★★★½☆ Tim Munro takes us on a nocturnal journey between sleeping and waking.

Lior, Elena Kats-Chernin and The Idea of North have collaborated on a CD for hospitalised kids and their families.

If you want to hear a dazzling young female pianist with a promising career ahead of her, try this. Such creatures are common today, but this set is special. It collects unreleased recordings Argerich made in 1960 and 1967 for North and West German Radio. At the time of the earliest of these, she was studying with Friedrich Gulda, who famously said he had nothing to teach her as “she could already do everything”.  Argerich’s recognisable characteristics are here: lightning reflexes; pithy attack; astounding nuance at high speed. She has since abandoned the solo repertoire, so it is fascinating to hear her in Mozart (Sonata No 18, K576) and Beethoven (the Sonata in D, Op. 10 No 3). The latter particularly benefits from her vitality and velocity; it is a shame she never recorded more Beethoven sonatas. The second disc contains works she rerecorded shortly afterward for DG: Prokofiev’s Toccata, Ravel’s Sonatine and Gaspard de la Nuit. In Ravel’s Ondine she is arguably too volatile – tranquillity is not in her armoury – but Scarbo is a knockout. So is her 1967 performance of Prokofiev’s Sonata No 7: the sharpness of her rhythmic response takes your breath away.  Throughout her…

Antony Gray is a London-based pianist who has gained praise for his recordings of Poulenc, Bach, Brahms and Goossens and one can see his skill with these composers fertilising this new disc devoted to Schultz’s pianistic output. In the Adelaide-born composer’s music there is a sense of space, which is entirely appropriate to the vast Australian landscape; and unlike many earlier composers, Schultz is is content to write in a more neo-tonal manner without resorting to dissonance or mimicry of birdcry. Even in his recent Interludes (2015), there is a sense of late-Romantic intensity. And though Schultz does not regard himself as much of a pianist, there is much here – a sparseness of creative landscape, which defines modern notions of Australia. His music is more melodic than atonal, and yet almost naively deductive in its sense of logic, place and space. Here is music that is haunting and inward, searching for a sense of landscape if not comprehension. Schultz’s literary influences are disparate – from the 10th-century Japanese Pillow Book to Inventions from his own opera The Children’s Bach after Helen Garner’s touching novella. His counterpoint is all so appropriate, making even more sense of the Bach adopted by…

This disc is, rather remarkably, volume 31 in Miklós Spányi’s complete keyboard works of CPE Bach, so it’s safe to say he knows what he’s doing! This disc includes several sonatas from Bach’s 1778 collection Six Sonatas for Connoisseurs and Amateurs.  I have to admit a certain fondness for just how odd CPE Bach’s music is, with his sudden melodic shifts and startling key changes. Bach’s left-of-centre keyboard writing is best exemplified by the charmingly experimental Sonata No 5 in F, which begins by teasing the audience with two false starts (first in C Minor, then D Minor), before beginning properly in F Major. It begins with a noble phrase that sounds like a precursor to Haydn. Similarly, the sparse second movement and sprightly third bounce along with enthusiasm, walking the fine line of being appealing without being cloying. The clavichord is a surprisingly quiet instrument – I saw one played in a small hall once to no more than 20 people, and the instrument still required amplification. I think that the recording in this case is a little too detailed – although we get a wonderfully close-up sound of the instrument itself, most of the more expressive passages come…

Ivan Ilić reveals a long lost arrangement of Haydn’s Symphony No 44, “Mourning” for solo piano. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Julie Kerr has founded Music Love, an online platform to showcase women across all branches of the Australian music industry.

Antony Partos takes home a double, while Alan John, Caitlin Yeo and Neil Sutherland are among the composers honoured.

If Melbourne composer Samuel Smith’s Bleed-through for guitar and laptop is “about” anything, it’s the mutability of memory. It receives its world premiere recording as part of Australian guitarist Callum Henshaw’s debut disc which, taken as a whole, is about the same thing. Smith’s work was inspired by the phenomenon for which it is named.  As magnetic tape deteriorates, its signal infects different layers, resulting in, “a ghostly prediction and recollection of the original signal, itself now significantly diminished… In Bleed-through, the guitar acts as an original signal, becoming surrounded and consumed by the whale song of its own echo.” It’s a spacious, saudade-saturated work, and a perfect end to an echo chamber of a recital resounding with variations on themes, including Henshaw’s own “return” to playing after injury interrupted this recording project. Henshaw, who has numerous awards to his credit, begins his recital with Granados’ Valses Poéticos, delighting in the Spanish composer’s refined chiaroscuro, before moving confidently through Napoléon Coste’s programmatic Le Départ and Manuel Ponce’s unquestioned masterpiece for classical guitar, Variations sur Folia de España et Fugue to the endless vistas of Peter Sculthorpe’s From Kakadu. Henshaw has technique to burn, as evinced by his clear textures and…

The contemporary “easy listening” status of Eric Satie’s Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies belie his reputation in his own day as a musical iconoclast and innovator of the first order. And while they are among his earliest compositions, their outrageous simplicity and, in the Gnossiennes, lack of key signatures and bar lines, place them too in those dangerous regions of novelty and experimentation. Prolific pianist Noriko Ogawa, whose Debussy interpretations in particular have won her wide acclaim, begin and end this first volume of the complete piano music of Satie with the above works. What happens in between should prove to those who consider Satie’s music chillax fodder that it is anything but. Ogawa’s tone, tempi and phrasing are just right in the seven Gnossiennes and three Gymnopédies for the more transparent timbre and slightly faster decay of the 1890 Érard grand, she’s chosen to record on. The effect is a languid obsessiveness, a perfumed tension, between the (mainly) simple chordal accompaniments and spare, haunting, modal-inflected melodies. Following the Gnossiennes is what feels like a Dadaist phantasmagoria, beginning with the ragtime march Le Piccadilly and heralding the Gymnopédies with Satie’s own arrangement of his cabaret song, Je te veux, a waltz, which…

“I swallowed the whole thing and now it’s inside me,” says the French pianist of his teacher’s words of wisdom. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The acclaimed Russian pianist explains his passion for Liszt’s Études and why it was important to him to record them all. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in