A feast for the senses reminiscent of an all-night rave or the film Bladerunner, Chamber Made’s new work Diaspora bathes the audience with broad spectrum frequencies of light and sound.
Inside the Royal Albert Hall at the Last Night of the Proms.
Yui Mok/PA Archive/PA Images
A conductor’s role is about communication with performers and their audience. They do so using eye contact, dress, and of course, the fabled waving of the arms.
Oscar and Lucinda, Sydney Chamber Opera, Carriageworks.
Zan Wimberley
A world premiere performance of a new Australian opera is an exhilarating experience. But the music in this reworking of the Peter Carey novel underwhelmed.
Artistic Director Richard Tognetti and members of the orchestra: the rock musicians whose work feature in this concert openly acknowledge the influence of the seemingly inaccessible avant-garde.
Julian Kingma
An Australian Chamber Orchestra concert features works by Jonny Greenwood, Sufjan Stevens and The Nationals’ Bryce Dessner, along with those of modern Polish composers.
Fernando Guimarâes and Brenton Spiteri in The Return of Ulysses.
Brett Boardman
If The Return of Ulysses is not Monteverdi’s most inspired creation, it is close to it. And Pinchgut Opera’s premiere may have been the first time this wonderful work was presented professionally in Australia.
Performers in Speechless, a new opera by composer Cat Hope, co-commissioned by the Perth Festival and Tura New Music. The opera is a response to the Australian Human Rights Commission’s 2014 report into children in immigration detention.
Toni Wilkinson
Despite the exclusion of their creative work from mainstream opera companies, Australian women composers are creating spaces for themselves, writing work that tackles urgent social issues.
Composer William Barton in 2013. Indigenous composers have long been working in the field, but the contribution of Indigenous music and culture to Australian composition deserves greater recognition.
David Crosling/AAP
Telecommunications company Huawei has used artificial intelligence to complete Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. But the result fails to capture the spirit of Schubert’s original compositions.
The recorder was one of the most popular instruments during the Baroque period, and was more commonly made of wood.
Many school music teachers aren’t trained recorder players. And cheap and badly made recorders are often sold in discount stores. But this an instrument with a fine musical pedigree.
André Rieu performs in his Sydney Town Hall performance.
André Rieu Productions
“They have been crucifying Othello into an opera,” Lord Byron later wrote after watching Rossini’s opera. But the performance does much to highlight the play’s racial politics.
Stunning: the new-look Royal Opera House at Covent Garden.
Royal Opera House
Pelléas and Mélisande tells a story of forbidden love between its title characters, set in the fictitious kingdom of Allemonde. However the action offstage before the opera’s 1902 premiere was just as dramatic.
South African-born composer Stanley Glasser’s musical legacy is in many ways unknown in his motherland which he left under political duress in 1963, and awaits critical engagement.
A Tasmanian Requiem brings together Western and Aboriginal voices to confront the violence of the state’s Black War. It shows what a historical reckoning, and reconciliation, might look and sound like.
Kendrick Lamar in the music video for Humble.
Screenshot from Youtube
Whether it is art or pop, high or low, terms such as creativity, authenticity, innovation and uniqueness can help us judge a work of music. And Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. brims with these qualities.
Beethoven monument on the Beethovenplatz square in Vienna, Austria. The monument was unveiled in 1880.
Shutterstock
The last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony gave us ‘Ode to Joy’, one of the most famous tunes of all time. But the composer initially thought he’d made a grave mistake with it.