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.
An Australian Chamber Orchestra concert features works by Jonny Greenwood, Sufjan Stevens and The Nationals’ Bryce Dessner, along with those of modern Polish composers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.