Category: The Diary

MOZART AND THE MENDELSSOHNS

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Melbourne Town Hall

Thursday July 3 at 7:30 pm

What used to be simply called the Town Hall series has apparently been amplified in its geographical scope but the essentials remain the same. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is playing under its chief conductor, Jaime Martin, but the program isn’t as barnstormingly popular as you’d expect., Yes, the forces wind up this evening’s entertainment with Felix Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony in A Major (well, half of it is) of 1833 which can never wear out its welcome from the first frothing wind chords to the emphatic saltarello‘s last belt. But, we begin with a true rarity, even in these anti-misogynist times: Fanny Mendelssohn’s Overture in C, written in 1832 and an intriguing chronological partner for her brother’s brilliant symphony. As for the essential concerto, the MSO offers four of its principals – oboe Johannes Grosso, clarinet David Thomas, bassoon Jack Schiller, horn Nicolas Fleury – as soloists in Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante of 1778 . . . or is it really his? A lot of water has passed under the musicological bridge and the absence of an original score is only the start of questions about this quadruple concerto’s provenance. Standard tickets run from $45 to $105, concessions are a princely $5 lower, and anyone under 18 gets in for $20, but let these last beware of the $7 transaction fee that costs a third of your admission cost – that’s the way to get the young interested.

This program will be repeated in the Frankston Arts Centre on Friday July 4 at 7:30 pm, and at the Ulumbarra Theatre in Bendigo on Saturday July 5 at 7:30 pm.

JESS HITCHCOCK & PENNY QUARTET

Melbourne Recital Centre and Musica Viva Australia

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Monday July 7 at 7:30 pm

I wrote about this event (see March Diary 2025) while still living on the Gold Coast (ah, those halcyon years of heat and humidity) when the program was played at the Queensland Conservatorium on March 4 It seems a long time to be still on the road four months later for Jess Hitchcock and the Penny Quartet but here they are, fleshing out the Melbourne Recital Centre‘s monthly program and still (co-)sponsored by Musica Viva Australia. I have a feeling that the original program was altered before the March recital, but in its present format, nine composers offer arrangements of Hitchcock songs, including three by the singer herself as May Lyon, Matt Laing and Nicole Murphy have disappeared from the original list. It’s to be hoped that the Penny personnel stay the same – violins Amy Brookman and Madeleine Jevons, viola Anthony Chataway, cello Jack Ward – especially for the program’s final offering: a string quartet from American writer Caroline Shaw called Plan and Elevation: The Grounds of Dumbarton Oaks, written in 2015. Admission for your regular patron moves between $65 and $125, concessions on a sliding scale that operates between $56 and $110, the Under 40 bracket get in for $49, while First Nations peoples from any country only have to stump up $15. Your transaction fee at this site falls anywhere between $4 and $8.50 (a riveting exercise in fiscal logistics, reminiscent of Trump’s mercurial tariff rates) which is hard cheese for the Aboriginal, Torres Strait, Maori etc. patrons.

FOLK REIMAGINED: EAST IN SYMPHONY

Ryan Maxwell Event

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Wednesday July 9 at 7:30 pm

What you’re offered here is a transformation exercise: Chinese folk-song into symphonic form. The executants in this enterprise are the Guizhou Chinese Orchestra and a body called The Australia Orchestra. The visiting ensemble was founded in 2003 and is conducted by Long Guohong in its current Sydney and Melbourne appearances. The local group cannot be traced online (well, I can’t find it) but is to be conducted by Luke Spicer, who is a well-known presence in Sydney for work with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Opera Australia. And what do you hear? For openers, there’s the Guizhou Kam Grand Choir which will probably be singing a cappella. Then comes that well-worn fusion classic, the Yellow River Piano Concerto, followed by a symphonic sequence of scenes from four great classical Chinese novels, and more solid orchestra (which one?) work in a fantasy springing from the gaming activity Black Myth: Wukong which itself has to do with an Eastern monkey hero questing in the West. For soloists, you will hear Jiang Kemei playing a concerto called Deep in the Night on her jinghu (two-stringed violin) and Zhang Qianyang on the suona (double-reed oboe/horn) in one of the most famous pieces for her instrument, A Hundred Birds Paying Homage to the Phoenix. Admission costs between $35 and $169 with some piddling concession reductions; groups of ten-plus and students pay between $55 and $107. On top of this, factor in that swinging transaction fee of between $4 and $8.50; could that impost factor in Chalmers’ tax review, I wonder?

PASTORALE

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall

Thursday July 10 at 7:30 pm

Since I’ve been away, Sophie Rowell has taken over the artistic directorship of the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra as well as having recently been posted to the role of associate professor of violin and chamber music at the University of Melbourne. She’s been busy over the years, what with the Tankstream/Australian String Quartet and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra co-concertmaster position for eight years. Tonight, she takes her charges through two string masterworks at either end of the program: first, Barber’s Adagio for Strings of 1936 – a favourite when Americans want to be serious or funereal – and Tchaikovsky’s lush Serenade for Strings, written in 1880. Both of these are more than familiar, so it’s as well that the central works offer some variation. Aura Go will be soloist in Doreen Carwithen’s Concerto for piano and strings which the British composer wrote in 1948 and which is probably here enjoying its Australian premiere. The work’s three movements appear to be worked out in solid neo-classical style with definite tonalities obtaining across its half-hour length; there’s even a good old-fashioned cadenza in the Moderato e deciso conclusion. And the program takes its title from a Peter Sculthorpe excerpt, the central segment of his String Quartet No. 4 written in 1949, then upgraded to string orchestra standing in 2013. It has an even more checkered history in Sculthorpe’s own recollections. but it might well be his last ‘composition’, as the MCO publicity has it. Still, as it’s only about 4 minutes long, who wants to argue? Adult tickets range from $72 tp $124 with some reasonable concession reductions and a flat charge of $30 for students and children. The booking fee on the seat I selected was $7, which – to put it mildly – is excessive for the work involved.

This program will be repeated on Sunday July 13 at 2:30 pm.

YINYA DANA: LIGHTING THE PATH

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall,, Arts Centre Melbourne

Friday July 11 at 7:30 pm

In honouring the 50th anniversary of NAIDOC Week, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is paying an exceptional honour to Deborah Cheetham Fraillon whose compositions are the focus of this event. I’ve not encountered any of her music but I suppose that’s because her recent grounds of operation have been in Melbourne, particularly with the MSO who appointed her to a five-year tenure of their First Nations Creative Chair in 2021; I did experience her work as a soprano with Short Black Opera but that was some time ago. Details about what is actually being performed tonight are hard to find. but the range operates between her 2018 Eumeralla: a war requiem for peace (two movements of which were recorded by the ABC in 2020) and last year’s Earth. A pair of conductors share the honours: Aaron Wyatt and Nicolette Fraillon. as for soloists, Cheethem Fraillon will be singing, as will vocalists Jess Hitchcock and Lillie Walker. That sine qua non of Aboriginal serious music events, William Barton, brings his didgeridoo to the mix of colours and the MSO Chorus is joined by members of the Dhungala Children’s Choir, an offshoot of Cheetham Fraillon’s opera company. Standard tickets range from $68 to $113; concession prices are $5 cheaper which should bring on a chorus of that old favourite, Thanks for Nothing. Mob Tix are available for $25, but how do you prove your standing? Just be prepared to hand over the $7 transaction fee, whether you’re a member of the First Nations or a Johnny Come Lately like me.

BENAUD TRIO 20TH ANNIVERSARY CONCERT

Melbourne Recital Centre

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday July 12 at 3 pm

Yes, it’s a celebration of a kind, if a short one as it’s only an hour long: no interval, quick in, quick out. The members of the Benaud Trio – brothers Lachlan Bramble (violin) and Ewen Bramble (cello), Amir Farid (piano) – still maintain a relationship; although the brothers are both associate principals with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and Farid is based in New York. They’re playing two works: Dvorak’s Dumky of 1891, which they have played here before in the heyday of their Benaud-Melbourne years; and Jakub Jankowski‘s Piano Trio No. 2. The latter is an Adelaide composer with a modest body of work to his name. The Benauds seem to have premiered this particular trio in 2018, a few months after the debut of Jankowski’s Piano Trio No. 1 from the Seraphim Trio. Now the piece is back for another airing. It would be handy if more information was available about the piece, but background is sadly lacking. Entry is a flat $50, concession $40, and you have to negotiate the Recital Centre’s odd ‘Transaction Fee’ charge that runs from $4 to $8.50 according to some criterion that escapes me.

This program will be repeated at 6 pm.

FIESTA! DVORAK’S CELLO CONCERTO & CHINDAMO

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday July 17 at 7:30 pm

This was originally labelled ‘Journey to the Americas’ but has since been recast more sensibly so that it covers the entire night’s work. Yes, there is some emphatically relevant-to-the-Americas music on the program in Peruvian composer Jimmy Lopez’s Fiesta! Four Pop Dances for Orchestra, written in 2007 and the writer’s most popular work, here promoted by tonight’s conductor (and fellow-Peruvian), Miguel Harth-Bedoya who commissioned it. Joe Chindamo’s Americas connection might emerge in his Concerto for Orchestra of 2021, composed for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra; most of us would associate him with the field of jazz, and so easily American. And then we come to the large-framed Cello Concerto by Dvorak, completed in 1895 and written while the composer was living in New York during his last unhappy months directing the National Conservatory of Music. Here is a rich score loaded with melody and a splendid vehicle for its soloist, who on this occasion is German musician Raphaela Gromes; I believe she has made tours of North and Central America. Standard tickets range from $51 to $139; concession card holders might as well pay full price because their deduction is only $5. If you’re under 18, you are charged $20, which makes the compulsory transaction fee of $7 sting all the more sharply.

This program will be repeated in Costa Hall, Geelong on Friday July 18 at 7:30 pm and back in Hamer Hall on Saturday July 19 at 2 pm.

AXIS MUNDI

ELISION Ensemble

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Friday July 18 at 7 pm

The ELISION Ensemble is almost 40 years old, which puts into perspective a fair few of us who were around in its heady early years. Speaking of the few, some of the original musicians survive, including founder Daryl Buckley who remains one of the most adventurous guitarists I’ve come across. A fair bit of tonight’s program is up-to-date, beginning and ending with 2025 compositions. Melbourne-based academic Charlie Sdraulig‘s fresh Air opens us up in a septet (possibly) for flute (all three played by Paula Rae), bassoon (Ben Roidl-Ward), saxophone (Joshua Hyde), trumpet (Tristram Williams), trombone (Benjamin Marks), violins (interesting as there’s only one such player listed: Harry Ward) and contrabass (Kathryn Schulmeister). Then clarinet Richard Haynes performs John Rodgers’ Ciacco solo for bass clarinet of 1999 before we encounter Mexican-born Julio Estrada‘s yuunohui’ehecatl (2010?) to be played by trumpet, trombone, bassoon and contrabass. After interval comes the program’s title work, written for solo bassoon by ELISION evergreen Liza Lim in 2012-13, followed by indigenous composer Brenda Gifford‘s new score Wanggadhi for saxophone, trumpet, trombone and bass. Then we hear Victor Arul‘s Barrelled space featuring bass clarinet, saxophone, bassoon, trombone, percussion (Aditya Bhat and/or Peter Neville), and bass. If you haven’t had enough, you can wait around for a post-recital performance of Double Labyrinth v2, a new construct by British writer Bryn Harrison that calls for alto and bass flute, clarinet d’amore (Haynes had one made about five years ago), clarinet in A, flugelhorn (Williams, presumably), harp (Marshall McGuire), percussion and violin. Tickets are $55, concession $45, and don’t forget that peculiar transaction fee of between $4 and $8.50 that slugs every order you make.

MOZART’S CLARINET

Musica Viva Australia

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Tuesday July 22 at 7 pm

A trio of specialists take us through a set of works by Mozart and Beethoven in this latest Musica Viva recital. The entertainment features Nicola Boud on ‘historical’ clarinets, Sydney Symphony Orchestra cellist Simon Cobcroft, and Erin Helyard playing the fortepiano. I think their combined aim is to give us the experience of listening to this music as it would have sounded when it was written – a delight for musicologists, an aural adjustment or three for the rest of us. We begin with Beethoven’s Sonata for Fortepiano and Horn Op. 17 of 1800, arranged for basset horn (with the composer’s approval, apparently) by Josef Friedlowsky in about 1802. A touch earlier in his life, the composer wrote his Variations on Ein Madchen oder Weibchen from Mozart’s The Magic Flute for cello and piano in 1798; a puzzle as it’s catalogued as his Op. 66. All three players are involved in Mozart’s Kegelstatt Trio of 1786, even if the original called for a viola, not a cello. Back to Beethoven for the Aria con variazioni (four of them, with a coda) tacked on to the Three Duos for Clarinet and Bassoon WoO 27 and written somewhere between 1790 and 1792; you assume Cobcroft will stand in for the lower voice. Helyard then performs the familiar Sonata in C K. 545, composed for all piano learners’ delight in 1788, and the ensemble concludes this exercise with Beethoven’s Gassenhauer Trio Op. 11, written in 1797 with clarinet, cello and keyboard as the designated players. Tickets range from $20 to $153, and, on booking, you will encounter the $7 transaction fee: a disappointment we have always with us.

A GHOSTLY AFTERNOON

Selby & Friends

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre Wednesday July 23 at 2 pm

This recital features two young musicians in the latest Selby & Friends recital. Violinist Natalie Chee, Sydney-born and recently nominated as the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s concertmaster for 2026, and cellist Benett Tsai, fresh from delivering the Saint-Saens Concerto No. 1 with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, will partner with Kathryn Selby in three piano trios. First comes an arrangement by the Linos Trio from 2001 of Debussy’s Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune – one of the more formidable works that ushered in a new musical era as far back as 1894. From the program title, you would have guessed that Beethoven’s Op. 70 No. 1 was on track for a hearing, and so it is although perhaps not as spectral as it seemed to listeners in 1809. To end, the group takes on the gripping Shostakovich Piano Trio No. 2, a 1944 work that never fails to absorb its listeners from the keening cello harmonics of the opening to the three last bars of soft E Major chords that offer a close but no consolation. Entry ranges from $63 for a student (and a concession card holder), to $79 for a senior, to $81 an adult. You’ll also pay between $4 and $8.50 if you order online or by phone. What if you show up at the box office, cash in hand? Worth a try.

This program will be repeated at 7 pm.

