night stand is Chinese music, while the second part is a warhorse very familiar to Melbourne audiences: Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2 of 1907 – a big sprawling series of four canvases packed full of Romantic surges and emotional richness. Before that, we hear some selections from the ten-movement Chinese Kitchen: A Feast of Flavours, written in 2024 to a Shanghai Symphony Orchestra commission from 30-year-old composer Elliot Leung who has enjoyed remarkable success in China and the United States, bridging the Trump/Xi divide with aplomb. As for a soloist, the orchestra hosts pianist Serena Wang, a San Francisco-born 21-year-old talent who fronts the 2009 Er Huang Concerto by Qigang Chen, Messiaen’s last pupil. The title refers to a type of Beijing opera, Chen employing tunes from that art-form in a lavish orchestral palette. To hear these guests, you’ll pay between $81 and $139, concession holders enjoying a munificent $5 reduction; children get in for $20, but everyone faces the $7 transaction fee – a shameful example of grift generated by our dependence on credit cards and online booking.

THE DEVIL’S VIOLIN

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm

Saturday March 14 at 7:30 pm

Back for the third time, violinist Ilya Gringolts takes the Australian Chamber Orchestra through a program that oscillates between the old and the new with an even hand. Clearly, the entertainment’s core is intended to be Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Violin Sonata in G minor which the composer said he wrote in 1713, even if those in the know claim it came from about thirty years later; what a dreamer. Scoring with two concertos is Vivaldi: first, with the RV 237 in D minor, possibly written in 1617 and notable for a sprightly third movement; and the C Major RV 507 for two violins that Gringolts gets to play with ACO principal Satu Vanska in a demonstration of canonic interplay and endless chains of thirds. Fleshing out the Baroque content will be Geminiani’s Concerto Grosso No 12, La Follia, which is an arrangement of a Corelli original and which keeps to the well-known theme throughout. Starting the program is Johann Paul von Westhoff’s Imitation of the Bells from his Sonata No. 3 in D minor, published in 1694 and consisting of 41 bars loaded with solo violin exercises intended to simulate a carillon. Moving to more recent times, Gringolts leads a string orchestra version of Gubaidulina’s brief String Quartet No 2 of 1987 which screams individuality from every bar, so having the ACO players handle it three or four to a line will be more than intriguing. Mieczyslaw Weinberg represents another facet of Soviet composition and we hear his 1942 Aria for string quartet, presumably organized for the ACO forces. As well, Paul Stanhope received an ACO commission for Giving Ground, written in 2020 and based on the La Follia chord progression, so that you have a traditional and a (pretty) contemporary look at this famous sequence. As usual with a hall the size of Hamer, prices range wildly and widely. You can start at $30 for a student and pay top adult for $148. The handling fee is $8.50, which is a tall order for your student struggler; probably why you don’t see many of them at these Sunday afternoon events.

This program will be repeated on Sunday March 15 at 2:30 in Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne, and on Monday March 16 in the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall at 7:30 pm.

TOUR DE FORCE #1

Corpus Medicorum & the Royal Melbourne Hospital Foundation

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Sunday March 15 at 5 pm

This bod of medical personnel trying their hands at taxing serious music here takes on two cornerstones of the Russian repertoire under regular conductor Fabian Russell. The Corpus Medicorum showed more than competence the last time I heard them, but that was some decades ago and you might reasonably expect that their achievement level would have risen. In any event, their cause is a noble one: raising funds towards the treatment of lung cancer patients at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. To this end, the organizers have gained the services of Alexander Gavrylyuk to take the main role in Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, written in 1909 and forever linked in Australian minds, for better or worse, with the names of David Helfgott/Geoffrey Rush/Shine. Partnered with this redoubtable work is Prokofiev’s most famous symphony, No 5 in B flat Major of 1944. As a Soviet-era score, this stands at the top of the pile through its inventiveness, integration and striking individuality. And it has been the subject of many recordings by eminent conductors, so you can easily familiarise yourself for comparative purposes with a score that was once as regularly heard as Shostakovich’s No. 5. Tickets for a full adult cost $70, concession holders enjoy a whopping reduction to $40, and students pay $30. But then you have the $4-to-$8.50 fee imposed by the Recital Centre if you book online or by phone. I’d be tempted to show up on the day; at the time of writing (February 28), there are about 450 seats available across the Murdoch Hall.

STRAVINSKY & CHINDAMO

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday March 19 at 7:30 pm

Happy company, then, for our own jazz master Joe Chindamo. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under principal guest conductor Benjamin Northey begins its work tonight with Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante defunte, from the year 1899 when the composer was studying with Faure. This exercise in introspective retrospection lasts a little less than 7 minutes. Stravinsky is represented by his epoch-making The Rite of Spring ballet that shocked the public – well, the Western part of it – at its premiere on March 29, 1913. Mind you, it wasn’t long before the world had a lot more on its mind than the not-quite-emigre Russian composer’s full-scale innovations. This lasts about 35 minutes. Which leaves a lot of space for Chindamo – the MSO’s composer in residence this year – to fill with his commission piece Are there any questions? which will involve the services of mezzo-soprano Jessica Aszodi and the MSO Chorus. I don’t have much information about this new composition, except that it takes its title from Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale novel, and it is a requiem. I’ve seen and heard Chindamo play only a few times over the years, even more rarely as a composer but his handling of large-scale forces will be a significant demonstration of his participation, from about 15 years ago, in serious music enterprises. Full adult tickets fall between $75 and $139, concessions are a ludicrous $5 cheaper, and children’s seats are priced at $20. You will add $7 an order if you try to book online or by phone. The alternative? Just come on the night, cash in hand.

This program will be repeated on Saturday March 21 at 7:30 pm.