SAMSON ET DALILA

Melbourne Opera

Palais Theatre., St’ Kilda

Sunday June 1 at 2:30 pm

it’s been quite a while since Saint-Saens’ enduring opera of 1877 has been staged here. The one and only time I can recall is from November 1983 when the Victorian State Opera forces, conducted by Richard Divall, presented a version in Hamer Hall, the company’s chairman, Sir Rupert Hamer, having to make a small statement defending the microcosmic amount of nudity that occurred during the Bacchanale. Mind you, this was during the oddly strait-laced premiership of John Cain Jr. who was no stranger to the art form. A lot was made of some naked bodies that were intended to spice up Act 3, Scene 2 and the more salacious among us were looking forward to a bit of real Philistine brouhaha, especially as you had to sit through a fair amount of tedium before the fun started and the roof caved in. Let’s hope that Melbourne Opera has better luck with its orgy. Details are slim: mezzo Deborah Humble is taking on the temptress role; tenor Rosario La Spina will wind up shorn but triumphant as the strongman judge, The director is Suzanne Chaundy, conductor Raymond Lawrence. It seems as though the company is not using the Palais lounge or balcony while ticket prices range between $69 and $199, never forgetting the $7 ‘handling fee’ which gives an expensive venture a little extra bite – and a fiscal necessity for reasons that nobody can explain to me without blushing.

This program will be repeated on Tuesday June 3 at 7:30 pm.

SCHEHERAZADE

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Monday June 2 at 6:30 pm

Have you ever heard a satisfactory live performance of this marvel of orchestration? I can’t say that I have, but my experiences have been limited to three state orchestras in this country. I mean, you can be wrapped in a pleasant cocoon of sound as Rimsky-Korsakov’s suite from 1888 moves from its snarling opening bars to the soaring, placid triumph of its conclusion, but an average reading loses your interest in the middle movements to do with the Kalendar Prince, and then the Young Prince and Young Princess which test the phrasing inventiveness of several exposed individual players. Conducting the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in this gem is Elim Chan, the young Hong-Kong-born musician who has been wooed with various degrees of success by British and European organizations. Scheherazade is the only work on this program which belongs to both the Quick Fix at Half Six and the Meet the Music: Years 9-12 series which have different modes of preparation for their two distinct types of audience member. Mind you, it pays to be a secondary school student: their tickets are only $9 each. If you’re after the quick fix, your standard ticket costs between $62 and $99 (a hell of a lot for one work); concessionaires can expect to pay $5 less (big deal), and your child under 18 will pay $20. Add the compulsory $7 transaction fee, of course; administering your credit card deployment is so time-consuming.

STEPHEN HOUGH

Melbourne Recital Centre

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, MRC

Monday June 2 at 7:30 pm

The formidable British pianist is a guest of the Melbourne Recital Centre and is always good value, not leat for the spread of his programming. This time round, Stephen Hough opens with a group of three pieces by Cecile Chaminade: Automne from the Op. 35 Six Etudes de concert of 1886, Autrefois from the Op. 87 collection of Six pieces humoristiques written in 1897, and the 1892 Les Sylvains. which is Chaminade’s Op. 60. Well, it’s his program but the little I’ve encountered from the French writer’s catalogue strikes me as fin-de-siecle Light. This triptych is followed by Liszt’s B minor Piano Sonata which will probably overshadow anything that precedes it, anyway. Hough then treats us to his own Sonatina Nostalgica, a 2019 work comprising three movements, all with a combined timing of less than five minutes. This mimics the positioning of the Chaminade in preceding another formidable score: Chopin’s final Sonata No. 3, composed in 1844 and enjoying less exposure in the modern recital hall than its predecessor, the Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor. You’d think this presents as a rather eccentric array of offerings; you’d be right. But Hough has the ability to maintain your interest, even in his easy-going moments. Standard tickets cost between $67 and $115, with some half-decent concessions for students and the elderly. There’s also the inevitable $7 levy for taking your money, an unreasonable tax which has apparently infected every musical enterprise across the city.

FIRST VOICES SHOWCASE

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Iwaki Auditorium, Southbank

Wednesday June 4 at 6:30 pm

Here is one of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra‘s special excursions – the First Voices First Nation Composer program under a Music and Ideas banner. I don’t know how the organization is approaching this concept of giving a voice to Aboriginal writers but this strikes me as tentative. For one thing, it’s not hard to fill the Iwaki space. For another, the event is scheduled to last only an hour. For a final touch, all tickets are $15 . . . and you can add on almost half that again for the gouging transaction fee which pushes your price up to $22. Anyway, what do you get for your money? Three works, as it turns out. First comes James Howard‘s Nyirrimarr Ngamatyata/To Lose Yourself at Sea; followed by Leon Rodgers‘ Seven Sisters; the set concluding in Fragments by Nathaniel Andrew. Howard is a well-established academic with a solid background in tracing cultural heritage. The piece by Rodgers was programmed in last year’s First Voices concert, according to a still-extant website. Andrew presents as the most versatile musician with a strong base in performance both here and overseas. I know nothing of the work of any of them but, if in the audience, would be waiting with anticipation for any sign of innovation or irregularity elements that are absent all too often in the output of contemporary writers.

NORTHERN LIGHTS

Musica Viva Australia

Melbourne Recital Centre, Southbank

Tuesday June 10 at 7 pm

An inevitable title, given the Swedish-Norwegian background of this recital’s violinist, Johan Dalene. This young celebrity appearing for Musica Viva will be partnered by Hobart-based Jennifer Marten-Smith, latest in a long line of pianists who have partnered Dalene across an active schedule of performances. Mind you, some of the material he’s presenting tonight has been part of his duo programs for some time, like Rautavaara’s Notturno of 1993, and Ravel’s spiky Tzigane from 1924. Dalene also specializes in Grieg’s Violin Sonata No. 2, written in a nationalistic blaze during 1865. And he has been known to play Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 8 in G, last of the Op. 30 set of three written in 1902. Three other works that the artists present tonight seem to be new. The most unarguable in this respect us Tilted Scales by (fairly) young Australian Jack Frerer, commissioned for this national tour. Another is Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir d’un lieu cher of 1878 in which we will be hearing all three parts, not just the popular Meditation. And Lili Boulanger’s D;un matin de printemps enjoys a hearing, written near the composer’s death in 1918. Prices range between $20 and $153; don’t say you don’t have choices. And there’s no avoiding the $7 fee which will be really welcome for those who qualify for the cheapest tickets.

A REFLECTION IN TIME

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday June 12 at 7:30 pm

Back in the well-furrowed trench of orchestral concerts as they were held in this country for years, this presentation follows a venerable pattern, its main components a concerto and a symphony. The difference this time around is that the night’s three components all show their composers at highpoints in their public careers. Conductor Benjamin Northey opens the event with Barber’s Adagio for Strings, originally the slow movement from the 26-year-old composer’s String Quartet Op. 11 from 1936. Christian Li, the Australian-born 17-year-old violinist, is soloist in Korngold’s concerto of 1945; this has become a standard these days, suffering no little neglect for several years after the composer’s death. Finally, Northey takes the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra through Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, written in 1937 allegedly as a response to Stalin-inspired criticism of the composer’s modernist tendencies. These days, the work is seen to have undercurrents of protest against the Soviet state and its oppression of artists. You’d be a noggin-head to take all that final movement bombast at face value but plenty of people do. Whatever the reaction you have, Shostakovich was seen as toeing the Party line, especially by the time-serving music critics in the Russia of that time. It’s all a fascinating reflection of the decade across which these works were written. Standard tickets tonight fall between $75 and $139, concession card holders enjoying a $5 discount, while children under 18 can get in for $20. And there’s the eternal $7 booking/transaction fee/extortion to add on to your cost.

This program will be repeated on Friday June 13 at 7:30 pm in Relaxed Performance mode with special consideration for audience members with disabilities (special prices apply for tickets on this occasion of $35 standard and $30 concession), and on Saturday June 14 at 7:30 pm under regular operating conditions.

ANAM AT THE CONVENT: ELISION ENSEMBLE

Australian National Academy of Music

Rosina Auditorium, Abbotsford Convent

Friday June 20 at 7 pm

The country’s premier contemporary chamber ensemble is playing in the Australian National Academy of Music precincts and also features among its ranks some ANAM alumni. All the same, I think that, from the publicity material, regular Elision Ensemble players will be reinforced by current ANAM musicians. In any case, tonight’s offerings hold memories for me, including the ensemble’s long-time advocacy for the works of Franco Donatoni, whose 1977 Spiri for ten instruments is being played here. Also, the voice of Liza Lim, an Elision essential, will be heard in her Veil for seven players of 1999. Then there’s a work by Xenakis to start the second half – his Eonta of 1964, written for a most mixed sextet of piano, two trumpets and three trombones.. We have an Australian premiere in German composer Isabel Mundry‘s Le Voyage, written in 1996 for four woodwind, three brass, two percussion and a string septet which makes it the most substantial work we’ll hear in terms of participant numbers. Lastly, Russian-born German-based writer Dariya Maminova is represented by her Melchior from 2021; scored for two synthesizers and samples, this promises to exhibit the composer’s attempts to fuse contemporary with rock – I know: an impossible task but the texts come from Edward Thomas and Pasternak, and the piece lasts for ten minutes. Pricing is one of those 1960s box office deals where you can offer $60 if you have the cash, $40 if you fit into the standard patron category, and $20 if you’re feeling the cost of living weighs heavily. And, to show that the organization is really a freedom-loving, libertarian revenant from the hippie era, your booking fee is only $5. As the old song has it, who could ask for anything more?

CLASSIC 100 IN CONCERT

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Friday June 20 at 7:30 pm

Not sure about these popularity polls for serious music because they usually display the responders’ lack of musical experience as the outcomes, especially near the top, are numbingly conservative. This year, the ABC Classic FM hosts and announcers have focused on the piano and are asking which work written for this instrument as a solo, as part of a chamber ensemble, or having the instrument in front of an orchestra happens to tickle your fancy. At moments, I feel like doing a Tom Gleeson and fixing the vote by having numerous people propose Boulez’s Piano Sonata No. 2, or Webern’s posthumous piano scrap, or Paisiello’s Concerto in D. You have until 1 pm on Monday June 2 to make your voice heard. Needless to say, patrons won’t be hearing the complete election result; rather, selections will be presented by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under conductor Benjamin Northey (who is also billed as having ‘creative direction’) , with Andrea Lam as the focal pianist who presents the concertos and solos and chamber music extracts: the sole fount of pianistic wisdom – all without Harry Connick Jr. Your normal everyday customer can pay between $59 and $109 for a seat; the concession reduction remains a risible $5 and the booking fee of $7 still obtains, despite the fact that you have no idea what you’re going to hear – although I’m guessing that surprises will be almost non-existent.

This program will be repeated on Saturday June 21 at 2 pm.

ACO UNLEASHED

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Sunday June 22 at 2:30 pm

A continuation of the Australian Chamber Orchestra‘s 50th birthday celebrations, this event serves to showcase some individual talents from the ensemble’s ranks. The program has been curated by artistic director Richard Tognetti, but he is shining the opening spotlight on violins Helena Rathbone, Satu Vanska and Anna da Silva Chen (the ACO’s latest recruit) through Bach’s Triple Concerto BWV 1064R, which actually enjoyed reconstruction as a three-harpsichord concerto during the mid-Leipzig years. Then Vanska takes the solo line in Ravel’s Tzigane of 1934, here arranged with a strings and percussion support). After this, we can relish Tognetti’s own arrangement of the Beethoven String Quartet No. 11, the Serioso. of 1810 which will be followed by Schubert’s 1820 Quartettsatz; that too will probably involve the ensemble rather than a select four – more’s the pity. Finally, we hear a true rarity in Jaakko Kuusisto’s Cello Concerto, written in 2019. It was the composer’s last completed orchestral work before his 2022 death from brain cancer and will have principal Timo-Veikko Valve taking the solo line; as in the Ravel arrangement, this piece’s orchestra comprises percussion and strings. Standard tickets range from $49 to $141 in the stalls, the cheapest rising to $71 in the circle. Top price for concession card holders is $113 while Under 35s can get in for a flat $35 for those seats still available.. But there’s a lavish $8.50 ‘handling fee to queer your economical pitch; at the moment, this sum tops the list in add-on costs for following live performances of serious music.

This program will be repeated on Monday June 23 at 7:30 pm.

PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Friday June 27 at 11 am

A short program in the MSO Mornings series, chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Jaime Martin, has charge of Mussorgsky’s formidable piano suite in its Ravel orchestration. For years, this has been held up as an ideal example of how to transcribe from one medium to another and the process is packed with memorable touches, like The Old Castle‘s saxophone solo, an exposed tuba powering through the first 20 bars of Bydlo, the strings’ bite throughout Baba Yaga, and the overwhelming cascades of sonority in the last pages of The Great Gate of Kiev. Fleshing out this experience, if not by much, comes Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso; originally a piano piece from the Miroirs collection of 1905 but orchestrated by the composer in 1918. All of which is very interesting if you know the piano originals of both works, although the orchestral tapestries are fascinating in themselves. Your everyday punter pays between $62 and $99, concession holders $5 less, children under 18 pay $20 – and you add on the $7 ‘transaction fee’ to flesh out that warm feeling that always accompanies meaningless, mindless charity.

THE SOUL OF THE CELLO: TIMO-VEIKKO VALVE

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday May 3 at 7:30 pm

After an out-of-town try-out at the Gippsland Arts Centre in Warragul the previous night, the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s principal moves to a same-but-different sphere with this Election Day program which reminds us of the cellist’s main arena of operations because both major works are arrangements for string orchestra and it’s only the MSO strings that will be heard tonight. Timo-Veikko Valve begins with a solo in the Prelude from Bach’s E flat Suite, which is followed by one of Mozart’s arrangements of Bach – suitably, an E flat Fugue. But I don’t know whether this is a version of The Well-Tempered Klavier‘s Book 2 No. 7, or the Trio Sonata No. 2’s fugue. Speaking of Mozart, Valve then presents his own arrangement of the String Quartet in D minor No. 15 K. 421, one of the set dedicated to Haydn. A touch of modernity appears with brother-of-Pekka Jaakko Kuusisto’s Wiima of 2011, a 13-minute landscape which Valve has promulgated since its composition in 2011. We finish with Schumann’s Cello Concerto without the original woodwind, horn and trumpet pairs and lacking timpani; I assume this is the transcription by F Vygem (Florian Vygen?) and a. Kahl (Andrea Kahl?). Remaining tickets at this venue for adults are from $57 tp $67, while; the young get in for $20. I assume that a booking fee is imposed but you can’t tell without putting your money down. If not, this would be a major advantage over where I’ve spent the last 5 1/2 years.