THE POETRY OF PIANO DUO

Hoang Pham Productions

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday March 21 at 2:30 pm

Two doctoral graduates from the Manhattan School of Music, Allie Xinyu Wang and Daniel Le are combining their talents to present a 75-minute tour of some significant contributions to the duo piano repertoire. The musicians begin with some scraps from Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite of 1908, which most of us know better in an orchestrated form that came three years later. Then follows one of the repertoire’s masterpieces in Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn which came out in 1873 in two scores: piano duo and orchestra. Just like the Ravel, we know the orchestral version much better than the smaller-scale piece; a shame, as the latter is a joy to play and less orotund to the ear. Staying with the strength, Wang and Le give us Rachmaninov’s early Suite No. 1 from 1893, the composer being 20 at the time he wrote these four reactions to poems and which he dedicated to Tchaikovsky. We jump forward to Lutoslawski’s 1941 Variations on a Theme by Paganini which treats the Caprice No. 24 with respect (until the end) and an acerbic harmonic vocabulary. Finally, the musicians leap across the Atlantic for part of William Bolcom‘s The Garden of Eden: four ragtime stages in the Fall, originally written for solo piano in 1969, then transmuted for two pianos in 1994 (half of them) and 2006 (the other half). The extract we’re to hear is The Serpent’s Kiss which takes on fantasia qualities throughout its D minor length and is the longest in the set. Standard tickets are $62, concession $50, student $38 – this last, a strange number but nowhere near as odd as the Recital Centre’s universally applied fee of between $4 and $8.50 for labouring intensively over your credit charge use if you book online or phone.

CHOPIN PIANO RECITAL

Hoang Pham Productions

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday March 21 at 6 pm

Acting as both producer and artist, pianist Hoang Pham plays a 75-minute program of various pieces from the extraordinary larder that is Chopin’s contribution to piano music. He begins with the C-sharp minor Fantaisie-Impromptu, that favourite from 1834 that sets three against four (or six against eight) in a satisfying musical mesh. We then move to the Ballade No 1 in G minor of 1835, which is another very popular recitalist’s choice for its coruscating virtuosity and overt drama. The Two Nocturnes Op. 27 give any listener a welcome experience in tonal subtleties, the first in C sharp minor and the second in D flat Major, this latter showing the composer in 1836 already at his refined best with some astonishingly delicate fioriture. Pham then takes on the Ballade No. 4 in F minor, written in 1842 and a remarkably difficult piece to bring off, even for experts in this composer. The Two Waltzes Op. 64 of 1847 follow: another pairing of D flat Major (the so-called Minute Waltz) and that well-known C-sharp minor one used in Les Sylphides. Taking on another form that the composer made his own, the pianist offers us the Three Mazurkas Op. 63 of 1846, of which the last in C sharp minor may ring some bells. To end, Pham breaks over us with the Polonaise No. 6 in A flat: one of the most recognizable works by the composer and a test for every pianist with a battery of difficulties, including that energising Trio with its octave semiquaver bass-line. A standard ticket to this recital costs $68, with concession holders enjoying a measly and fiscally inexplicable reduction to $61.20 while students pay $34. Everyone who books online or by phone will also have to stump up the Centre’s $4-to-$8.50 ‘Transaction Fee’, in which extraction art is meant to make friends of the mammon of iniquity.

ART OF THE SCORE: JAMES HORNER

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Friday March 27 at 7:30 pm

Yet again, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is hitting the film score theme, although this time the players will not be providing the soundtrack to a full movie. The aim is to celebrate the career of American writer James Horner who died over ten years ago in a plane crash. Across his career, this composer wrote music for a large number of films, some of which even I know: Aliens (1986), Apollo 13 (1995), Braveheart (1995), Jumanji (1995), Titanic (1997), The Perfect Storm (2000), Troy (2004), and Avatar (2009). Nicholas Buc will be conducting suites and individual excerpts from Horner’s oeuvre stretching (according to MSO publicity) definitely to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), The Rocketeer (1991) ‘and many more’, some of which have been mentioned in my list of familiarities. I’m assuming that these extracts won’t be accompanying specific scenes from the various films; if that’s the case, it undermines the whole purpose of the music itself which only lives in the power of its suggestiveness. All credit to Horner but I can’t think of a single theme from any of the films I’ve seen for which he wrote the soundtrack – except that Titanic number. Taking fans through the program, two presenters/hosts will negotiate the narrative path: Andrew Pogson, the MSO’s Special Projects Manager, and Dr. Dan Golding, Professor of Media at Monash University. Obviously, my lack of recall/filmic insight means nothing because there are plenty of people for whom the Horner music must be memorable; the MSO has scheduled three concerts in a row to celebrate his music. Mind you, the balcony in Hamer Hall is unavailable for these concerts; further, at the time of writing (February 28), plenty of seats are available. Standard price comes in anywhere between $93 and $150; concession holders pay a whole $5 less, if they can be bothered; everyone faces the objectionable $7 transaction fee if booking online or by phone. As I say, it’s a month away but nobody seems to be rushing to get in.

This program will be repeated on Saturday March 28 at 7:30 pm and on Sunday March 29 at 2 pm.

SOUVENIRS: BRAHMS AND TCHAIKOVSKY STRING SEXTETS

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Iwaki Auditorium, Southgate

Sunday March 29 at 11 am

A day after presenting this program at the Castlemaine Town Hall, musicians from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra come back to town with the rarely-heard Brahms Sextet No.1 of 1860, and the much more well-known Tchaikovsky Souvenir de Florence Sextet, written in 1890 after several years of difficult gestation and followed by an uneasy revision/afterbirth. Even so, the Russian composer’s nervous energy makes his work an illuminating pleasure: an excellent coupling of sophistication and (in the later two movements) simplicity. The Brahms is another matter, soaking in warmth right from the broad opening cello statement to the same instrument’s tenor clef melody of the concluding Rondo‘s initial bars. Coupling these scores was a happy inspiration for someone (Michelle Wood, it would seem from the advertising bumf) in the MSO and these players will have just as large a chance of success as anybody, permanent string sextet combinations being few in number. They are violins Kathryn Taylor and Emily Beauchamp, violas Katharine Brockman and Aidan Filshie, cellos Wood and Anna Pokorny. Part of the organization’s long-lasting Chamber series, tickets cost $55, concession holders still only getting an insulting $5 reduction. And you have to engage with the booking platform to find out that the orchestra will apply its customary $7 transaction fee at this recital; probably unavoidable because these events are highly popular – which makes this example of fiscal greed all the more contemptible.

RACHMANINOFF’S RHAPSODY

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday February 7 ay 7:30 pm

No, it’s not the composer’s Russian Rhapsody of 1891 for two pianos but – as you’ve anticipated – the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, written in 1934 and these days the most popular of his works for piano with orchestra. To foreground the Australian Chamber Orchestra‘s excursion into this spiky score, Dejan Lazic comes back to work with Richard Tognetti and his gifted players. In keeping with recent ACO practice, the orchestra will be reduced, in this case confined to strings and percussion. It’s improbable that any arrangement will make up for the missing 20 wind players; we’ll all just have to adjust our levels of disbelief. Stravinsky, who was remarkably non-catty about his fellow-exile, also appears on the program with his Concerto in D for strings of 1946 from just about when the composer had become a freshly-minted American citizen. Proceedings open with an ACO commission – Horizon – from the committed environmentalist American John Luther Adams. As a counterweight to all this Americana, home-grown and imported, we hear Lithuanian composer Raminta Serksnyte‘s early work for strings from 1998, De Profundis. It’s a searing, aggressive (for the most part) score of great passion and rigour; just the sort of music that attracts this group which is here playing its Australian premiere. Ticket prices range between $30 for a student to $175 for an adult top seat; you have to add on the excessive ‘handling fee’ of between $7 and $8.50, depending on what your delivery mode is.

This program will be repeated on Sunday February 8 in Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne at 2:30 pm and again on Monday February 8 in the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre at 7:30 pm.

SYMPHONIC CELEBRATION

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Sidney Myer Music Bowl

Tuesday February 10 at 7:30 pm

Some traditions hold fast and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra‘s free concerts at the Myer Bowl still flourish, I see, even if the format has altered since I last sweltered into the venue along with half of Melbourne. Tonight’s conductor will be Leonard Weiss, the organization’s Cybec assistant conductor (although he doesn’t appear as such on the MSO website); he has an impressive list of accomplishments and engagements here, in New Zealand, and across Europe. His main task tonight will be infusing novelty into Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 – still in C minor, as one curmudgeonly British critic once wrote. Eventually completed in 1808, it remains one of the composer’s most striking and accessible compositions and concludes with the mother of all C Major codas. The program’s soloist is the MSO’s principal trumpet, Owen Morris, who premiered Sydney composer Holly Harrison‘s Hellbent back in April 2021: ten minutes of jazz-style inflections for the soloist and written by someone who can actually play the instrument. Pleasing us all with its familiarity comes Grieg’s publication of 1888, the Peer Gynt Suite No. 1: Morning Mood, The Death of Ase, Anitra’s Dance, and In the Hall of the Mountain King. This appeared in one of the MSO’s first programs (way back with Zelman’s Albert Street Conservatorium Orchestra?) and satisfies for its emotional canvas and satisfyingly balanced phrase lengths. To begin, the voice of a Cybec (how that organization gets around) Young Composer in Residence is heard in a specially commissioned Fanfare. This is Andrew Aranowicz who has proficiency in this field, having contributed to the fifty fanfares written on commission for the Sydney Symphony in 2022, his brass decet Pride a jaunty, well-crafted sample of the form. We can only anticipate similar.

AUSTRALIAN YOUTH ORCHESTRA

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Sidney Myer Music Bowl

Wednesday February 11 at 7:30 pm

Rather than putting themselves out, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is giving up one of its Bowl nights to the Australian Youth Orchestra. I haven’t heard this group for many years, long enough for the personnel – both players and administrators – to have changed completely. Anyway, tonight they begin with American writer Anna Clyne‘s This Midnight Hour of 2015: a 12-minute complex that the Australian National Academy of Music performers aired last March at the Melbourne Recital Centre. Next comes Daniel Nelson‘s Steampunk Blizzard, a 2016 fanfare by the American-born Swedish resident whose composition lasts a little over 7 minutes and sets some nifty rhythmic puzzles for young players, mainly to do with dotted quavers. It’s racy and highly atmospheric, especially if you’re into the industry-heavy side of steampunkery, while its progress shows influences of Bernstein and, at one luminous passage, Janacek’s Sinfonietta finale. Then comes Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite from 1945, rearranged so the always-thrifty composer wouldn’t miss out on his American copyright cash. There are three pantomime interludes between the first four dances but, even with this expansion, the score lasts barely half an hour. So, from what I can see, this all adds up to less than an hour’s music, a quick concert – unless there’s going to be a lot of talk. The evening’s conductor is Christian Reif from Germany, currently chief conductor of Sweden’s Gavle Orchestra, his predecessor in that post being Jaime Martin . . . which just goes to show that what goes around, goes around. As usual, this is a free event.

BAROQUE MASTERS

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday February 12 at 7 pm

Opening its Melbourne operations for this year, the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra gets back to basics with a fully Baroque program: Handel, Bach, Vivaldi and Pachelbel. As well, the concert’s soloists come from the Brandenburg ranks – all local talent. Nevertheless, much of the content relies on the ensemble’s strings with artistic director Paul Dyer regulating everybody’s input from his centrally-positioned harpsichord. To begin, a Handel concerto grosso from the seminal Op. 6 published in 1739: the first one, in G. Then come the middle two of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos – No. 3 in G for strings and No. 4 also in G which asks for a front group of solo violin and two recorders. As we all know, these were presented to the idiot Margrave in 1721 and five of them disappeared from public notice. I don’t know what’s happening in this version of No. 4: Melissa Farrow is down to play baroque flute, but Adam Masters is listed as performing baroque oboe. Concertmaster Shaun Lee-Chen will probably take on the solo string line which has just as much work to do, if not more, than the two wind players. Then we’ll have a break from G Major and hear the one Pachelbel piece that everyone knows: his Canon in D for strings which you can encounter at many a wedding or funeral in this country. To end, Vivaldi’s 1705 Trio Sonata Op. 1 No. 12 which is a set of 20 variations in D minor on that useful progression, La Folia. It also involves two violins and a continuo part but I sense that its original modesty in personnel demands might take a turn for overkill. The ticketing is an administrative saga. Full adult prices move from $45 to $167; concession card holders inexplicably fall between $54 and $105. If you’re a senior, your range is $77 to $151; a full-time student sits anywhere for $20; an Under 40 only gets into A Reserve at $36. I won’t carry on about the individual price for groups of 10+ but will excite you with the news that prices vary between this and later performances. A constant is the $4-$8.50 fee exercised by the Recital Centre if you book online or by phone; the grifters we have always with us.

This program will be repeated on Saturday February 14 at 5 pm and on Sunday February 15 at 5 pm.