FOUR BASSOONS

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Iwaki Auditorium, ABC Southbank Centre

Sunday May 4 at 11 am

Necessarily, we’re talking arrangements again, given this unusual front-and-centre combination of Jack Schiller, Elise Millman, Natasha Thomas, and contrabassoonist Brock Imison; all escorted along their way some of the time by an MSO string quintet of violins Anna Skalova and Philippa West, viola Fiona Sargeant, cello Rohan de Korte, and double bass Ben Hanlon. Mozart starts the morning with an unspecified ‘suite’ arranged by Imison for bassoon quartet. Then, an abrupt jump to Wynton Marsalis and his Meeelaan for bassoon and string quartet: a fusion piece now about 25 years old and which lasts between 13 and 16 minutes. Imison revisits his arranger status, this time of Giovanni Batista Riccio’s brief Sonata a quattro, here organised for a quartet of bassoons. Australian writer Gerard Brophy scores with his Four Branches of 2015, dedicated partly to Imison and lasting about as long as the Riccio. Last comes Dutch bassoonist/composer Kees Olthuis’ Introduction and Allegro of 2006 for bassoon, contrabassoon and string quintet; at 20 minutes in length, this promises to be the focal work of the program. The Mozart apart (perhaps), these pieces are completely unknown to me but that has been an occasionally welcome surprise factor in these recitals by musicians who are rarely heard together in intimate converse. As for prices, you might as well forget it because this recital is sold out, thanks to the plethora of bassoonists in Victoria. Bad luck, unless you have high-level double-reed connections . . .

HOLLYWOOD SONGBOOK

Musica Viva Australia

Melbourne Recital Centre

Tuesday May 6 at 7 pm

Soprano Ali McGregor collaborates with the Signum Saxophone Quartet, a group I heard in Brisbane on their last tour supporting Kristian Winther in an arrangement of Kurt Weill’s Violin Concerto. Here, the participants’ combined efforts are centred on film music from the legendary American Dream Factory. We’ve heard of the Great American Songbook and know that this could refer to any collection of songs that your average schmuck could put together and then call his/her collation by that name; a con trick to equal Trump’s repeated clams to singular greatness. But the Hollywood Songbook was a reality: a compilation of 47 songs by Hanns Eisler to poems by Brecht, Holderlin, Goethe, Viertel, Eichendorff, the Bible, Morike and himself – all written in 1943 when the composer was an unhappy refugee in Los Angeles. McGregor and her colleagues will present selections from this liederbuch as well as some scraps by Weill, Porter, Berlin and Harold Arlen’s Over the Rainbow. Mind you, the Signata share the limelight with a few of Schulhoff’s Five Pieces for String Quartet from 1924, a set of numbers eviscerated from Prokofiev’s 1935 Romeo and Juliet ballet, a respectable composite in Three Dance Episodes from Bernstein’s On the Town musical of 1944, and then back to selection land for some chunks hacked out of Copland’s Rodeo ballet score, dating from 1942. Tonight will be the second in a series of eight performances and you can attend as a full adult for seats ranging between $65 and $125, with student rush places available for $20. But never forget the $7 transaction fee added on for a reason that no reasonable entrepreneur can explain.

DISCOVER SIBELIUS: SIDE BY SIDE WITH MYO

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday May 8 at 7:30 pm

Yes, you can discover a sort of Sibelius tonight with newly-created stars from the Melbourne Youth Orchestra featured alongside MSO regulars. But what conductor Benjamin Northey and his forces offer is a Reader’s Digest version of the Finnish master; a little bit here, a morsel there, and perhaps enough to titillate – hopefully. But then, who needs this sort of itty-bitty introduction to one of the 20th century’s most individual and approachable voices? The night opens with Finlandia, the composer’s 1899 not-so-open act of anti-Russian propaganda that still thrills to this day with its combination of power and lyricism. Then comes the first movement to the 1902 Symphony No. 2, which is excellent but pales into the background when compared to the score’s sweeping finale. Likewise, we get the last movement of the Violin Concerto of 1904 (with an unknown soloist), but this acts as roughage when compared to the work’s preceding pages which give a fairer picture of the composer’s moody emotional environment. We then hear the Valse triste of 1903, one of the composer’s most frequently performed scraps, and about as useful a musical piece of information as Elgar’s Salut d’amour. To end this brief procession of delights, we come to something more mature in the Symphony No. 5 in E flat, written in 1915. Its grinding. inexorable ending tolerates no grounds for complaint as it simply carries all before it. Sorry, but I’d rather spend my cash on a full performance of either symphony or the magnificent concerto. If you’re under 18, you get in for $20; any older and you have to cough up $39. There’s no fee, unless you want your tickets delivered non-automatically, where you fall victim to the fiscal demands of supplying human contact; it’s not much, but enough to generate a slight feeling of sourness.

AN EVENING OF FAIRY TALES

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday May 15 at 7:30 pm

You’ll get to enjoy your other-worldly experience here without a soloist; the main interest in a pretty pedestrian program comes from conductor Alpesh Chauhan, a British musician who began by playing cello, then sank to the level of directing orchestras – first in Birmingham, then Italy and Scotland, before landing back in Birmingham with side-trips to Dusseldorf. Tonight he expands our awareness with the 1892 Prelude to Humperdinck’s ever-welcome dose of gemutlichkeit, the opera Hansel and Gretel. We are then taken to Prokofiev’s 1944 vision of Cinderella, although nothing is definite here in the land of ‘selections’. Speaking of which, we enjoy more bleeding chunks of extrapolated pleasure in some extracts from Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty of 1889 which admittedly lends itself to filleting. Not sure about such a night where you’re faced with extracts from two ballets and an opera and you have to do a lot of extrapolation and supplementary imaginative work to get much out of the whole exercise. Still, for all I know Chauhan has a magic baton that directs such music with brilliant transformative power. You pay full-price $139 in the stalls and circle of Hamer Hall, with a minor reduction to $127 for the balcony. Sit further back and you’re up for $81 or $93 respectively.

This program will be repeated in Costa Hall Geelong on Friday May 16 at 7:30 pm and in Hamer Hall on Saturday May 17 at 7:30 pm.

BACH TO THE BEACH BOYS AND BEYOND

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday May 17 at 7:30 pm

Carolina Eyck is the centrepiece of this night’s work. She is a theremin player, mistress of that primal electronic instrument that provides the focus for so much of Messiaen’s Turangalila-symphonie. Richard Tognetti leads his ACO and includes among his forces ABC Radio celebrity pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska. As for what this combination gets up to, the program is as wide-ranging as its title proposes. We start with Bach’s Air on the G String from the Orchestral Suite No. 2, and we end with a compendium of music from Miklos Rosza’s soundtrack to Spellbound (1945), Jonny Greenwood‘s background for There Will Be Blood (2007), Star Trek (Alexander Courage’s opening credits theme for the original series of 1966, you assume), Morricone’s 1966 score for The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, as well as Jim Parker’s title music for Midsomer Murders that actually used the theremin and which also dates from 1966. In between come Brian Wilson‘s Good Vibrations (you wouldn’t believe it – released first in that vintage year of 1966), Offenbach’s Can-can (originally from 1858), all Five Pieces for String Quartet of 1924 by Schulhoff, some off-cuts from Saint-Saens’ 1886 Carnival of the Animals as well as his Danse macabre of 1874, Rimsky’s 1900 bumblebee, Glinka’s The Lark romance from A Farewell to St. Petersburg written in 1840. And we’ll have a few samples of local content with the 2005 commission by the ACO of Brett Dean‘s Short Stories: IV. Komarov’s Last Words, plus a world premiere from Holly Harrison. Alongside these works, Eyck gives the Australian premiere to her own 2015 Fantasias: Oakunar Lynntuja for herself and a string quartet, and there’ll be an outing for Jorg Widmann‘s 180 beats per minute of 1993 for two violins, a viola and three cellos. Well, they say it’s the spice of life. Entry costs $49 to $158 for an adult, $75 to $128 for concessionaires, $35 for those under 35, and $30 for a student. There’s an extra fee of ‘between $4 and $8.50’ if you order online or by phone – which pretty much involves everybody in what amounts to an unabashed grab for extra cash.

This program will be repeated on Sunday May 18 at 2:30 pm in Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne, and back at the Melbourne Recital Centre on Monday May 19 at 7:30 pm.

STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS IN CONCERT

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday May 22 at 7:30 pm

Nothing’s changed, then, in the past 5-plus years. Our chief orchestra sticks to a sure-fire dollar spinner with the old live soundtrack exercise although, to my mind, there’s little to commend this episode of the saga, the first of the third trilogy that I dutifully saw in the theatre, bought the DVD, then never looked at again. Visually startling and quite devoid of character-interest, the film once again features music by an incorrigible John Williams which on first hearing sped past my ears at warp speed. But that’s what the MSO, under Benjamin Northey, will be resuscitating tonight under the big screen. Are they still using subtitles so that the actors can be heard over the orchestral sub-text? Let’s hope so because, even in the original cinema screening, parts of dialogue bolted past, incomprehensible and unable to be relished. Still, another viewing is almost worth it just to see Han Solo killed by his psychotic son. Standard adult tickets range from $81 to $150; concession card holders and children enjoy a cut rate of a few dollars less. Makes you salivate, doesn’t it? As well, you have to cough up an extra $7 for a ‘transaction fee’, although I can’t find mention of that when I tried booking. To be honest, I find the MSO ticketing process to be all over the place – something like the entertainment on offer here.

This program will be repeated on Friday May 23 at 7:30 pm, and on Saturday May 24 at 1 pm.

GRIEG’S PIANO CONCERTO

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Thursday May 29 at 7:30 pm

While it’s hard to plumb securely the dim recesses of the past, this popular concerto was probably the first of its Romantic kind that I became aware of, thanks to an LP recording by Dinu Lipatti that I was somehow forced to buy while in a state of early-teen innocence. Still, the reading proved memorable enough to colour several later renditions – and there were many of them as the Grieg proved popular with entrants in the ABC’s Concerto and Vocal Competition staged during the 1950s and 60s. For all its renown, this is one of the easier examples of the Romantic barnstormer; little wonder that Liszt was able to sight-read it for the composer as it’s right up his virtuosic Hungarian alley. Tonight, Alexander Gavrylyuk makes another welcome Melbourne appearance to invest this familiar score with his considerable skill and insight. Surrounding this, Hong Kong-born conductor Elim Chan leads the MSO through British/United States writer Anna Clyne’s This Midnight Hour of 2015 which takes its kick-off from poems by Juan Jimenez and Baudelaire and serves as an aural feast for about 12 minutes – or so they say. To end, the orchestra will struggle through Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, a voluptuous and still-testing feast from 1888 that celebrates repetition and instrumental colour in a brilliant exhibition of capture and release. One of the acting concertmasters, Tair Khisambeev or Anne-Marie Johnson, is in for a wild ride. To get in, you need between $75 and $142 for a standard ticket; concession card holders get a $5 reduction. A child is charged $20 but there’s a $7 transaction fee applied to each booking. Mind you, this information comes from the MSO website, so it should be right, right?

This program will be repeated on Saturday May 31 at 2 pm.

OUR CLASSICAL FAVOURITES

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Saturday February 8 at 7:30 pm

Back again for another year’s endeavours in combat against the rising tide of growing irritation with high culture, the QSO goes for the popular jugular with this collection of chunky clunkies. Rather than make the audience sit through the whole thing, conductor Benjamin Northey and his musicians sweep straight into the concluding Galop from Rossini’s William Tell Overture of 1829 – the Lone Ranger bit for an audience who doesn’t know what that means. Graeme Koehne‘s Forty reasons to be cheerful fanfare follows, written for the 40th anniversary in 2013 of the Adelaide Festival Centre and comprising 7 minutes of confected jollity. A well-known lump from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet of 1935 emerges: the Dance of the Knights with its clever fusion of pomp and bounce. We calm down for the Nimrod dirge extracted from the 1898/9 score of Elgar’s Enigma Variations, then turn elegant for Faure’s 1887 Pavane. Raise your beers (or rums) for Bernstein’s 1944 On the Town Overture which gets off to a splendid start but moves into sentimental weltering all too soon. Two of the QSO’s principals, harp Emily Granger, and flute Alison Mitchell, combine for the middle movement of Mozart’s concerto for their two instruments, written in 1778 during his 7-month stay in Paris – an unfortunate residence that saw his mother die in that city. The program’s other soloist, violinist Eric Kim, is a Year 12 student who won last year’s QSO Young Instrumentalist Prize; here, he’s up for Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen showcase of 1878. The soulful Adagio from soulless Khatchaturian’s Spartacus ballet of 1956 takes us into a branch of the USSR’s post-Stalin encounters with Hollywood kitsch. Then the Russian dance theme continues with the Pas de deux from Act 2 of Tchaikovsky’s 1892 Nutcracker ballet, based on that memorable descending major scale motif. A little bit more Bernstein (and choreography) with the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story (all of them? That’ll be the longest item of the night), assembled in 1960, three years after the musical’s premiere. We wind up with the Brahms Hungarian Dance No. 5 from the 1869 Book I collection. Standard prices range from $100 to $140 with the usual derisory reduction for concession holders, students and children coming off much better. The QPAC booking fee continues to impose itself this year operating at the higher level of $7.50.

This program will be two-thirds repeated on Sunday February 9 at 11:30 am. Northey and Co. leave out the Faure, both Bernstein works, and the Brahms. Tickets for adults cost between $80 and $115, the same comments on ticket costs made above still applying.

MAX RICHTER WORLD TOUR

Queensland Performing Arts Centre and TEG Dainty

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday February 10 at 7:30 pm

Probably everyone in the audience knows more about this composer than I do because my only exposure to his ‘work’ has been via a re-composition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons: those defenceless and evergreen violin concertos in no apparent need of reorganization. Max Richter is presenting extracts from his album The Blue Notebooks and his latest product – In A Landscape. I’ve listened to a few extracts from both and wonder how much simplicity (or simple-mindedness) we can bear before mental implosion. You could have a few laughs at Michael Nyman tracks in the good old days when tolerance was easier to exercise. Even listening to the cyclical deserts provided by Philip Glass could keep you involved for all of three minutes at a time. But a whole two hours of Richter would turn an inquiring brain to distraction, especially one that has any acquaintance with compositional practice over the past century. The composer will be escorted along his way by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble which is, in this format, a string quintet with two cellos. If you want to hear this concert, you’ll have to wait till next time because tonight is sold out – just like Taylor Swift, although the Concert Hall only offers 1800 seats maximum.

This program will be repeated on Tuesday February 11 at 7:30 pm. This is also sold out.

CLERICI & SCHAUPP

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Queensland Conservatorium Theatre, Griffith University

Friday February 14 at 11:30 am

This program is notable for a few elements. The most significant would have to be the world premiere of Gerard Brophy‘s migrating with swallows, a guitar concerto to sit alongside the composer’s Concerto in Blue of 2002. As you can guess from the concert’s title, the soloist will be Karin Schaupp, empress of guitar at the Queensland Conservatorium. It’s splendid to be hearing from Brophy, one of the few survivors of a highly creative epoch in Australian music-making. Bringing up the rear comes Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor which is a marvel of innovation in a tight form and one of the composer’s most athletic creations. To begin, Umberto Clerici and his orchestra play Anahita Abbasi‘s why the trees were murmuring which involves an improvising trombone and two spacialized ensembles. Written in 2020, this score by the Iranian composer now based in San Diego is going to present local audiences with challenges, especially given the prominent solo trombone role and the preponderance of percussion which seem to make up the two different groups that are spatially separate on either side of the orchestra. I can’t see any connections between these three works but is anybody meant to? If you want to get in, the full price ranges between $99 and $140, with students and children getting in for $49 and $35 respectively. Because the event is held at the Con, there’s no sign of that annoying extra charge for handling your credit card.