50 YEARS OF ABC CLASSIC

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Sidney Myer Music Bowl

Saturday February 14 at 7:30 pm

In a burst of patriotic fervour, this program from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra celebrating a pivotal national radio station (and the rest) comprises Australian music only; as far as I can tell, all the soloists are well-known locals. Let’s see what sort of crowd this program attracts, although it strikes me that you could play a night of Berwald alongside Hovhaness and the place would be packed. No, it’s not just because it’s free, but that helps. Benjamin Northey conducts works by ten writers covering a wide range. He opens with Nigel Westlake‘s Cudmirrah Fanfare of 1987: a two-minute jubilation. Then we hear selections from Westlake’s Antarctica Suite, extracted in 1991 from music written for a documentary and tonight featuring guitarist Slava Grigoryan; obviously, we won’t get all four movements. An up-to-the-moment effort comes from Ella Macens with the world premiere of her My Heart on Yours about which nothing is known – yet. A nod to the recent elders with Sculthorpe’s nostalgic Small Town for chamber orchestra of 1963, inspired by D.H Lawrence’s antipodean saga, Kangaroo. A vital contrast comes with the last movement of Ross Edwards‘ Maninyas Violin Concerto, written in 1988 – a voice that can’t be mistaken for anyone else’s and tonight featuring as soloist the MSO’s concertmaster Natalie Chee. We wouldn’t be complete without an Elena Kats-Chernin contribution, and here it’s her 2021 Momentum involving lots of woodwind throughout its seven minutes. As we’ve arrived at the statutory female part of the night, we’ll hear from the mainly expatriate writer Peggy-Glanville Hicks through the Promenade first movement from her Etruscan Concerto of 1954 which also calls for chamber orchestra only and will feature pianist Aura Go. A better-known blast from the past arrives in Miriam Hyde and her Andante tranquillo reworked from the Piano Concerto No. 2 of 1935 and which you’d have to assume will also be delivered with Go as soloist. James Henry, the MSO’s Cybec First Nations Composer in Residence, is contributing his Warrin (Wombat Season for the Wurundjeri, lasting from April to July), written in 2022 for string orchestra. To finish, here come the co-composing Tawadros brothers, Joseph and James on oud and req respectively, with a trio of numbers, all from their 2014 album Permission to Evaporate: first Constantinople, then Bluegrass Nikriz, and the title track to finish. It’s exciting music to experience in person and makes an affirmatively multi-cultural end to this night which has almost exclusively spoken a single if unequivocally imported tongue. Entry is free, of course, and the Bowl gates open, as usual, at 5 pm.

BRAHMS WITH JACK AND KRISTIAN

Kristian Chong & Friends

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Tuesday February 17 at 7 pm

You can’t ask for a recital more direct in its material than this one. Pianist Kristian Chong is collaborating with violinist Jack Liebeck, the British-German musician who is currently artistic director of Townsville’s Australian Festival of Chamber Music. These artists are working through all three of the Brahms violin sonatas: the meltingly fine G Major of 1879, the direct-speaking A Major from 7 years later, and the D minor, strikingly sombre and aggressive, finished after a long gestation in 1888. Thanks to an old friend, violinist Andrew Lee, I gained early knowledge and affection for all these scores and can’t think of a finer way to spend listening time than with this music. Liebeck has already given ample evidence of his abilities in these sonatas, having recorded them to some acclaim with pianist Katya Apekisheva for Sony in 2010. As for Chong, he’s an unfailing expert in chamber music operations, being one of the few pianists I can think of who’s aware of his function and responsibilities throughout intimate, confessional works like these. Tickets are $20 for students, $45 for concession holders, $55 full adults. Never forgetting the sliding scale fee from $4 to $8.50 if you book online or by phone; the trouble is, you have to or you could miss out because of the small holding power of the Centre’s Salon.

STARBURST

Omega Ensemble

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Wednesday February 18 at 7 pm

Beginning its Melbourne operations for 2026, the Omega Ensemble travels down the Hume (or its aeronautical of XPT equivalents) to perform a demanding program bookended by contemporary compositions. The evening begins with American violinist-composer Jessie Montgomery‘s 2012 work for string orchestra (at least, you have to assume this is the format we’ll hear) that gives a title to this event. It’s quick: listen hard or it will pass you by. Then David Rowden, the Omegas’ artistic director and founder, plays solo in Finzi’s Clarinet Concerto of 1949 about which British critics have made extravagant claims regarding value and cultural merit. We’ll see. To follow, the Omega resident pianist Vatche Jambazian and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s principal trumpet David Elton go for the Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 1, with the composer at his enthusiastic best in that happy year of 1933, just before the Soviet apparatchik-generated dung hit the Stalin-generated fan over Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. To conclude, an Australian work enjoys its premiere: Lachlan Skipworth‘s A Turning Sky brings everyone together in a 2025 score for clarinet, trumpet, piano and strings. According to the quality of your chosen seating position, Under 30s prices range from $39 to $114; the rest of us pay between $64 to $139, concession card holders getting their tickets for $10 less. You can circumvent the Recital Centre’s $4 to $8.50 surcharge by not booking online or by phone; just turn up on the night.

GOLDBERG VARIATIONS BY J. S. BACH PERFORMED BY ERIN HELYARD

Pinchgut Opera

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday February 19 at 7:30 pm

Here’s a commendable move by Sydney’s trailblazing opera company: sponsoring a performance of Bach’s brilliantly focused masterwork for keyboard, to be performed by Erin Helyard, our home-grown William Christie. It helps, I suppose, that he is Pinchgut’s artistic director and co-founder, but he became a familiar face here through his role as artist in residence at the Recital Centre in 2022 and his assumption of the same role with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra through 2024. Hence, I assume, the gamble of having him expound the Goldberg Variations in the Murdoch Hall rather than in the more rewardingly intimate (for him and for us) Primrose Potter Salon. Reassuringly, the performance is scheduled to last for about 70 minutes – which means that he’ll be observing all the repeats, or so you’d have to guess. Still, it’s a solid, fulfilling progress to the performer’s climactic repetition of the fulcrum theme and Bach’s organizational skill is still dazzling today, getting on for three centuries since the work’s initial publication in 1741. It’s fortunate if you’re under 35 as you can get a poor-to-not-bad seat for $35. If you’re older, you have to shell out between $55 and $140, with concession holders paying between $3 and $6 less – a demonstration of appalling niggardliness, especially when you have to accommodate the Transaction Fee imposed by the Recital Centre of between $4 and $8.50 if you book online or by phone.