This program will be repeated at 7:30 pm.

AN EVENING WITH JOSEPH KECKLER

Opera Queensland

Opera Queensland Studio, South Bank

Friday February 14 at 7 pm

Here’s another one of those oddly non-specific presentations by the state opera company. Joseph Keckler is an American singer/speaker with a wide range – vocally as well as aesthetically. You can enjoy a foretaste of his work on YouTube where the narrator skills are quite evident. I don’t think much of his compositional style, if you can centralize such a concept. It occupies that well-trodden land where consonance is king and progressions take their time; rhythmic patterns are predictable and anything but angular; melodic matter has moved no further than the Romantic era. Will Keckler be accompanied by ambient pre-recorded tape or Alex Raineri’s piano or a chamber ensemble complete with synthesizers? None of this is even suggested on the OQ publicity material. Nor is anything made clear about exactly what he will be singing, although you’d have to assume it’ll be sourced from his previous work, rather than something original, and you can find examples of that on the singer’s own website – if you’re prepared to pay. Speaking of which, tickets are $65, with a ludicrous reduction for concession card holders and students of $6, but there doesn’t appear to be a booking fee.

This program will be repeated on Saturday February 15 at 2 pm.

SINGAPORE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Sunday February 16 at 3 pm

The Singapore Symphony Orchestra has been in existence less than fifty years, which is surprising given the nature of that city-state’s background and ambition. Here it is, at the fag end of its Australian debut after presenting concerts in Sydney and Melbourne which consist of the same program items as are being mounted here. I thought that I would know by sight some of the orchestra members, possibly a couple of graduates from the Australian National Academy of Music, but not so: there are no familiar faces to be found at the orchestra’s on-line home-page. Artistic director/conductor Hans Graf begins with a piece by 25-year-old Singaporean writer Koh Cheng Jin: Luciola singapura which was commissioned and performed by the Singapore Symphony in 2021. This work celebrates the discovery of a new bioluminescent firefly and features a role for the yangqin (a dulcimer), which instrument the composer herself plays (but will she be doing so tonight? Nobody specific is listed on the participating personnel). After this flurry of nationalistic fervour, we settle into the solid Western tradition with Brahms’ Double Concerto Op. 102, the violin soloist Chloe Chua and the cello soloist Ng Pei-Sian, this latter being the SSO’s principal. After interval comes the gloom-to-grandeur sweep of Tchaikovsky’s E minor Symphony – always a rewarding showpiece for its executants, notably the first horn at the start of the second movement. Tickets are going for between $69 and $146 full adult with a miserable reduction for concession card holders and the usual unjustifiable extraction of $7.20 for all that difficult credit card-use office work.

BRAHMS & BEETHOVEN

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday February 17 at 7 pm

In existence slightly longer than the Singapore Symphony, the Australian Chamber Orchestra is this year celebrating 50 years of existence, 35 of them with Richard Tognetti as King of the Kids. To give the opening concert an extra-auspicious aspect, he will take the lead in the Brahms Violin Concerto: an unmitigated joy from first bar to last and gifted with the most exciting and luminous violin writing in all such concertos across the Romantic era. Just as pleasurable will be the Tognetti experience, chiefly because of his ability to find new facets in familiar diamonds; I have rich memories of his outstanding interpretation of the Dvorak concerto many years ago with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. To balance this, we hear the Beethoven Symphony No. 7, the ardent A Major which I don’t believe the ACO has recorded. But you can be sure there’ll be surprises in shaping, rhythmic emphasis and attack as this dynamic warhorse is dusted off. To hear these two big-frame works, you have to pay between $85 and $167 if you’re up for full adult admission. By some computer crack-up, you can get a $10 concession discount, but no such luck if you’re a student or Under 35: Box Office says Full Price for these last two. That can’t be right, surely. In any event, you have to pay the disturbing QPAC cover-charge, slightly increased this year to $7.50.

THE RITE OF SPRING

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Thursday February 20 at 7:30 pm

It’s a great ballet and a fulcrum in Western serious music. Also, it’s one of the few pieces of 20th century creativity that musicians know bar by bar. For all that, I must have heard it countless times in concert performance but have seen it danced only once, and that an amateur performance that did little credit to the dancers or the unhappy choreographer. In this version from the QSO under chief conductor Umberto Clerici, we get a new visual experience, provided by Circa, Brisbane’s own contemporary circus group that I last saw cavorting through Gluck’s Orpheus for the state opera company. I suppose the troupe might be able to make some relevant acrobatic commentary on Stravinsky’s work that deals in complex tribal dances and climaxes in a self-willed human sacrifice. To give this epoch-marking score a contemporary companion, we’ll hear, as an opening to the concert, Debussy’s Prelude a ‘l’apres-midi d’un faune’, Written in 1894, it was taken over by Nijinsky as a (mainly) solo display of his skill in 1912, a year before he assumed the choreographer’s role for Stravinsky’s ballet. In the middle of these masterworks, violinist Kristian Winther takes on the solo line for Respighi’s Concerto gregoriano of 1921, which uses (obviously) Gregorian chant for its basic material. This is a true rarity; I can only recall one previous performance of it, headed by Leonard Dommett over 40 years ago, before he left Melbourne after his stint as concertmaster with the MSO. Full adult tickets range from $120 to $140, with a $20 reduction for concession card holders, and the usual rate of $49 for students and $35 for children – but you still have to pay the QPAC $7.50 fee for daring to darken the Concert Hall portals.

This program will be repeated on Friday February 21 at 7:30 pm, and on Saturday February 22 at 1:30 pm.

CELEBRATE!

Southern Cross Soloists

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Sunday February 23 at 3 pm

Vienna, city of so many dreams and multiple nightmares, gives us a focus for this opening 2025 foray from the Soloists with Mozart and Johann Strauss II leading the way. Soprano Alexandra Flood, well-prepared for this afternoon following her time with the Wiener Volksoper, takes centre-stage for two Mozart pieces: Ah se in ciel of 1788 to a Metastasio text, and Un moto di gioia which replaced Venite inginocchiatevi for a 1789 production in Vienna of The Marriage of Figaro. The Strauss excerpts kick off with the Emperor Waltz of 1889 as arranged by Schoenberg in 1921 for piano, string quartet and flute. Then Flood takes on the Laughing Song, Mein herr Marquis, from Die Fledermaus of 1874, and (you’d hope) Voices of Spring from 1882 which has an optional soprano part. In the middle of this program we hear Beethoven’s 1800 Septet for clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello and double bass; it’s a serenade that proved very popular in the composer’s lifetime, much to his chagrin. As for the program’s opening, that is a new work for didgeridoo and (unspecified) ensemble by American-based Leah Curtis and Chris Williams, permanent artist in residence with the Soloists. Williams is the only musician who is certain to appear, but I’m not sure that the organization can mount a full body for those Strauss pieces untouched by Uncle Arnold. Adult tickets go for $90, and there’s a concession rate of $80 while Under 35s can get in for $40 for 90 minutes’ worth of uninterrupted music – so the group will be playing the entire Septet. Please don’t forget the compulsory $7.50 requisition by QPAC for taking your money.

I jest.

There’s nothing happening in Brisbane to entertain serious music-lovers across this month.

And that’s been the state of play as long as I’ve experienced it in five years spent here, luxuriating in heat and indolence on the Gold Coast.

The city goes to sleep and its real musicians disappear, heading for climes unknown

It’s almost enough to make you head back to Melbourne.

ADRIAN STROOPER – A WINDOW INTO SONG

Opera Queensland

Opera Queensland Studio, 140 Grey St. South Bank

Friday December 6 at 7 pm

As its last gasp for the year, our state company presents Australian tenor Adrian Strooper accompanied by Alex Raineri in a program that currently (early November) is completely unknown/unspecified. But it will include operatic arias (not surprising, considering the singer’s substantial European career and residencies, including a decade at Berlin’s Komische Oper) and lieder – which does come as a surprise as that art form doesn’t feature significantly in Strooper’s biography. But it’s always a pleasure to hear any local artist of this vocal type, although good tenors are not as rare as they used to be, say, 30 years ago. Adults can get in for $65, with a lousy concession rate of $59 (which also applies to students); as far as I can see, there’s no booking fee. Still, I can’t find any indication as to the recital’s length.

This program will be repeated on Saturday December 7 at 2 pm

BACH’S CHRISTMAS ORATORIO

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Queensland Conservatorium Theatre, Griffith University

Saturday December 7 at 7:30 pm

All is not as it seems here. The QSO and Brisbane Chamber Choir won’t be presenting all of the Bach collation but only four of the usual six cantatas that make up this magnificent seasonal celebration. I must confess to being spoiled with regard to the Christmas Oratorio, having heard the Australian Chamber Orchestra perform it (twice, I think) with a very lively band and a chorus made up of soloists who turned the chorales into musical bliss. Tonight, we get to hear Part 1, Jauchzet, frohlocket!, which is festive Christmas music streets above all the rest; Part 2, with that miraculous double of Und es waren Hirten with the soul-stirring Brich an, o schones Morgenlicht chorale to follow; then a rush to Part 5 and the bouncy joy of its opening Ehre sei dir, Gott, gesungen chorus; and Part 6 to finish in a blaze of affirming D Major at both ends, the final revisiting of the O Haupt voll Blut chorale reworked into a musical image of Christ’s life and work encapsulated with consummate art. Conductor Benjamin Bayl is in charge and, with his big reputation in period performance, we’re likely to get the oboes d’amore that feature across these four cantatas, as well as the oboes da caccia that feature in Part 2’s opening sinfonia as a four-part ensemble and stay that way across this cantata up to the final pastoralization of the Von Himmel hoch tune. Also, we can but hope for a trio of brisk Baroque trumpets. Bayl’s soloists are soprano Sara Macliver, mezzo Stephanie Dillon, tenor/Evangelist Paul McMahon, and baritone Shaun Brown. The only tickets left are sight-restricted in the Con theatre’s gallery and their full cost is $119 with concessions available for the elderly, students and children. Wonder of wonders, there’s no booking fee because (I assume) this event is being held in Griffith University.

BRISBANE SINGS MESSIAH

The Queensland Choir

Brisbane City Hall

Sunday December 8 at 3 pm

Here comes your annual dose of Handel being presented at the wrong time of year, but who cares? For reasons beyond rationality, Messiah is trotted out in this country’s state capitals as a matter of course around December. For this one, TQC director Kevin Power again leads his own choir, the Sinfonia of St. Andrew’s and a quartet of soloists – soprano Leanne Kenneally, mezzo Shikara Ringdahl, tenor Sebastian Maclaine, baritone Leon Warnock – in the memorable oratorio. Well, I’ve got it pretty much by heart after too many years of exposure, staying awake through many performances only by following the score – especially for the choruses where you can delight in the non-existent alto line or the disappearing tenors. To make this performance even more involving, members of the public have been encouraged to join the Choir, presumably having given prior evidence of ability as well as having attended rehearsals. It’s very democratic and might even bring some useful performance experience to a young generation. Or perhaps not. Stalls tickets range between $15 and $60; sitting further away in the balcony costs you between $20 and $70. There’s a $1.25 fee added on, which is not as irritating as the much larger charges required by other organizations but still makes you wonder what you’re being squeezed for. The performance is scheduled to last for 2 hours 45 minutes which, with an interval, is about right for the usual Part the Third-truncated readings.

CHRISTMAS AROUND THE WORLD

Brisbane Chorale

Christ Church, St. Lucia

Sunday December 8 at 5 pm

It will last only an hour but that’s enough (apparently) to perform a universally applicable Christmas celebration. The Chorale will work under its music director Emily Cox with Christopher Wrench, inevitable and indefatigable in support on the Christ Church digital organ. Their program is going to be multicultural, which is itself a promise of joy in this increasingly blinkered world now blighted even further by the prospect of another four years of Trumpian moral mayhem. We’ll have a welcome infusion of multicultural community carols, which will be a source of aesthetic balm after the usual cultural domination in enterprises like these. overwhelmed year after year by Anglican content. Further, we are assured that refreshments will be provided; presumably at extra cost. Patrons are also asked to bring a gift, pre-wrapped, to the event with intended gender and age group attached. As for the ticket prices, these range from full adult of $35 to $30 for Seniors and Concession Card Holders to $15 for students. Even with a limited knowledge of Brisbane’s geography, I know that St. Lucia is outside the central city area but it does have the advantage of being the University of Queensland’s suburb and it’s only 8 kilometres from the CBD.

PARALLEL PLAY

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St..

Friday December 13 at 1 pm

As anticipated, the final events in this calendar come from Alex Raineri‘s chamber music festival that illuminates the closing months to each serious music year in Brisbane. This final slew of seven recitals begins with a duo recital by flautist Lina Andonovska and pianist Raineri. They open with Richard Strauss’s Violin Sonata in Andonovska’s own arrangement; what she’s done with the quadruple and triple stop chords will be revelatory, I’m sure. But this work takes up half the recital’s allotted hour length, so the remaining four works must be rather brief. First comes the Australian premiere of American composer Sarah Kirkland Snider‘s 2019 duo that gives this recital its title. Then a world premiere in an as-yet unnamed new work by Judith Ring; could it be her All You Can Do Is Hang On For Dear Life which is the solitary flute/piano duet in her catalogue and dates from this year? After the Dublin composer’s offering, we hear a new work, still unnamed, and another Australian premiere from Mark Mellet (or is it Mellett?) who could be another Irish writer but he’s difficult to source, as they say. Unlike the last name on this program – Paul Dean – whose 2015 Falling Ever Deeper enjoys a resuscitation after Raineri’s previous 2021 performances with Johnathan Henderson. Tickets remain at $25 with the usual $1.99 surcharge for computer science classes (for whom?) and, out of nowhere, a GST add-on of 20 cents; you pay $27.19. And that’s progress.

This program will be repeated on Saturday December 14 at 6 pm.

THE DIARY OF ONE WHO DISAPPEARED

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.