GHOSTS MAKING FORM

ELISION

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Friday February 20 at 7 pm

This presentation from the contemporary music ensemble ELISION falls into three sections, the first pair being a ‘normal’ division of the entertainment into two halves. Then there’s an extra bit into which you can opt: a postlude billed as a Special Post-Concert Show. As far as I can tell, the whole recital is special: most of the composers are names I’ve never come across, although I can’t say that about the first one. Liza Lim has been a significant presence on this country’s modern music scene for many years and she begins this evening with her 2024 construct for cello (Freya Schack-Arnott) and piano (Alex Waite), written for a pair of Norwegian musicians which gives this program its title; then comes her brief Ming Qi, composed in 2000 for oboe (Niamh Dell) and percussion (Aditya Bhat or Peter Neville). Speaking of Scandinavia, a piece by Iceland-born writer Einar Torfi Einarsson follows: his Zone of proximity: (and the weakly interacting particles) from 2024 uses the forces of recorder (Ryan Williams) and cello (Schack-Arnott), here enjoying its premiere hearing. Victor Arul is currently Ph. D.-ing at Harvard after time in Perth and here; he is presenting new work from 2023 for the quartet of oboe (Dell), clarinet (Carl Rosman), trumpet (Tristram Williams) and piano (Waite). But he leaves us in a quandary: is this new work a ‘new work’ despite its dating from three years ago? Or is it actually called new work? Anyway, the first half of this exercise ends with Serbian-born Milica Djordjevic‘s 2022 Transfixed for bass clarinet (Rosman), trumpet (Williams), percussion (Bhat or Neville, or both), piano (Waite) and double bass (Rohan Dasika). We come back after a break for American musician Aaron Cassidy‘s 2021 E flat clarinet solo (Rosman, who commissioned it) 27. Juni 2009, taking a Gerhard Richter overpainted photograph as its stimulus. German composer Hakan Ulus is represented by a ‘new work’ but it dates from 2025 so he may not yet have decided on a title; in any case, it’s scored for cello (Schack-Arnott), piano (Waite) and percussion (Bhat/Neville). Amor, a vehement duet for flute (Paula Rae) and oboe (Dell), was written by John Rodgers in 1999, well before disastrous ill-health struck; a Queensland-born musician of high versatility, he died near Christmas 2024. To end this half, Cat Hope is represented by Goddess from last year, written for harp (Marshall McGuire), tam-tam (either Bhat or Neville, probably not both), and double bass (Dasika). The extra bit at the end of the concert proper features music by Lim, Mary Bellamy and Julio Estrada; these pieces will probably last about half-an-hour. Full-time students and concession card holders are charged $45, everybody else $55. And you also have to cope with the Recital Centre’s sliding transaction fee of anywhere between $4 and $8.50: an inimitable silliness that should preclude anybody from ordering online or by phone.

CHINESE NEW YEAR

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Saturday February 21 at 7:30 pm

These concerts have become a regular part of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra‘s annual presentations and this observation of the Year of the Horse promises a heady mixture of East and West with five works thrown together without concern for relevance or juxtapositioning. Conductor Li Biao is also an expert percussionist which may give him extra insight to cope with Beethoven’s three-quarters-bouncy A Major Symphony No. 7 of 1812. He also leads the orchestral support for Saint-Saens’ flamboyant Cello Concerto No. 1 of 1872, with American 2019 Tchaikovsky Competition winner Zlatomir Fung as soloist. As for the Chinese content, we’re hearing the last of Wang Xilin‘s Yunnan Tone Poems of 1963, the Torch Festival. Then Mindy Meng Wang takes centre stage with her guzheng for the 1959 Butterfly Lover’s Concerto by Chen Gang and He Zhanhao; it was originally conceived as a violin concerto and I don’t know how it will sound on a zither. Anyway, the night ends with a piece by Julian Yu: an orchestral setting of Jasmine, that haunting Chinese folk song used by Puccini in Tudandot to moving effect on its first appearance in Act 1 when the boys start singing La, sui monti dell’Est. Tickets range from $75 to $127, with concession prices $5 cheaper; hooray. You have to stump up a $7 transaction fee if you order your ticket/s; pretty unavoidable as this event is very popular. God rot all money-grubbers.

MARKIYAN MELNYCHENKO AND RHODRI CLARKE

The Weiland Project

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Cntre

Sunday February 22 at 5 pm

The second violin/piano recital inside a week and with a similar bent. Where Jack Liebeck and Kristian Chong are playing all the Brahms violin sonatas on February 17, this evening/gloaming violinist Markiyan Melnychenko and pianist Rhodri Clarke are presenting four sonatas by Douglas Weiland, the British composer who was a foundation member of the Australian String Quartet and who was fortunate enough to find in one of his colleagues there, William Hennessy, an indefatigable promoter of his music. The Violin Sonatas 1, 2 and 3 are concentrated in a particular few years of Weiland’s creative life. The first, Op. 26, was first performed in January 2000, the second, Op. 28, (which is originally listed for violin and harpsichord) in July 2000, and the third, Op. 29, in December 2001. Added to these scores, which come in at a bit over 45 minutes in performance, Weiland, who will be present, has recently written a work for Melnychenko based on Ukrainian themes in support of that nation’s struggles with a Stalinist revenant. Ticket prices are $75 full adult, $65 concession with the usual $4-$8.50 transaction fee added if you buy online or by phone. But then, it’s risky fronting up to the box office on the night because the Salon capacity is small and you tempt non-admission.

BARTON & BRODSKY

Melbourne Recital Centre

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Wednesday February 25 at 7:30 pm

With didgeridoo master William Barton as their guest, the Brodsky Quartet members – violins Krysia Ostostowicz and Ian Belton, viola Paul Cassidy, cello Jacqueline Thomas – are treading a fine line between their traditional fare and the most ancient music I know still to be heard. I’m assuming that Barton won’t take part in certain segments of this program: Purcell’s Fantasia on One Note in Three Parts of about 1680 (or is it his Fantasia in Three Parts upon a Ground ca. 1678?) and Fantasia in D minor also from about 1680, Janacek’s Intimate Letters String Quartet No. 2 of 1928, and Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet (finished in 1914 but not published for eight years) although the advertising material suggests that Barton will be participating in this last. You can be fairly sure that he’ll be there for Peter Sculthorpe’s 1990 String Quartet No. 11, Jabiru Dreaming, which has an optional part for his instrument. He’ll also participate in Brisbane composer Robert Davidson‘s Minjerribah (2012?) depicting North Stradbroke Island and performed by Barton and the Brodskys in Auckland during March 2024. I doubt if there’s a role for him in Salina Fisher‘s 2017 Torino for string quartet alone and imitating sounds generated by the versatile Maori putorino instrument. Andrew Ford‘s Eden Ablaze String Quartet No. 7 of 2020 refers to the NSW township menaced by the 2019 bushfires and it was written for Barton and the Brodsky group. I can’t see much room for the digeridoo in the Irish tune She moved through the fair and hope that there’s none to distract from that superb lyric. But Barton himself wrote the final piece on this program: Square Circles Beneath the Red Desert Sand of 2020 which was partly commissioned by the Australian String Quartet. If you’re under 40, you can get a poor or middling seat for $49; full adult prices range from $79 to $139, concession holders paying $79 or $99 for a B Reserve or A Reserve. Everybody has to cope with the online/phone booking fee of between $4 and $8.50, depending on how much you’re prepared to pay for your place. Can’t advise on this one: don’t know how popular Barton and/or the Brodsky Quartet are.

FLEXIBLE SKY

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Thursday February 26 at 7:30 pm

Something of an odd collection here. The Melbourne Chamber Orchestra plays under the customary direction of Sophie Rowell and its guest soloist will be guitarist Slava Grigoryan; all well and good so far. Proceedings begin with a new work by Joe Chindamo; well, there are plenty of those flying around (see ELISION above) and this is a welcome MCO commission. It could involve Grigoryan, or it might confine itself to the core string ensemble. The next does require him: Vivaldi’s Guitar (Lute) Concerto in D of 1731 with its moving central Largo of a mere 17 bars. Then comes a true deviation from the norm in a transcription of Beethoven’s Moonlight Piano Sonata No. 14, published by Polish arranger Jakub Kowalewski in 2014 and transposing all three movements up a semitone; the third movement has a laugh a minute. Reason is restored with Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances in an orchestrated version, though probably not the composer’s own of 1917 which involves pairs of woodwind and horns. At last, we reach the title work, more or less. It was composed by Austrian guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel, the original recorded in 2017 by Grigoryan and the Australian String Quartet. This is a Redux version which was, like the Chindamo, commissioned by the MCO and so the original quartet will be swollen somewhat. Finally, as we opened with an Australian work, so we close – with Matthew Hindson‘s Song and Dance, composed in 2006 and giving you exactly what it says – a song (largo) and a dance (allegro), in this instance for string orchestra. I don’t know why but the seating prices for this event are extraordinarily complicated. Full adult prices range from $75 to $150; concession and senior entry is somewhat less – from $55 to $135; full-time students and children pay a flat $30; Under 40s can get a poor or middling spot for $40; and groups of 10+ will front up anything between $60 and $120 each. Also, you know that the Recital Centre has its claws out for your $4-to-$8,50 transaction fee if you book online or by phone.

This program will be repeated on Sunday March 1 at 2:30 pm.

FESTIVAL OPENING CONCERT – GLORIA!

Ballarat Organs & Fine Music Festival

St Patrick’s Cathedral

Friday January 9 at 7 pm

It’s all different up the Western Freeway since I’ve been away in the north. This festival has undergone a name change as well as a revamp in administration with long-time artistic directors Sergio di Pieri and Judith Houston gone, replaced by gamba exponent Laura Vaughan. As well, the time-line has been compressed so that it now runs for half of its previous length. And the geography has closed in so that events are limited to the city of Ballarat, with two day-time events in both Clunes and Creswick – nothing to the south. And the number of concerts/recitals has shrunk to 12, with the Festival al fresco Breakfast continuing as an extra-numerary. As usual, we have a celebratory opening event which this year involves the Consort of Melbourne, Consortium of viols, Unholy Rackett, with Donald Nicholson playing harpsichord and Nicholas Pollock on theorbo; Steven Hodgson, the Consort’s director, seems to be in charge of this amalgamation. No specifics are available but the names of Schutz, Hassler and Praetorius are being bandied around, with the promise of multi-choral polyphony. The concert lasts for 70 minutes, promising an early night for everybody – a welcome relief for this largely local audience. Students pay $10, concession holders $35, adults $45; if you want the post-concert supper, it’s $10 extra. The booking fee ranges for 75 cents to $1.88 – so why is this impost so cheap in the country and so monstrously expensive in Melbourne?

THE SINGING PIPES – MUSIC OF HANDEL, BACH, HAYDN & BEYOND

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

St. John’s Anglican Church, Creswick,

Saturday January 10 at 11 am

This recital is being given on the church’s Fincham and Hobday instrument by Rhys Boak, resident music genius in St. Michael’s Uniting Church, Collins Street. The organ was relocated from the Wesleyan (Uniting?) Church, Barkly St., Ballarat in 2016 and has a solid range of stops for its two manuals and pedal board. Boak is committed to five definite works in his hour-long program: the Overture to Handel’s Occasional Oratorio of 1745-6 without the original trumpets and drums; Bach’s towering Prelude and Fugue in A minor BWV 543 from the Weimar years 1708-13; Haydn’s Eight Pieces for Musical Clocks from anywhere between 1772 and 1793; Mozart’s Minuet in D – possibly K. 355/576b from possibly 1789/90; and contemporary Hungarian Zsolt Gardonyi‘s 1995 jazz-inflected Mozart Changes based on the final movement to K. 576. As well, pieces by J. K. F. Fischer, John Stanley, and Theodore Dubois are promised which fleshes out some odd corners very neatly. Tickets follow the opening concert’s lead – $10, $35, or $45, depending on your age and/or career stage.