Friday December 13 at 6:30 pm

A real rarity, Janacek’s 1920 song-cycle is a big ask for its tenor, a doddle for the alto and easy pickings for the three female voices that pop up (off-stage?) for two songs in the middle of operations. The only performance I can vaguely recall is one featuring Tyrone Landau during one of the Musica Viva festivals held at the Domaine Chandon winery many years ago. This time, the tenor is Brenton Spiteri whom I have probably heard in Melbourne but whose talents have not remained in the memory. His alto beloved will be sung by soprano Katherine McIndoe and the three females come from the ranks of that distinguished ensemble, The Australian Voices, which puts them in patriotic company with Spiteri, while McIndoe comes from New Zealand. Their piano accompaniment is undertaken by Alex Raineri, the impossibly hard-working festival artistic director. On either side of the Janacek are two settings of Um Mitternacht: the first that of 1901 by Mahler from his Ruckert-Lieder, which could be sung by either McIndoe or Spiteri; the second by Britten from 1959 and a setting of Goethe’s poem. This will go to Spiteri, I should think, although I remain ambivalent about what sort of voice it requires – a tenor, perhaps a baritone; certainly, a male. But it brings the event to a sombre ending, which is just right, given the program’s other content. Tickets can be bought for $25, with an added impost of $1.99 going towards books for schools, and a 20 cents GST, which I haven’t noticed in previous festival recital charges from Humanitix.

This program will be repeated on Saturday December 14 at 2 pm.

ORPHEUS

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.

Friday December 13 at 9 pm

Alex Raineri is taking on the great Greek myth as pianist and composer, performing his own new temples in your hearing – a world premiere – as well as three pieces by female composers to give us the Euridice viewpoint, I expect. His other collaborator is visual artist Eljo Agenbach who will provide materiel to satisfy the eyes. Samantha Wolf‘s Life on Earth was first performed by Raineri in 2022 at a Brisbane Music Festival recital (also named Orpheus) and apparently revised for this re-presentation. Another revenant will be Jane Sheldon‘s Ascent: soft, uncertain and without impatience. Besides these reconstructions, patrons will be treated to Natalie Nicolas‘ Descent which is offered without revision but also featured in that 2022 first appearance of Orpheus. Festival aficionados will be pleased to reacquaint themselves with this event featuring four Australian writers which proposes a contemporary take on the tale of all-too-human love that ends in disaster, ignoring with ridicule the deus ex machina intervention by Gluck’s Amor, and forgetting the poet’s eventual dismemberment by those maddened precursors of rock’s female devotees, who also can whip themselves into hallucinatory states with a little help from their friends. Admission costs $25, the usual $1.99 impost to be spent on books for schools; not forgetting the 20 cent GST which somehow applies to the non-booking fee rather than the ticket itself.

This program will be repeated on Sunday December 15 at 10 am.

ARAGONITE

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.

Saturday December 14 at 10 am

Aragonite is a mineral that forms in fresh or salt water environments. Melbourne-based musician Thea Rossen‘s new work, here enjoying its world premiere, utilises ceramics, corals and metal instruments to construct its aural world, one that is intended to suggest deep oceans. Or it might be intended to focus our attention on the properties of the night’s honoured mineral, although that might be a rather dry (please) exercise and not a La mer for our times. Rossen herself will play percussion, as will Rebecca Lloyd-Jones. Possibly the festival’s omni-present Alex Raineri will assist on piano. Three woodwind artists could also participate – flute Lina Andonovska, flute Tim Munro, bass clarinet Drew Gilchrist. But, as I can’t find out any specifications regarding Aragonite, the whole compositional complex might just feature the percussionists, particularly since Rossen is an expert in this field. the others could just be hanging around for American composer Terry Riley‘s In C, a historically important 1964 essay in aleatoric minimalism for an unspecified number of participants and lasting anywhere from 15 minutes to over an hour. Tickets still only cost $25, with the $1.99 fee going towards books for schools, while the 20 cents GST will end up God knows where.

This program will be repeated on Sunday December 15 at 6 pm.

WAYS BY WAYS

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.

Saturday December 14 at 1 pm

Here is a new trio ensemble – flute Tim Munro, percussion Rebecca Lloyd-Jones, piano Alex Raineri – and it’s called Ways By Ways, but let’s not get started on the possible modifications of that name. Setting their bar on a personal level, the musicians begin with a collaborative new work called (wait for it) Ways By Ways which I suppose will outline the ensemble’s performing/aesthetic/polemical agenda. Chilean-born composer resident in Perth (last I heard) Pedro Alvarez will at last hear the world premiere of his Fosforesciamo from 2012; the four-section piece (we know it’s glowing in the dark??) that investigates block chords and their assemblage is written for harpsichord solo. Then we experience Irish composer/academic Ann Cleare‘s 2010 unable to create an offscreen world for piccolo and percussion, which I’ve only heard in its electronic manifestation; the experience didn’t make much of a positive impression because of its suggestion of industrial burps. I can’t tell whether or not Jodie Rottle was born here or in America, but she spent a decade on the new music scene in Brisbane before settling down in Melbourne this year. She is represented by blueprint in shades of green (where did this e e cummings fad come from?) of 2022, an obsessive 7-minute gem which is written for flute, alto flute (I think) and assorted percussion (Lloyd-Jones played in the first performance). Finally, we hear Irish composer Jennifer Walshe‘s Thelma Mansfield from 2008, written for Ways By Ways’ actual combination and which takes its name from an Irish TV presenter who became a painter in a worthwhile career change. Tickets are $25, with the $1.99 extra fee going towards computer science classes. And don’t forget the 20 cent GST – keeping the whole country economically stable.

This program will be repeated on Sunday December 15 at 4 pm.

HOLD YOUR OWN

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 650 Queen St.

Saturday December 14 at 4 pm

You don’t come across solo cello recitals that often, unless somebody wants to work through several or all of the Bach suites. Gemma Kneale is treading a new path here by playing eight works, all of them by women composers, three of them undergoing their Australian premieres. More to the point, I’ve heard none of these scores and am only vaguely aware of the output of one of the writers; a sad state, of course, and all too typical of my antique generation and a damnable witness to a lifetime of undeveloped exposure. Kneale begins with the afternoon’s oldest music in Anna Clyne‘s Fits + Starts of 2003 for amplified cello and tape; this is, as far as I can see, the British-born composer’s first composition. Jump forward twelve years to Gemma Peacocke‘s Amygdala which explores feelings of anxiety; a malfunctioning part of the brain, then, depicted by this New Zealand composer who is based, like Clyne, in the USA. We move to Missy Mazzoli, who is a native-born American and issued her A Thousand Tongues in four different versions; we’re hearing the one for cello and electronics written (like all the other three interpretative choices) in 2011. Molly Joyce, another American (born in the let-us-down state of Pennsylvania) studied with Mazzoli and wrote It has not taken long three years ago; it is also written for cello and pre-recorded electronics. Melbourne-based Australian composer Zinia Chan wrote In Transition in 2018. It concerns an individual’s journey through space towards the unknown – which applies to most of us, I suppose, except for the space bit. The work involves cello and tape but also a flute (piccolo); I suppose someone will step in to lend a helping hand. Next is Australian Kate Neal‘s A Game from A Book of Hours, written last year and originally a composition for a quartet (flute, cello, piano/harpsichord, percussion) and screendance; doubtless this extract will be reduced in scale here. We’re back to the once-great republic for Brooklyn-born Nathalie Joachim‘s Dam Mwen Yo of 2017 which brings us back to cello+tape territory, even if the recorded content strikes me as uninspired. Finally, it’s full steam ahead into Scottish writer Anna Meredith‘s brief Honeyed Words, written in 2016 and bringing to an end a solid sequence of cello-and-electronics compositions. Entry costs $25, with the usual $1.99 compulsory contribution dedicated to books for schools, and add on that irrational 20 cents for GST.

This program will be repeated on Sunday December 15 at 12 pm.

IN PLATONIA

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.

Saturday December 14 at 8 pm

Bringing this year’s festival to a crashing New Complexity conclusion, director-pianist Alex Raineri partners with clarinet/bass clarinet Drew Gilchrist in three contemporary works, the first by Melbourne (or is it Ballarat?)-based writer Chris Dench which gives this event its title. My limited research has led me to believe that platonia is a type of tree, rather than a physical space dedicated to the Greek philosopher. But that turns out to be useless information/fantasy. Dench has, in fact, based his 12 capsules on insights by British physicist Julian Barbour concerning the immense number of instants that make up our existential and temporal planes and which he calls Platonia. This piece was written to suit Gilchrist (bass clarinet here) and Raineri who have featured (and will continue to perform) Dench’s compositions. Michael Finnissy‘s one-movement Clarinet Sonata of 2007 is here given its Australian premiere by Gilchrist and Raineri, the latter having much to do with the British composer’s use-in-reversal of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 110 across his 20-minutes-or-so construct. Finally, the duo takes on Welsh composer Richard Barrett‘s Flechtwerk, written between 2002 and 2006. This is impossibly difficult music to synchronise for the clarinet in A and the piano, thanks to its subdivisions of tempo and virtuosic leaps across the instruments’ compasses. But the title, as I read it, means an interlacing and you can’t deny the relevance while you’re listening to it . . . or trying to take in its brushes with comprehensibility. Admission costs $25 base price, with an additional $1.99 for Humanitix’s charitable endeavours in providing literacy skills (for whom, we’re not told) and a 20-cent dollop that’s meant to cover GST – somehow.

This program will be repeated on Sunday December 15 at 2 pm.

FRANKENSTEIN!! & THE GOOSE’S MUM

Ensemble Q

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Sunday November 3 at 3 pm

Not surprisingly, the second element in this concert’s title is Ravel’s five-part suite Ma mere l’Oye which exists in a piano duet version, a reduction for solo piano and a full orchestra transcription. What are we going to get this afternoon? Probably the piano solo version because Daniel de Borah is the only pianist noted in the personnel list and the remaining musicians number only twelve; too small for the Ravel orchestration. The group also attempts Saint-Saens’ Danse macabre, arranged by American Cicely Parnas for violin and cello; no worries about this ensemble’s cello – Trish Dean – but the violin role could be taken by Adam Chalabi or Anne Horton. Then there’s Poltergeist by William ‘Bolcome’, who I assume is William Bolcom. This is hard to pin down, as there’s a Poltergeist Rag written by Bolcom for solo piano but the advertising bumf claims that this work will be performed by a string quartet: Chalabi, Horton, Dean and viola Tobias Breider. I can’t find any such arrangement in the list of this famous American song-composer’s catalogue. So far, not so much work for the other eight listed participants. Things change for the other title work: Heinz Karl Gruber‘s 1971 ‘pan-demonium’ Frankenstein!! for chansonnier (probably Jason Barry-Smith who is listed in this cast list as ‘narrator’) and an ensemble that takes in everyone except de Borah: the string quartet plus double bass Phoebe Russell, flute Alison Mitchell, oboe Huw Jones, clarinet Paul Dean, bassoon David Mitchell, horn Peter Luff, percussion Jacob Enoka. But who’s playing trumpet? And where does harpist Emily Granger fit into this program, unless the Ravel work is being played in an unidentified arrangement? Anyway, tickets cost $75 or concession $55 with the usual QPAC add-on of $7.20 as a compulsory sting.

A SYMPHONY FOR WINDS

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Queensland Symphony Orchestra Studio

Thursday November 7

This evening opens with one of Richard Strauss’s later works, the so-called Symphony for Winds No. 2 in E flat of 1944/5, sub-titled (by the composer) ‘Happy workshop’. The more constipated among us call it the Sonatina No. 2, but it’s of a substantial length and sits in happy comparison alongside Stravinsky’s 1920 briefer essay with similar participants but also involving a slew of brass. Strauss involves 16 instruments: pairs of flutes, oboes, bassoons, then four horns, a contra-bassoon, and five clarinets – an E flat, two B flats, a basset horn and a bass clarinet. In terms of time, it’s the longest work on the program. Then a complete change of personnel for Penderecki’s 1961 Polymorphia for 48 strings (24 violins and 8 of everybody else) which could probably be the most advanced music that the QSO has played all year: a splendid sample of graphic notation and a test of Umberto Clerici‘s directional powers. This is followed by British rock guitarist Jonny Greenwood‘s 2011 tribute 48 Responses to Polymorphia which can last either 15 or 19 minutes, depending on the number of movements attempted which will in turn determine whether all 48 players need their own pacay bean shakers. Well, to be fair, it’s not a tribute but a spring-board for an uninspired and unadventurous essay in harmonic conservatism. But that’s just my opinion; listen for yourself and have that finding reinforced. Tickets range from $79 for an adult to $35 for a student or child, with the QSO’s own outrageous $7.95 surcharge on every order.

This program will be half-repeated on Saturday November 9 at 3 pm as the Penderecki and Greenwood spin-off disappear to be replaced by Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings to ensure an afternoon of harmonic emulsion. You’ll be happy to learn that the ticket prices don’t vary; nor does that over-ripe excessive booking fee.

SCOTLAND UNBOUND

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday November 11 at 7 pm

Just as the Queensland Symphony Orchestra is finishing up this month, so too is Sydney’s own ACO ending its year with this tour fronted by Scotch-Japanese guitarist Sean Shibe who is going to treat us to a long belt of Hibernian musical craft. With ACO artistic director Richard Tognetti leading the string ensemble, Shibe starts off on a normal classical (acoustic?) guitar, working through some traditional Scottish lute solos collected by the 17th century aristocrat Lady Margaret Wemyss, about whom nobody seems to know anything except her parentage and that she died aged 18. We rush forward to From Galloway by contemporary Scot James MacMillan; this was originally a two-minute clarinet solo from 2000, here transcribed by Shibe. Who continues with a suite of folk songs – could be anything – before we enjoy a new commission from Canadian-born writer Cassandra Miller for guitar and strings. Then Shibe switches to his electric instrument for Lad by American academic and co-founder of the Bang on a Can organization, Julia Wolfe; this is another transcription from the 2007 original that asked for nine bagpipes. Following which it’s over to Irish composer David Fennessy for his Hirta Rounds of 2015 involving nine violins, three violas, three cellos and a double bass; this memorialises a group of now-abandoned islands in Scotland’s St. Kilda archipelago. Like the Miller and Wolfe compositions, Hirta Rounds is receiving its Australian premiere across Shibe’s tour. To end, the electric instrument returns for some selections from another Canadian-Scot: Martyn Bennett’s 1997 nine-track album Bothy Culture which is about all I’ve heard from this musician who died aged 33 in 2005. It’s another arrangement for guitar and strings, but there’s no indication who put this set together. Tickets can be as cheap as $25 for the lucky young and move up to $129 for the affluent old, always remembering that QPAC $7.20 surcharge for exercising your attendance prerogative.