BAAZ AVAZ – ON THE SILK ROAD

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

Creswick Town Hall

Saturday January 10 at 2 pm

So it’s off to Persia and a recital involving music, dance and story-telling during which, somewhere along the hour-long expedition, we’ll doubtless meet up with the cry of the falcon mentioned in the event’s title. Four participants present this amalgam: Vahideh Eisaei contributing vocal work as well as playing the qanun or large zither; Dong Ma on erhu or Chinese two-stringed fiddle which may have links to the (more topical for this recital) rehab; Elnaz Sheshgelani covering the stories and the dance components; and Yang Ying on pipa or Chinese lute which came to that country along the Silk Road. This is one of those occasions where you enter a world unfamiliar to most of us; my experience of Persian music has been confined to an Adelaide Festival recital many years ago from an ensemble playing court music – or so it was claimed. That’s the sort of cultural ignorance that a presentation like this seeks to remedy; it’s not all Omar Khayyam and Hafez or the AliQapu restaurant here in Kew. If you’re a student, you can get in for $10 plus a piffling booking fee of 75 cents; concession card holders ($35) and adults ($45) have to go on waiting lists because their allocations are sold out.

VERSAILLES IN LOVE

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

St. Paul’s Anglican Church, Bakery Hill

Saturday January 10 at 6 pm

Quite a lot of promises made for this non-specific 60-minute program which features a quintet of musicians, some of whom I know. Soprano Myriam Arbouz, baroque violinists David Rabinovici and Tim Willis, baroque triple harpist Hannah Lane, and theorboist Nicholas Pollock presumably combine and re-congregate in small groups to take us through works by Lully, his father-in-law Michel Lambert, and his student Marin Marais. Two specific forms are designated: the air de cour and chamber music – which is telling us nothing, except that the songs preclude the three composers named who all wrote airs of a different colour. As for the other, these musicians have a wealth of rich, magnificently mannered material from which to select; a pity they haven’t let us into their confidence about what we’d be paying for. Speaking of which, prices follow the usual pattern: $10 for students, $35 for concession holders, $45 for adults with a maximum booking fee of $1.63 and a minimum of 75 cents – almost seems pointless to charge it.

TELEMANN PARIS QUARTETS

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

Ballarat Performing Arts Centre, Soldiers Hill

Sunday January 11 at 2 pm

These works are being presented by the Coomoora Ensemble, apparently headed by baroque violin Lizzy Welsh (she writes on Instagram about ‘my delightful Coomoora Ensemble’, which strikes me as a pretty obvious statement of ownership. She’s accompanied on her sojourn into Telemann by Alison Catanach on baroque flute, Edwina Cordingley on baroque cello, and Ann Murphy playing harpsichord, as is her wont. It’s not clear if the ensemble can get through all twelve of the Paris quartets – six Quadri published in 1730, and six Nouveaux quatuors printed in 1738. In fact, I doubt if they could, given their recital’s 60 minutes time-span. I suspect that they’re attempting the latter, given that they refer to works composed during Telemann’s visit to the French capital in 1737-8. But then, all of them were written before he hit Paris, so they may be attempting a mixture. Whatever the case, this hour (possibly longer) will cost you $10 a student, $35 a concession holder (but not Seniors’ Cards, apparently), and $45 full adult, with a negligible booking fee ranging from $1.63 to 75 cents.

O FILII ET FILIAE – ORGAN SPLENDOUR OF THE (MOSTLY) FRENCH BAROQUE

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

St Paul’s Anglican Church, Bakery Hill

Sunday January 11 at 6 pm

Another solo organ recital to balance Rhys Boak’s one on Saturday January 10 in Creswick, this mixed collation lasting an hour is being presented by Donald Nicholson, showing us another side to his musical abilities after he has played harpsichord for the festival’s opening concert. Yet again, details are scant although he is sitting securely in a French gallery by performing works by Couperin, Louis Marchand, Jean-Francois Dandrieu and Nicolas de Grigny. For the first of these, I can find only two organ works, both mass settings; Marchand offers more, some of them formidable elements of the French repertoire; Dandrieu I know only through his Noels but he did write an Easter offertory, published in 1739, based on the plainchant that gives this event its title; de Grigny is celebrated for his only publication – a Premier livre d’orgue from 1699 which has a preponderance of church music in it. Just to offer a change of diet, Nicholson will also play some pieces by Buxtehude to offer a ‘dash of fiery North German contrast’ – just what those French formalists need. Ticket prices follow the usual $10, $35, $45 pattern (student, concession, adult) with a small booking fee too minute to outline, too inconsiderable to make any difference to anybody.

FOUNDATION OF FANTASIE

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

St. Paul’s Anglican Church, Clunes

Monday January 12 at 11 am

For this excursion to the book-driven town of Clunes, lutenist Rosemary Hodgson and organist Jack Stacey are attempting to draw some parallels between Renaissance architecture and the period’s music. Terrific, and good luck with that. Their 60-minute presentation centres on the works of Alonso Ferrabosco the younger who performed for Elizabeth I and Hodgson is playing all seven of the composer’s extant fantasias, leavening this core with side-steps to vocal intabulations, passamezzi and pavans. An intriguing venture, although the fantasias look to me as being more suited to a chest of viols than a lute, mainly because of some sustained notes that a soloist (apart from an organist) can’t manage. You’re invited to find similarities between the cleanness of form and structural balance of a building from this time in the clarity and formal integrity of the Elizabethan viol composer’s works. As I read things, Stacey is to provide a solo on the church’s organ at the start of the recital but I can’t find anything by Ferrabosco for that instrument; in this case, a Hamlin & Son rarity that sits in remarkably close relationship to the church’s acoustic properties, as I remember from over a decade ago – since which time (2018) the instrument has been restored extensively. The usual entry costs apply: $10 a student, $35 for concession holders, $45 an adult, all with small booking fees that probably won’t put patrons off.