VIRGILIO MARINO

Opera Queensland

Opera Queensland Studio, 149 Grey St., South Bank

Friday November 15 at 7 pm

Here, you take things on trust – not my favourite position. Virgilio Marino is a well-known Queensland tenor; probably less famous than Rosario La Spina but working in the tradition of local legend Donald Smith. I heard Smith in his prime, and La Spina (probably) in his; Marino I’ve yet to come across. Anyway, this occasional recital for the state opera company pairs him with Alex Raineri, so you know the accompaniments will be informed and supportive. But what’s he going to sing? According to the few lines of OQ site information, we’ll hear his ‘favourite arias and songs’ These could include La donna e mobile, Questa o quella and Parmi veder le lagrime because the most important role he has sung for our national company is the Duke of Mantua. Still, he’s performed a host of major roles for Opera Queensland – Don Ottavio, Rodolfo, Nemorino, Pinkerton, Almaviva and Alfredo. Those characters are entrusted with a wealth of arias; as for his ;songs;, I’ve no idea. The event lasts for an hour and you can attend it for $65 full price, $59 if you’re a student or concession-holder (whoopee-do) and a child gets in for $33. As far as I can tell, there’s no charge for using a credit card.

This recital will be repeated on Saturday November 16 at 2 pm but don’t bother: this hearing is sold out. Mind you, there aren’t many seats in the Studio to start off with – a couple of hundred at most.

UMBERTO & NATSUKO

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Friday November 15 at 7:30 pm

This program is being advertised as the season closing gala and all stops are out, as they say in rugby. The QSO chief conductor Umberto Clerici is conducting two overtures and Strauss’ Four Last Songs, but he’s also returning to his instrument-wielding days and partnering the orchestra’s concertmaster, Natsuko Yoshimoto, in the radiant Double Concerto by Brahms. I, for one, can’t get enough of this masterpiece, which is something of a rarity; the last time I think it was played in Brisbane was when the ACO’s Richard Tognetti and Timo Veikko-Valve gave a dazzling performance about 4 or 5 years ago. So, here we are again with expert soloists and a chance to enjoy the score’s rolling grandeur. But wait: there’s more. Clerici conducts Schubert’s Rosamunde Overture which is no such thing but is as joyfully exuberant (when it gets over its initial solemnity) as the Symphony No. 5. This makes for an amiable if irrelevant preface to the Brahms concerto. For the night’s second half, we begin with Wagner’s Overture to The Flying Dutchman which also sits at odds with the Strauss songs, here sung by soprano Eleanor Amy Lyons. What’s the link between the opera’s youthful wildness or heaped-up tension and the intensely sad final fruits of a resigned and near-disgraced old age? Well, it’s an end-of-term celebration and the aim is clearly to drench listeners in the soporific. Top adult price is $135; children’s tickets are $35 each and there’s plenty of options in between, if no escaping the $7.20 add-on for using your credit card.

This concert will be repeated on Saturday November 16 at 1:30 pm.

MUSICA ALCHEMICA

Musica Viva Australia

Queensland Conservatorium Theatre, South Brisbane

Wednesday November 20 at 7 pm

Last Brisbane cab off the rank for this organization in 2024 is an ensemble put together by Spanish-born violinist Lina Tur Bonet. In fact, there are only three other persons associated on this tour with the metal-transforming ensemble: baroque cello Marco Testori, archlute Giangiacomo Pinardi, and harpsichord Kenneth Weiss. The group has been a mobile one over the years and Bonet has collaborated with Testori and Weiss on some tracks from her records. Most of the 10-part program being presented tonight has featured on these CDs, like the two Biber Mystery Sonatas (Nos. 1 and 10), Westhoff’s Imitatione del liuto, Schmelzer’s Sonata No. 4, the Corelli G minor Sonata and the concluding D minor Sonata from his Op. 5 set, and (I suspect) the Sonata No. 2 from Cima’s Concerti Ecclesistici. The remaining three elements will be Muffat’s G minor Passacaglia for solo harpsichord, a Telemann cello sonata in D Major, and Piccinini’s Toccata (which one?). Entry for adult best seats costs $115; student rush tickets are $15 anywhere in the hall. Once again, Musica Viva stands tall among this city’s entrepreneurs by not adding on booking charges.

CINEMATIC

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Friday November 22 at 7:30 pm

Nicholas Buc is back to direct this 13-part sequence of soundtrack extracts from films known and unknown – to me. As usual, a lot of composers appear in the lists – two of them get a double serving – but I wonder how enjoyable the experience is if you’re left to summon up the visual recollections in your mind’s eye; it makes for a considerable and lengthy series of mental gymnastics. Proceedings begin with Danny Elfman‘s music for Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, from which I recall only Jack Nicholson’s outrageously prominent Joker. A bit of Australiana follows with something from Caitlin Yeo‘s Ballarat-celebrating New Gold Mountain TV series score of 2021 (not actually cinematic but what’s in a name?). We can relish Carl Davis’ theme for the 1995 Pride and Prejudice TV adaptation, notable for Colin Firth’s totally unnecessary swimming exploits. Joe Hisaishi‘s 2001 score for Spirited Away is represented by One Summer’s Day; Hans Zimmer is honoured by a suite from his 1994 The Lion King score and later his music for Interstellar of 2014; John Williams also manages a double with his Superman march of 1978 and the theme from the original 1993 Jurassic Park. Continuing the TV encroachment, we hear another suite, this one by John Lunn for the Downton Abbey series that kicked off in 2010. Then a true blast from the past in Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, presumably included because of its use in the 1940 Disney Fantasia film starring Mickey Mouse and Leopold Stokowski shaking hands in a prodigious feat of cinematic legerdemain. John Powell is represented by part of what I assume is his music for the original 2010 How to Train Your Dragon which I’ve not encountered (probably because of my age-group, that being over 10). A confusing extract comes next from Alan Silvestri with both a promised suite from his Forrest Gump score of 1994 and a focus on the composer’s Feather Theme; means nothing to me because I gave up on Tom Hanks after his prissiness when faced with Ricky Gervais’ humour at the Oscars. To end, some Howard Shore in the form of The Lighting of the Beacons (the horns of Rohan loudly blowing) extracted from the last film in 2003 of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Pianist Daniel Le is soloist but I don’t know a lot of this music so can’t tell in which parts he takes on prominence. Tickets range from top adult of $135 to a child costing $35 and you can eschew your Coke and popcorn bucket as you have to find $7.20 each order for the sake of QPAC’s accounting woes.

This program will be repeated on Saturday November 23 at 1:30 pm and at 7:30 pm. Prices for entry appear to be the same whenever you go.

BEETHOVEN’S ODE TO JOY

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Thursday November 28 at 7:30 pm

What’s puzzling about this reading of the mighty Symphony No. 9 is its projected length: 1 hour 25 minutes – and an interval is scheduled. Your average performance time is about 65-6 minutes. If you insert a 20-minute interval, you’d have to assume that the work is going to be cut in half, so that we go out for a drink between scherzo and adagio. Can’t see it myself: chief conductor Umberto Clerici plays his Mahler symphonies here straight through, so he wouldn’t be splitting up the more digestible Beethoven, would he? It could detract significantly from the vital experience of hearing the sequence of four movements, rather than just the over-used finale. Clerici’s four soloists are soprano Eleanor Amy Lyons (fresh from negotiating the Four Last Songs by Strauss a fortnight ago), mezzo Ashlyn Tymms, tenor Andrew Goodwin (that’s a brave sound to hear in the Froh variant when we go all Turkish), and bass Samuel Dundas. The Brisbane Chamber Choir will be prepared by director Graeme Morton. Tickets range from a good adult seat for $135 to a child being lucky enough to enjoy the experience for $35. And you won’t forget the joyful privilege of shelling out $7.20 an order to keep the QPAC financial team chuckling in an abundance of fiscal Freude.

This program will be repeated on Friday November 29 at 7:30 pm and on Saturday November 30 at 1:30 pm. No price reduction for the matinee.

VIGNETTES

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Sunday October 6 at 11:30 am

The QSO’s Grand Panjandrum Umberto Clerici is guiding us through this French or French-connected set of scraps, with an emphasis on the saxophone, an instrument invented by a Belgian. This morning’s soloist will be Nick Russoniello who will front – inevitably, given this program’s nature – the Debussy Rhapsody for alto saxophone, written in 1911 with piano accompaniment, then orchestrated eight years later by Roger Ducasse. The only other element of the program featuring this instrument prominently is Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition where the second stop, The Old Castle, features a famous (alto) sax solo. Still, Clerici is conducting selections only from this showcase, so the odds of hearing this gem are about 15 to 1. Also in the allied rather than native-born genre will be Gershwin’s An American in Paris with its brilliant central blues and unintentional (one hopes) suggestions of a loud-mouthed tourist out of his depth. The event opens with a suite from Rameau’s 1735 Les Indes Galantes, hopefully (as footballers say) including that great finale Forets paisibles. Along the way we hear Les Gymnopedies by Satie – presumably all three. And the female-acknowledging extra will be the Overture No. 2 in E flat by Louise Farrenc, written in 1834. That’s an awful lot of playing to fit into a scheduled 70 minutes with no interval, but you’ll be charged from $76 to $109 full price, with various concessions (some of which are useful) as well as the usual outrageous transaction fee of $7.20 attached to every booking.

SOUNDS LIKE AN ORCHESTRA

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Friday October 11 at 11:30 am

Never too late to start. This program is aimed at children aged from Prep (Is it still called that? My younger granddaughter went through a process called Foundation last year, but that was in Victoria which might as well be a different country) to Grade 6. Conductor Jen Winley has a fair bit on her plate this morning but she’s being assisted by versatile composer/presenter Paul Rissmann and vocalist/educator Ashleigh Denning. First up is the first movement, Dance, from Coleridge-Taylor’s 1909 Othello Suite: a mildly ebullient excursion to get this familiarization process under way. The Brahms Hungarian Dance No. 5 in G minor is also fine, if not exactly calculated to enchant the target audience. For Oz content, we have Elena Kats-Chernin‘s Dance of the Paper Umbrellas from 2013 which exists in seven different versions and is perky enough in a Playschool minimalist manner to appeal to the most jaded of juvenile palates. Rimsky’s bumblebee enjoys a ventilation and the finale is the main theme to John Williams’ Star Wars music. Before that comes a Rissmann composition in Leon and the Place Between which will feature Denning as focal interpreter – a role that she has undertaken at previous airings of this setting of Angela Mcallister’s fantasy adventure. I can’t see anywhere else on the entertainment list where she could feature as well. Tickets are $35 straight, as far as I can tell; no card-use penalty added on.

This program will be repeated on Saturday October 12 at 10 am.

REEL CLASSICS

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Friday October 11 at 7:30 pm

All of this content is familiar and none of it comes from the John Williams era of composition for the screen, or soundtracks in a contemporary adolescent’s experience (or a young adult’s, for that matter). Conductor-host Vanessa Scammell brings in some adopted oldies, like the Intermezzo from Mascagni’s 1890 opera Cavalleria Rusticana, used in Scorsese’s 1980 Raging Bull film. She brings back Gounod’s Funeral March of a Marionette of 1872 which introduced Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV mysteries from 1955 on. But the rest is a sequence of memorable tunes. You have Henry Mancini’s subtle The Pink Panther from 1963; John Barry represented by both Born Free (1966) and Goldfinger (1964), both put in place by London-born arranger/orchestrator/composer Nic Raine; a selection from Elmer Bernstein’s The Magnificent Seven of music of 1960 as well as Leonard Bernstein’s Times Square sequence from that golden oldie of 1949, On the Town. You can’t go past Harold Arlen’s even older (1939) Somewhere over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz in an arrangement by ‘Hurst’ (can that be the ABC’s own Michael?); nor can you get away from the Carousel Waltz/Overture (1945) by Richard Rodgers. Bernard Herrmann is represented by a little suite from his music for Hitchcock’s Psycho, which made 1960 memorable. And we can never forgive/forget Kubrick’s use of Strauss filius’ The Blue Danube for his 2001: A Space Odyssey; written in 1866, the oldest music on this program and, dare I say it, the best? All this is yours for $95 to $135 full price, with lavish concessions for students and children, worthless ones for the elderly, and the usual $7.20 overcharge for taking your money.

This program will be repeated on Saturday October 12 at 1:30 pm. Tickets here cost either $115 or $135 full price; the concessions comments above still apply, as does the loathsome supercharge.

ENSEMBLE Q & WILLIAM BARTON

Musica Viva Australia

Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University

Saturday October 12 at 7 pm

The country’s leading chamber music organization here presents Brisbane’s premier mixed ensemble; its nature is reflected in this program, as in everything it attempts. Didgeridoo master William Barton has become a familiar presence on concert platforms, playing others’ music but becoming more notable as his own composer. Tonight is the end of a fortnight’s tour for Musica Viva and the ensemble’s regulars take on a challenge, half the program devoted to works by its interpreters. They begin with Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles, derived from an earlier Musica ricercata (1953) for solo piano, here transferred to wind quintet: flute Alison Mitchell, oboe Huw Jones, clarinet Paul Dean, horn Peter Luff, bassoon David Mitchell. Then follows Paul Dean’s 2018 Concerto for Cello and Wind Quintet, fronted by Trish Dean with the oboe doubling cor anglais and the composer employing both bass and B flat instruments. The soloist also gets to star in the eloquent Brahms Cello Sonata No. 1 in E minor, eventually finished in 1865 and here arranged in 2007 for wind quintet and an ad lib double bass (in this instance, almost certainly Phoebe Russell) by German conductor and composer Heribert Breuer. Finally, Barton appears in his own Journey to the Edge of the Horizon, commissioned by Musica Viva for this tour. This involves all the night’s players and invites its listeners into the composer’s indigenous world-view, about which I know as much as most white Australians. Tickets range from $15 student rush to $115 full adult in the stalls. As far as I can tell, there’s no booking/transaction fee, which puts this organization in a class of its own.

CHAMBER PLAYERS 5

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Queensland Symphony Orchestra Studio, South Brisbane

Sunday October 13 at 3 pm

Here’s another example of the QSO moving between the lines. All eight participants in this concert are cellists; I count seven in the orchestra list, but only six are specified in the material relating to this event. We have principal Hyung Suk Bae, Kathryn Close, Andre Duthoit, Matthew Kinmont, Kaja Skorka, and Craig Alister Young. No mention of Matthew Jones, who features in the QSO’s official cello line-up. And anyway, that leaves us one short. Whoever the lucky musician is, s/he/they will first off get to take part in what I assume is an arrangement of Grieg’s joyfully robust Holberg Suite; actually, I’ve found versions for five, six and twelve cellos, so there are certainly precedents. Popper’s Requiem follows, written for three cellos and piano (another un-named participant?), although I’ve also come across an orchestration of this one-movement work by the great 19th century Bohemian cellist-composer. A favourite encore for cello soloists is Faure’s song Apres un reve, which may or may not feature that spectral pianist, or it could be a solo with cello supporters rumbling underneath. Finally, we’ll enjoy Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1 – as the publicity has it, ‘reimagined’ – although, if the phantom pianist really is there, you might have . . . No, it’s the cellos’ afternoon and God knows the music is malleable enough. Tickets range from $35 to $59 with the QSO’s home-ground money-wrenching tax of $7.95 added on to every purchase.

INTO PARADISE: FAURE AND DURUFLE REQUIEMS

Brisbane Chorale

Brisbane City Hall

Sunday October 13 at 3 pm

This is a lovely idea: matching up the two top French Requiems in one program. There’ll be a few moist eyes at the end of Faure’s In Paradisum setting of 1890, but the Durufle 1947 work grabs me from the outset with its Requiem aeternam based on the unforgettable plainchant. Both operate on a non-histrionic level and register as spirit-centred rather than the usual Timor mortis conturbat me tenor of Berlioz and Verdi – even Mozart. And we have the recent memory of Musica Viva’s guests, the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, giving us the spartan choir+organ version of the Durufle to offer a comparison between the chaste all-male timbre and the more credible male-female complex. The two works will be conducted by the Chorale music director, Emily Cox, with venerable organist Christopher Wrench underpinning the process, while the Sinfonia of St. Andrew’s will probably provide smaller-scale accompaniments which exist for both works, although it seems to me that there’s a lot of leeway in the older work, thanks to the composer’s multiple over-writings and changes of opinion.. Soprano Sarah Crane and baritone Shaun Brown take part in the Faure and the Durufle, Crane shifting to mezzo for the latter. Entry ranges from $15 for children and students to a top of $55 for adults with some meagre concessions and a piddling, petty charge of $1.25 for each purchase.

RACHMANINOV’S PIANO

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Friday October 18 at 11:30 am

Well, you can’t expect the QSO to have imported an instrument used by the composer, can you? What they have in mind is an entertainment that features the Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, a work that these days depends for its reach on the 1996 film Shine, telling the story of David Helfgott. I think this work has now surpassed the once-inevitable Concerto No. 2 in C minor as far as regular live performances are concerned. It’s a cow to play but nowhere near as superhumanly demanding as the film makes out. Anyway, you can bet that guest Nobuyuki Tsujii will have it under control, even if he’s not recorded it. Continuing the obvious theme, the QSO under Eduardo Strausser (who, for a young conductor, will turn 40 next year) will perform Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 7 in C sharp minor. The composer wrote an alternate up-beat ending for this 1952 work in order to win a Stalin Prize but instructed that the original quiet finish should be substituted when the roubles were in the bag; as far as I can see, he didn’t win, in any case. But it’s a programming rarity, heard nowhere nearly as often as the Symphony No. 5 or the very popular and crisp Symphony No. 1. So good on (relatively) young Strausser for learning this work and giving it, the composer’s last in the form, a Brisbane airing. Full-price tickets range from $76 to $109 but a child can settle into a good seat for $35; as usual, you have to stump up QPAC’s $7.20 for dealing with your order.

This program will be repeated on Saturday October 19 at 7:30 pm with the addition of the Waltz from Tchaikovsky’s ballet, The Sleeping Beauty, presumably to justify the hike in entry costs. Tonight’s full-price tickets move between $95 and $135; your child can get a poor seat for $35, but don’t forget that spirit-grinding surcharge.

RACHMANINOV SYMPHONIC DANCES

Queensland Conservatorium Symphony Orchestra

Conservatorium Theatre, South Brisbane

Friday October 18 at 7:30 pm

Continuing the Russian composer’s fortunate run of performances, the Conservatorium musicians, under an as-yet unknown conductor, is performing this masterful product of Rachmaninov’s final years in America. Despite the writer’s innate melancholy and gloom, this score radiates as much energy and spiritedness as the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with more than enough demands to keep what will be a large orchestra (including a big percussion group) operating at full bore throughout its three movements. Then, you can follow up yesterday morning’s reading of the Piano Concerto No. 3 from Noboyuki Tsujii with this evening’s interpretation of the Piano Concerto No. 2 from Reuben Tsang, a prize-winner at last year’s Sydney International and first place in this year’s Lev Vlassenko. The Rachmaninov double will be interleaved by works from Mozart and the Luxembourgeois/Australian near-recluse Georges Lentz who was highly favoured by Markus Stenz during his time as chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. This event takes your regular two hours including interval and you can gain entry for $45 full price, $35 concession, $25 for a student. As usual, it seems that there’s no transaction fee – a mark in favour of this institution’s fiscal responsibility in times of duress for us all.

MAGIC, MYSTIQUE AND MELANCHOLY

Southern Cross Soloists

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Sunday October 20 at 3 pm

For the most part, this exercise sticks to its last of focusing on the Belle Epoque and the Ballets Russe. The outlier is a new work by Perth-based writer Lachlan Skipworth that involves the talents of didgeridoo player Chris Williams who is the Soloists’ actual soloist in residence. From what I can make out, the score will be a collaboration between Skipworth and Williams in the best ‘what do you do with this un-notatable instrument?’ tradition. There will be a dash of Tchaikovsky with the Meditation movement from the 1878 three-part Souvenir d’un lieu cher violin/piano duet. For an epoque grounding, we’ll hear Saint-Saens’ Le cygne from the 1886 Carnival of the Animals suite; it will/should probably be expounded by a cello. More populism follows with Faure’s elegant Pavane, originally for piano, from 1888; then the composer’s 1898 Fantaisie competition piece for flute and piano. Further to the period comes Dukas’ showy Villanelle of 1906 for horn and piano. The afternoon’s most challenging work features last: Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka. I don’t know how this is going to be carried out; the original 1911 score requires a large orchestra and the 1946 revision isn’t that much smaller. There’s a transcription available of the original for symphonic wind band but most of the other versions are for piano solo, four hands, or two pianos. Perhaps here is where the concert’s two other soloists – violin Catherina Lee and trumpet David Elton – will feature, although it’s pretty obvious that Lee will forefront the Tchaikovsky scrap. If you’re under 30, you can get in for $35; if you have a concession card, you pay $73; normal price is a flat $88. Well, it’s not really flat as you’re lumbered, wherever you sit on the schedule, with QPAC’s $7.20 surcharge for attempting to support these players.

NOBUYUKI TSUJI

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday October 21 at 7:30 pm

A QSO guest performing the Rachmaninov D minor Piano Concerto a few days ago, Nobuyuki Tsujii here presents a recital that doesn’t appear in the orchestra’s schedule; so you’d have to assume that the real sponsor is QPAC on whose site I found this event. Not that the musician is casting a particularly wide programmatic net; for instance, he is opening with Beethoven’s C sharp minor Piano Sonata, the Moonlight. These pages are very familiar and you have to be something of a non-pareil to bring anything new to them. He then gives us a couple of Liszt works: the Consolation No. 2 in E Major (well, at least it’s not the following well-worn No. 3 in D flat) and the Rigoletto Paraphrase that focuses throughout on the Act IV Bella figlia dell’amore quartet and is a brilliant exhibition piece for anyone brave enough to enter its challenging cadenza-rich pages, Then follows the placid, ambiguous Pavane pour une infante defunte by Ravel, one of the composer’s best-known piano solo works. The evening’s novelty comes in Nikolai Kapustin’s Eight Concert Etudes from 1984 which are brilliantly voluble exercises in jazz/classical fusion: the sort of thing Gershwin might have written if he’d lived longer and heard more adventurous works. Kapustin has a keen technical insight into writing out what sounds brilliantly improvisational and he shows a mastery of the medium’s modes – cakewalk, blues, Michael Kieran Harvey-type toccata. It will make for a splendid finale to this otherwise predictable occasion. Mind you, there’ll be some trouble getting in: the performance is sold out, so all you can hope for are cancellations.

SOUNDS OF ITALY

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St., Brisbane

Friday October 25 at 7 pm

This recital opens the second round of the festival’s recitals with artistic director Alex Raineri playing an unusually smaller role in the six events, all of which are offering repeat performances, usually on the following day. Here, the 26-year-old Italian pianist Andrea Molteni – on a tour that takes in Western Australia, the ACT, and Sydney – is presenting an action-packed program that features music by Italian writers and some other works thinly associated with that country. For instance, he opens with Bach’s Italian Concerto; well, to be honest, it’s cast as ‘in the Italian taste’, isn’t it? And he finishes with Liszt’s 1874 Concert Fantaisie on Bellini’s ‘La Sonnambula’ which is something of an adoption rather than home-grown. Still, the body of his presentation is authentic enough. He is playing old Italian in a Scarlatti sonata: the G minor K. 30, known as the Cat’s Fugue. And then he focuses on two contemporary greats. First is Dallapiccola’s Sonata Canonica su Capricci di Niccolo Paganini in four movements that utilize seven of the supreme violinist’s caprices in a language that closes a gap between modernity (in 1943) and Scarlatti’s formalism, especially in the final E flat Major-tinted pages. And then appear two pieces by Petrassi: the 1933 Toccata which in its concise but episodic character mirrors the earliest formats of this type of work, rather than the all-in unstoppable thunderings of the composer’s contemporaries; and the Beckett-inspired Oh! Les beaux jours, the composer’s final piano product which appears to be a diptych composed across a 35-year gap. Entry costs $25 with a $1.99 surcharge, dedicated by the Humanitix booking agents to computer science classes.

This program will be repeated on Sunday October 27 at 10 am.

RENAISSANCE

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St., Brisbane

Friday October 25 at 9 pm

I’m not at all sure what to expect in this event. It presents as a solo violin recital from Julia Hill but there’s no indication of what she will be playing. The program refers to this player’s ‘touching story of recovery and resilience’, which suggests to me an illness or a breakdown, but references to any such crisis are absent on any of the many websites and accounts that focus on the young violinist. And then there’s the event’s title and that could mean anything from a spiritual awakening to a return to physical life. We know Hill is well-travelled, with an obvious penchant for Japan; she has also performed/studied in Switzerland, China and Singapore, thanks to several scholarships and a distinguished course of study at the Queensland Conservatorium. The only ‘dark’ reference I can find is to COVID, which curtailed a lot of Hill’s plans. Not only hers. Anyway, if you’re after a clean slate event where you go in knowing nothing and happy in anticipation, this is for you. Admission is $25 flat fee, with an additional Humanitix surcharge of $1.99 to subsidise books for schools.

This program will be repeated on Sunday October 27 at 12 pm.

PIANO ROOM

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St., Brisbane

Saturday October 26 at 10 am

This enterprise is sponsored by HOTA, Arts Queensland, and the Regional Arts Development Fund. As far as one can tell, the exercise au fond combines poetry, background music, and actual live-performed music. The last-named is provided by Corrina Bonshek and Liszt, the latter in the form of his Chasse-neige study, last of the Transcendental Etudes in the set of twelve published in 1852. As for the poetry component, that will be provided by Merlynn Tong. Bonshek has a four-part function: concept, composer, sound-art and collaborative direction.. Tong’s role falls under three headings: writer, voice actor and co-creator. We are blessed with an ambience designer in Tiffany Beckwith-Skinner, and James Clark (also known as Tonepacer) is the sound engineer for this project. In the middle sits pianist Roger Cui. Piano Room is by way of being a ;fever dream’ and we’ve all enjoyed one or twenty of those in our time. The whole thing reeks of the happenings of three generations past and its publicity suggests a surrender of self and critical faculty that I would find hard, unless Cui’s playing is sensationally good – which it may well be, considering his career and achievements so far. Tong is best known as a playwright and an actor but there’s no ban against expanding into verse. In the end, you get to enjoy a sensual feast with lots of manipulated sounds thrown into the mix. Tickets cost $25 with the customary Humanitix $1,99 charge going towards books for schools.

This program will be repeated at 6 pm.

PRELUDE, ELEGY, BURLESQUE

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St., Brisbane

Saturday October 26 at 12 pm

Two genuflections to tradition, then it’s on with the motley. This recital is being given by the Karlsruhe Concert Duo – cello Reinhard Armleder, piano Dagmar Hartmann – which has been in existence since 1998. The pair open with the G Major Prelude from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1 as arranged by Moscheles for cello and piano; well, the keyboard part seems to be original and there’s an added cello melody on top. Happy but mindless. The duo moves to a cello/piano classic with Faure’s Elegie of 1880 which is well-worn territory. Czech writer Jindrich Feld‘s Elegy and Burlesque of 1954/5 follow; unknown territory to me but a bona fide cello/piano duet. Sadly, these musicians then opt for Part‘s 1978 Spiegel im Spiegel where minimal creativity is brought into play; but, my word, it’s very popular and subject to many performance combinations, of which cello and piano is a permissible one. Enter American bassoonist and composer Chuck Holdeman whose Karlsruhemusik Concert Piece, written three years ago, is here enjoying its Australian premiere; nothing seems to be extant about this score but you’d have to suspect that it was written for this lucky pair of executants. Back to the North for Rautavaara’s 1955 Prelude and Fugue for cello and piano; the trouble is that he composed two of them – their fugues based on the names of Bela Bartok (B-E-B-A), the other on the name Einar Englund (E-A-E-G-D). On to another Burlesque, this for the cello-piano format by Nikolai Kapustin from 1999 and packed with jazzy cross-rhythms and syncopations. Finally, the atmosphere drops markedly for Piazzolla’s Le Grand Tango which I, for one, have heard too many times. But at least you have the preceding Kapustin as a benchmark for what you can achieve with popular tropes. Entry is $25, with the Humanitix $1.99 impost for computer science classes.

This program will be repeated on Sunday October 27 at 4 pm.

WAYFARING

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall, 540 Queen St., Brisbane

Saturday October 26 at 2 pm

We have three soloists in this event, the constant fulcrum being the festival’s artistic director and pianist Alex Raineri who accompanies baritone Camilo Lopez and cellist Michael Gibson. Raineri enjoys one definite solo in Debussy’s La plus que lente waltz of 1910, before he accompanies Gibson in Webern’s Op. 11 Three Little Pieces for Cello and Piano from 1914. To conclude the recital, the pair play Ligeti’s two-movement Cello Sonata, finished in 1953 and redolent of his senior countrymen Kodaly and Bartok. In the exercise’s first half, Lopez sings seven Latin/South American songs, most of which I don’t know. Famous Mexican composer Manuel Ponce’s 1912 Estrellita is a familiar quantity but the rest are well outside my ken. First off is Cantiga en la distancia from 1946 by the Cuban Cesar Portillo de la Luz. Then we hear the 1982 Todo cambia by the Chilean expatriate Julio Numhauser, followed by Gardel’s El dia que me quieras, the Argentinian writer’s popular (so they tell me) sung tango of 1934. Next comes Ahora by Otilio Galindez, a Venezuelan countryman of Lopez who wrote this piece in 1978, and then another Argentinian in Carlos Guastavino and his lushly Romantic 1942 La rosa y el sauce. Finally space is found for Venezuelan Simon Diaz’s folk song Caballo viejo which became immensely popular after its publication in 1980. Linking both halves of the recital, Gibson and the hard-worked Raineri perform Gaspar Cassado’s 1931 encore piece Requiebros. As usual, tickets cost $25 for all comers, with a $1.99 for Humanitix to cultivate literacy skills.