REEDS & RESONANCE – MUSIC FROM THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE BASSOON

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

Clunes Town Hall

Monday January 12 at 2 pm

This hour-long entertainment brings back some of the opening concert’s contributors: Nicholas Pollock resumes his theorbo and adds a Baroque guitar, while the Unholy Rackett group is identified as Simon Rickard, Brock Imison and Jackie Newcomb, all manipulating curtals and their namesake instrument. Also involved is triple harpist Hannah Lane, returning after her Love in Versailles participation on January 10 and the festival’s director Laura Vaughan consorting with her gamba. And this is one program where you know exactly what is being presented: a Sonata for four trombones from the Op. 22 collection of 1655 by Biagio Marini; two pieces from the Canzone, fantasie e correnti of 1638 by Bartolome de Selva y Salaverde in the soprano and bass song Vestiva hi colli passaegiatto and a canzon for two tenors (trombones?); a set of variations on La Folia by Antonio Martin y Coll from Volume V of his 1706 Flores de musica; Giovanni Bertoli’s 1645 Sonata settima that one would assume was for the bassoon, which was his instrument; Kapsberger’s Tenore del Kapsberger from the 1604 Volume 1 of his Intavolatura di chitarone, plus the Bergamasca and Canario from the Intavolatura Volume 4 of 1640; from Il primo libro de balli of 1578, Giorgio Mainiero’s La lavandera/Caro ortolano, probably for a rackett; the 1609 setting of Es ist ein’ Ros’ entsprungen by Praetorius; two anonymous songs in Vos senora, a maltratada and the Portuguese Renaissance lyric/laugh Nao tragais borzeguis pretos, both played on curtals by the Racketts; Machado’s Dos estrellas le siguen which I have come across as a four-part chorale-type invention from the Cancionero de la Sablonara of 1624/5; finally, Daniel Speer’s first (only?) two Sonatas for two violas published in 1697 and hisSonata for three bassoons (C Major or F Major?) which I believe comes from the same year. Anyway, tickets follow the usual costings: students $10, concession $35, adults $45 plus a nonsensical booking fee of minute proportions, although still a nuisance to fork out.

DARKNESS AND DELIGHT – JERRY WONG

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

Ballarat Mechanics’ Institute, Sturt St.

Monday January 12 at 6 pm

A 60-minute recital from the Head of Keyboard at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music is a singular surprise in this festival line-up. Jerry Wong hasn’t detailed what he is going to present, like so many contributors to this enterprise, but he opens a pretty wide door by introducing certain names as contributing agents. There’s Bach, Beethoven, Liszt – and Miriam Hyde, as a kind of satisfaction for our nationalistic yearnings. But the evening’s title gives an immense scope, as all of these composers have dealt with both the highs and lows of human experience. Still, it’s always worth your while listening to an artist of Wong’s calibre and, if the names strike you as promising, then you can get in for the usual fee: adults $45, concession holders $35, students $10, and the small booking fee that nevertheless nags like an itch in the middle of your spine.

MEDITERRANEAN – ELISABETTA GHEBBIONI

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

Loreto College Chapel

Tuesday January 13 at 11 am

Starting the festival’s final day comes Italian harpist Elisabetta Ghebbioni, a veteran performer at this festival and a professor at the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory in Venice. As is characteristic of so many performers in these Ballarat days, her program is unknown, even if her publicity refers to a few names: Albeniz, Saint-Saens, Einaudi ‘and others’. The first of these will probably involve an arrangement because I can’t find any harp works by Albeniz. Saint-Saens has a solo Fantaisie from 1893 and a 1918 Morceau de concert but nothing else relevant or practicable (apart from more arrangements). As for Einaudi, I assume this artist will be playing pieces from his album Stanze of 1992, although he has endorsed arrangements of some piano works for the harp. By the way, Einaudi is visiting Melbourne next month, playing at the Myer Bowl. Still, what information there is on this recital seems – even in this context – a bit vague, while Ghebbioni’s screed in the festival bumf is too brief to be of much use to anyone. Tickets for this event will be the same as all the others at the centre of this festival: $10 a student, $35 a concession holder, $45 full price, with the nugatory booking fee attached, increasing slightly as your price goes up. But, doing dutiful research, I couldn’t get on to the booking site – Error 404 made its entry for no apparent reason.

SUITES & SONGS

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

St. Paul’s Anglican Church, Bakery Hill

Tuesday January 13 at 2 pm

Cellist Josephine Vains is at the centre of this recital, although Jack Stacey is again going to preface proceedings with a solo on the church’s J. W. Walker organ, and why not? He’s this church’s organist. You’d have to assume that we’re going to hear at least part of a Bach cello suite; it’s also possible that we’ll hear all or part of one of the three Britten suites written for Rostropovich. Also mentioned in the publicity material is Gabrieli, whose cello works escape me; perhaps Stacey will kick in with some support here for – what? Then another one of the festival’s few dives into the vernacular with Ross Edwards; possibly Prelude & Laughing rock from 2003, or perhaps Monos I from 1970. As well, we’re to hear some Casals, who wrote a fair few works for cello, as you’d expect, but they all involve piano accompaniment; the Song of the Birds from 1941 might enjoy a sentimental visit. It’s all up in the air but tickets run through the familiar format: students pay $10, concession holders $35, and full adult tickets cost $45, all with a handling fee, which I assume only applies if you book on line.

FESTIVAL CLOSING CONCERT – SONGS OF LIGHT & DEVOTION

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

St. Patrick’s Cathedral

Tuesday January 13 at 6 pm

The subtitle to this final program is Life, Death & the Passion of 17th Century Italian Music; you can’t expect more in a concert than enjoying the two great existential fag-ends and, when you add in the Italian Baroque – be still, my beating heart. As usual, nothing specific is set down, nothing as vulgar as a set program, but we have some insinuations. For instance, we will definitely hear some late sacred music by Monteverdi; pieces from the 1641 Selva morale e spirituale, you’d reckon, or some scraps out of the Messa et salmi of 1650. As well, we can expect one (or more?) of the sacred oratorios by Luigi Rossi, with perhaps some extracts from the famous one for Holy Week whose provenance is even now questionable. Also, there will be a psalm setting or two from Giovanni Rigatti; there’s plenty to choose from as he published them across his brief career in 1640, 1643, 1646 and in the year of his death: 1648. Another name is Domenico Mazzocchi, famous for his motets so there should be a couple sung here, like the Videte et gustate published in 1664. Stephen Grant will be directing (as well as singing bass), principally his e21 Consort, but also Stephanie Eldridge and Lizzy Welch on baroque violins, Linda Kent at her harpsichord, John Weretka seated at (probably) a chamber organ, Hannah Lane bringing her triple harp into play for the third time this festival, and overall director of everything during these past days, Laura Vaughan plays both her gamba and a lirone. Tickets are currently unavailable on the usually reliable Humanitix website – not the best of omens. But I’d anticipate that they mirror those for the opening night and everything else – $10 for students, $35 for concession holders, $45 for adults with the by-now traditional small booking fee that seems to be necessarily attached to any event for which you either book online or pay by credit card.