This program will be repeated on Sunday October 27 at 6 pm.

FAIRY TALES

Brisbane Music Festival

FourthWall, 540 Queen St., Brisbane

Saturday October 26 at 4 pm

Finishing this segment of his festival, artistic director/pianist Alex Raineri performs a three-part solo recital. He opens with Ravel’s three-part suite Gaspard de la nuit of 1908, its first movement – Ondine – fitting well into the fairy tale scheme. Le gibet which follows proposes a desolate landscape on which is found a scaffold while a bell tolls incessantly in the distance. Scarbo is a goblin, a very active one and possibly malicious into the bargain; but the piano writing is intensely difficult and marvellous to experience. After this we hear a new work by Ian Whitney, here enjoying its world premiere. So far, no news about a title or any content; let’s hope Raineri is more informed than we are. Finally, the pianist performs Melbourne-based academic/composer Melody Eotvos‘ Piano Sonata No. 2, A Story from the Sand Dunes, written three years ago. and commissioned by Raineri. The piece takes its inspiration from a Hans Christian Anderson story concerning a shipwrecked baby who is of noble birth but lives his life as an adoptee fishing on the Danish shoreline.. This substantial sonata – about 25 minutes long – falls into five segments and speaks in a unique voice that suggests mobile power and emotional restlessness.

This program will be repeated on Sunday October 27 at 2 pm.

QSO FAVOURITES

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Sunday October 27 at 11:30 am

Eduardo Strausser is back to direct this catch-all miscellany that bounds across the orchestral repertoire with frolicsome abandon. To help him on his way, Ashleigh Denning puts in another appearance, following her participation in the QSO events on October 11 and 12 (see above), to host this entertainment. Our morning begins with Bernstein’s Candide Overture from 1956, one of the composer’s smartest and sassiest products gifted with a finely-spun love theme, Oh, Happy We, in the middle of the ruckus. Our own Elena Kats-Chernin comes up next with her Dance of the Paper Umbrellas recycled from the QSO’s October 11 concert (see above). Violinist Ein Na, the orchestra’s Young Instrumentalist Prize winner last year, fronts the Saint-Saens Introduction and Rondo capriccioso delight from 1863 (to be honest, I’d rather hear the melting Havanaise). The Beethoven Symphony No 7 from the fateful year of 1812 is programmed also, but surely not all of it in this 70-minute, no-interval program. Likewise, Tchaikovsky’s 1889 ballet Sleeping Beauty is also on the schedule, but that must refer to the Waltz only – another recycle from Strausser’s October 19 QSO concert. Balancing out the arthouse pretensions of Kats-Chernin’s frolic, we are treated to The Man from Snowy River music by Bruce Rowland for George T. Miller’s 1982 film of happy memory. For a rousing finale, what better than Sibelius’ hymn to freedom, Finlandia? Composed in 1899, this is the ne plus ultra in high-minded nationalism and makes a somewhat lofty companion to Rowland’s derivative sound-track. Full-price tickets cost between $76 and $109 but a child can get a good or a lousy seat for $35; other reductions are available for concessionaires and students. All will pay the QPAC fee of $7.20 for a richly over-funded accounting exercise.

CHAMBERS PLAYERS 4

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Queensland Symphony Orchestra Studio

Sunday September 1 at 3 pm

Just two works being played this afternoon, one of which is a perpetual source of delight: the Brahms String Sextet No. 1 in B flat with its astonishing quantity of warm melodies enjoying the most benign of developments and restatements. As a partner, behold the Sonata for Two Violins by Miklos Rozsa, master of those legendary film scores stretching over a 45-year career. The Hungarian-born writer had the benefit of revising his score several times after its initial appearance in 1933 until the final version appeared in 1973. Which raises the question of what we’re hearing this afternoon because the original is listed as Op. 15, while the revision became Op. 15a; this program lists the former. Whatever happens, the nationalistically-inflected three-movement duet will be performed by Mia Stanton and Sonia Wilson, both from the QSO’s first violins desks. For the sextet, they are joined by violas Imants Larsens and Nicole Greentree, alongside cellos Hyung Suk Bae and Kathryn Close. Once again, I’m perplexed by the recital’s proposed length of 1 hour 20 minutes, as the Brahms lasts about 37 minutes on average while Rozsa’s sonata takes up about 17 minutes. Tickets rage from $59 full adult to $35 for a student, with the QSO’s inexplicably self-indulgent ‘transaction fee’ of $7.95 added on to every purchase.

PUCCINI DOUBLE BILL

Queensland Conservatorium – Griffith University

Conservatorium Theatre, South Brisbane

Tuesday September 3 at 6:30 pm

As usual with the Conservatorium events, I’m in the dark about most details regarding this three-performance season. As you’d expect, the organizers have left out Il tabarro; a pity, because of those two powerful, passionate duets involving Giorgetta. So here we get the trite religiosity of Suor Angelica and then the farce based on one joke that is Gianni Schicchi. You can get involved in the angst that runs through the story of Angelica’s last hour but the eventual redemption from the stigma of suicide sounds to me like special pleading of an unpleasant nature, particularly when faced with the suicide of Doria Manfredi in 1909. The final tableau always strikes me as ridiculously bogus, a sop to the composer’s bourgeois morality and a sad self-justification. The trouble with the comic opera is trying to establish personalities for so many of the dead man’s relatives; two of them are interesting (well, perhaps three), but in productions I’ve seen most of the other six are given nothing to do. Mind you, the compensations include two splendid arias for Rinuccio and Lauretta but the work’s dramatic success depends totally on Schicchi. For all I know, the Con has an able baritone to carry off this difficult role. The conductor will be the establishment’s opera guru, Johannes Fritzsch, and Lindy Hume directs. Tickets are a flat $55 with no extra costs.

This program will be repeated on Thursday September 5 at 7:30 pm and on Saturday September 7 at 2:30 pm.

EUCALYPTUS – THE OPERA

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Wednesday September 4 at 2 pm

From various sources, it seems that Jonathan Mills‘ new opera, based on Murray Ball’s all-but-forgotten novel, received its premiere at the Perth Festival on February 21 this year. The work is also on the schedule of Victorian Opera for mid-October, the difference being that the WA premiere was a concert version while the Brisbane and Melbourne presentations are fully-staged, this Concert Hall one directed by Michael Gow, set and costume designs by Simone Romaniuk. From what I can glean from various sites, Desiree Frahn is singing Ellen and her crazy father Holland will be taken on by Simon Meadows. Mr. Cave is sung by Samuel Dundas and the stranger with talk of a world outside the forest that circumscribes the heroine has been entrusted to Michael Petrucelli. Conductor at the premiere and in Melbourne – and therefore here, probably – is Tahu Matheson. The work is in two acts, I suppose; at least we are informed that the opera in its Brisbane shape lasts 2 hours 20 minutes including interval. The odd thing is that I can’t find out when the central body responsible for its creation – Opera Australia – will be mounting this work at its home base (let’s be honest: its home) in the Opera House. After all, the Perth, Melbourne and Brisbane co-commissioning companies have done it the courtesy of a prompt airing or two in their regular venues. Tickets at QPAC range between $89 and $120, with the usual $7.20 ‘transaction fee’ added on, just to ensure that the event attracts even fewer patrons than it might have done.

This performance will be repeated on Thursday September 5 at 7 pm.

SPIRIT OF THE WILD

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Friday September 13 at 11:30 am

Here’s an eerie three-part concert that vaults from one historical phase to an extreme opposite. In the beginning is the overture to Haydn’s The Creation oratorio: The Representation of Chaos which, to Haydn’s mind, meant withholding the resolution of cadences. It’s a very Age of Reason musical depiction of the colossal muck-up that preceded the Big Bang, the Grand Deflation, or whatever descriptor tickles your primordial fancy. The world having been established, Umberto Clerici and his musicians move to Nigel Westlake‘s oboe concerto that gives this event its title. In its original 2016 form, the work was scored for Diana Doherty‘s solo (which she recreates here), four horns, timpani, five percussionists, harp, piano and strings. Westlake found his impetus to write from a visit to Bathurst Harbour in Tasmania, although he knew about the state’s wilderness from his youth. The program’s second half involves American writer John Luther Adams‘ Become Ocean of 2014 which is organised in three instrumental groups that will keep the stage crew busy throughout interval. The score works as a palindrome and the little I’ve heard should not perturb Debussy admirers; Adams spends his 40-plus minutes layering textures in what would function quite satisfactorily as the soundtrack to a sub-marine documentary. A child gets in for $35; the full adult rate is $109 for a good seat. And then there’s QPAC’s usurious credit-card-use fee of $7.20.

This program will be repeated on Saturday September 14 at 7:30 pm. Top price increases to $135 and most other costs rise too, but a child’s ticket continues to be $35.

TOGNETTI. MENDELSSOHN. BACH

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Monday September 16 at 7 pm

For this appearance here, the ACO appears unrestricted by any guest appearance(s). The evening’s solitary soloist will be artistic director Richard Tognetti, who takes front position for Bach’s A minor Violin Concerto which he recorded with the ACO in 2006; some of musicians from that time still survive in the ensemble’s ranks. As a preface, the orchestra plays an octet: Illumine, written in 2016 by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir. I’m assuming that this will be expanded to include all 17 or so of the ACO forces; it originally asked for a double bass and cut back by one on the regular number of violins. Anyway, this short piece has nothing to do with intellectual or spiritual light, but dawn: a natural phenomenon that delights you some of the time. We’re also enjoying the premiere of a work by Adelaide-based composer Jakub Jankowski; it’s apparently for string orchestra so will fit right in here but – as yet – the score lacks a title. And the ACO concludes its night with another octet: that by Mendelssohn which we’ve heard from the group several times and which the ensemble recorded in 2013. Entry costs $25 for a student, plus almost an extra third of that price for daring to enter into a financial transaction with QPAC; top tickets for adults cost $139, plus that $7.20 supercharge.

KRISTIAN WINTHER & DANIEL DE BORAH IN RECITAL

Queensland Conservatorium – Griffith University

Ian Hanger Recital Hall, South Brisbane

Thursday September 19 at 7:30 pm

Here’s hoping that Conservatorium faculty member and pianist Daniel de Borah attracts a larger crowd than his last recital in the Hanger space attracted. Tonight he’s partnered with violinist Kristian Winther of whom I’ve heard and seen very little since he left the Australian String Quartet in 2014. In this short outing, the duo perform two 20th century gems. One is the Shostakovich Violin Sonata of 1968, written for Oistrakh and an unsettling instance in its first movement of the composer coming to terms with 12-tone music: that is – use it, then lose it. Still the remaining two segments make for an intensely involving experience. The other piece is Bartok’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in three movements. Written in 1921, this work shows the composer at his most hard-bitten and confrontational with some shatteringly virtuosic passages for both executants. What makes this event most attractive is not the quality of the playing (about de Borah, I have no qualms) but the fact that you rarely hear either of these works on a mainstream program; in fact, I’ve not come across either of them in years. Tickets are $22 and, as far as I can tell, there are no concessions. But there’s also no booking fee – o brave new conservatorium that has such accountants in it.

CHAMBER MUSIC SIDE-BY-SIDE WITH THE L. A. PHILHARMONIC

Queensland Conservatorium – Griffith University

Conservatorium Theatre, South Brisbane

Friday September 20 at 7:30 pm

This sounds sensational but, as you’d expect, needs to be taken with several grains of salt. For one, the Los Angeles orchestra has not arrived at the Queensland Con en masse; just a few of them have made the trip – a wind quintet. Indeed, the group is here primarily to give an Utzon recital in the Sydney Opera House on Sunday September 22. Perhaps there’ll be common ground between the two events but at this Brisbane exercise, the American players will be joined by staff and students for a solid two-hour presentation. The visitors are flute Denis Bouriakov, oboe Marc Lachat, clarinet Boris Allakhverdyan, horn Andrew Bain (whom I remember from a stint he put in with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra over a decade ago), and bassoon Whitney Crockett. It’s great to see that the visitors are all principals with the LA Phil and – a special Californian tribute to the rightness of things – they’re all male. As usual, there’s no indication what the mixed ensemble will be playing; if you’re interested, you’ll just have to come along on spec. Students get tickets for $25 apiece, the concession rate is $35, and the full adult price is $45. In line with previous recital/concert bookings at this venue, I can’t detect a superimposed fee.

REQUIEM FOR THE LIVING

The Queensland Choir

Old Museum, Bowen Hills

Saturday September 21 at 7:30 pm

To begin, the choir will be singing Vivaldi’s Gloria RV 589 (vague memories of playing continuo organ for a joint PLC/Xavier performance in Monash University’s Robert Blackwood Hall too many years ago) which ranks among the composer’s best-known vocal works and remains buoyant throughout its half-hour length. I can’t find out the names of the three soloists, if there’ll be an orchestra (oboe, trumpet, strings, continuo), or who is conducting (Kevin Power, probably). After this comes the title work by American composer Dan Forrest, which exists in three versions; I suspect that the full orchestral one will not be given this evening. The composer sets his work in five movements: an Introit/Kyrie, an amalgamated set of Scriptural scraps in sympathy with the usual Dies irae (why not take on Thomas of Celano’s original?), an Agnus Dei (out of sequence in the Mass liturgy), then a Sanctus, finally a Lux aeterna. What I’ve heard of this work is heartfelt and simple-minded, traditional and smoothly accomplished with no problems for singers or instrumentalists. Finally, I’m unsure about the venue: the Choir’s website refers to ‘The Old Museum’, but the Old Museum (Bowen Hills) has nothing on its own website about this concert. Are there two Old Museums in this city?

FROM THE NEW WORLD

Brisbane Philharmonic Orchestra

Old Museum Concert Hall, Bowen Hills

Sunday September 22 at 3 pm

Here’s a lushly Romantic program that opens with two difficult pieces for any orchestra to negotiate, and then concludes with a magniloquent repertoire warhorse that holds a closetful of taxing moments. Conductor Steven Moore sets the bar high with the Prelude and Liebstod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, following these studies in deferred resolution with Chausson’s Poeme de l’amour et de la mer. The afternoon’s hard-worked soprano in both works is Nina Korbe who will be tested early on by her instant entry into the Wagner outpouring. I remember a hapless guest singing with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra many years ago, vocally clutching for her entry point and looking desperately at conductor Oleg Caetani for a note after the Vorspiel‘s unhelpful concluding, almost inaudible low G in the cellos and basses; she came in several steps away from the actual E flat required. The French composer’s three-part song-cycle makes a fine if controlled partner to Isolde’s massive stream of abnegation and assertion. Chausson sets up two eloquent vocal landscapes on either side of a refreshing, if puzzling, interlude. And good fortune to the players when venturing into Dvorak’s evergreen Symphony No. 9 with its double-sided character of being both a celebration of the composer’s time in America and his anticipated return home to the welcoming streets of Prague.