Whoever said grand sweeping melodies were a thing of the past? Grant Foster clearly has a penchant for the archetype of the brooding Russian virtuoso pianist-composer, despite being based in Bowral. You may remember Foster from his in-depth Limelight interview a few months back. After initially studying in Sydney he set off for Paris and London, where he built up a solid reputation as a pianist and composer before returning to Australia to settle in rural NSW. This CD is a follow up to The Music of Grant Foster and features two main works: the Russian-inspired The Pearl of Dubai suite for piano, cello and orchestra, and a setting of Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol for tenor and piano. As a bonus there is a DVD of the Ballad and part of the suite played live in concert. The overall impression of Foster’s orchestral music is that of a stirring and decadent black-and-white film score, albeit with super-smooth edges and superior sound quality. The pieces are unashamedly Romantic, as if Rachmaninov had been cryogenically frozen and thawed out in the 21st century. The Pearl of Dubai is the most ambitious work here, a set of mini tone poems…

Look no further than the title. Australian Portrait is a collection of recent Australian pieces for saxophone and piano that are mostly recorded here for the first time. Alongside composers Matthew Hindson, Anne Boyd, Brenton Broadstock and Michael Smetanin are less-familiar names worth getting to know: Andrew Batterham and Mark Zadro. It’s a diverse and compelling set from the Sydney-based HD Duo. The repertoire ranges from breezy post-minimalism and jazz-inflected tunes to meatier fare with the emphasis on the melodic and rhythmic interplay between the two players. Hindson’s Repetepetition is a buoyant opener that matches the confident flair of Batterham’s Duke’s Crusade. Broadstock’s Not too near … not too far is uncharacteristically bouncy for a composer best known for his bold and elegiac orchestral works. Equally surprising is Anne Boyd’s edgy Ganba which, unlike her more meditative pieces, isn’t afraid to let off steam, its raucous sax calls inspired by Indigenous responses to early steam trains. Likewise the Smetanin is gritty and chiseled, setting out as a sort of demonic warm-up exercise before easing into more florid climes. The disc concludes with an extended suite by Mark Zadro that fuses a kind of angular jazz with crisp colouristic passages. Australian…

Don’t judge this CD by its cover. No doubt the packaging went through a rigorous design process by expert minimalists, but somehow the portrait of virtuoso Israeli-Swedish flautist Sharon Bezaly, who recorded this disc of largely contemporary repertoire during her 2009 Australian tour with the ACO, still looks like a bad Polaroid, with the shadows left in and a random font or two slapped on as an afterthought. BIS certainly can’t have been relying on the familiarity or commercial appeal of the composer names to compensate. Ultimately, this CD featuring the most famous golden flute since James Galway’s and music by José Serebrier, Adina Izarra, Carl Vine and Ginastera, has just two things going for it – the quality of the South American/Australian music and the excellence of the performances. As she’s demonstrated on many previous recordings for BIS, Bezaly is an incredible flautist – fearless and truly an “attacking” player when it comes to the technically challenging bits – so she’s always exciting to listen to. And some of the repertoire here, largely unknown though it is, is terrific. Serebrier was once a long-serving conductor on the ABC orchestral network and he remains a prodigious recording artist, but… Continue…

Emily Bronte’s brooding love story is given a starkly neo-realist overhaul by British auteur Andrea Arnold, to haunting effect. Following up her bleakly beautiful Fish Tank (a doomed love story of a very different kind), Arnold continues her intensely raw approach to storytelling and sets it atop the windswept Yorkshire moors. Preferring lashings of rain and mud to stuffy period film production design, Arnold’s bracing trip to Wuthering Heights feels more akin to documentary. Almost entirely devoid of dialogue, the camera trails around the Earnshaw family home, where dirty young foundling Heathcliff (Solomon Glave then James Howson are the first black actors to play the role) is unceremoniously introduced and told to pull his weight. But he and foster-sister Cathy (Shannon Beer then Kaya Scodelario) instead run wild in their stark surrounds, their friendship growing more intense by the day. Yet as they come of age, the pull of responsibility sets in, and Heathcliff becomes undone when Cathy accepts a marriage proposal from their rich neighbour Edgar Linton (James Northcote). Many will know how the tale proceeds, but through Arnold’s eyes the story feels immediate and visceral. Once again displaying her skill with non-professional actors, Arnold’s version of Wuthering Heights…

Austrian conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt has been one of classical music’s great iconoclasts now for well over 50 years. Always challenging our preconceptions, he invariably comes up with something fresh and this delightful double disc is no exception. His stated aim is to create a “revolution” in the way we listen to 19th-century dance music, and in particular the waltz which he sees as reflecting a social shift from high-brow, concert hall fare to a genuinely egalitarian music. He also makes a good case that Strauss and Lanner’s dance bands may well have outshone the Viennese court and theatre orchestras in technique and ability to master a wide repertoire. So how does he go about convincing us? First of all, he uses Concentus Musicus Wien, his own period band. That smaller, leaner string tone helps, but in addition, Harnoncourt conjures up all manner of different tones with no less than ten different types of trumpet and five different types of clarinet! In a word, he takes the “sound” seriously and I must say he has a great deal of fun along the way. His starting point is Mozart’s late dance music which frequently utilises “Turkish” instrumentation to express Austria’s confidence in…

A new disc by Pieter Wispelwey is always a cause for great rejoicing and this one is no exception. I doubt that Mendelssohn’s Cello Sonata No 2 (in D, Op 58) has ever sounded as joyous and carefree as it does here. In the opening movement the players have an unbridled enthusiasm that at first surprises but then wins the listener over. The delicate wit of the ensuing Allegretto scherzando with its pizzicato passages is perfectly realised and is admirably balanced by the plangent Adagio. Mendelssohn’s Song without Words for cello and piano is offered as another example of Wispelwey’s superb expressiveness, while arrangements of three of Chopin’s waltzes by the Russian virtuoso Karl Davydov, including the famous Minute Waltz, show off the cellist’s quicksilver dexterity and amazing lightness of touch. That Chopin’s Cello Sonata caused the composer so much creative grief is scarcely apparent in this ardent performance. Here, as in the Mendelssohn, the total abandonment to the music’s high romanticism results in utterly magnetic music-making. In particular, the Scherzo stands out as a compelling blend of drama and lyricism. Giacometti’s use of an 1837 Érard piano in conjunction with Wispelwey’s 1760 Guadagnini cello adds further authenticity to these…

No one is ever going to accuse British-born, Perth-educated soprano Lisa Harper-Brown of chasing commercial success. Consisting of Australian art songs for soprano and piano, her The Poet Sings recital disc will no doubt send cash-registers into rigor mortis. Harper-Brown is a terrific singer – a touch stentorian and single-gestured perhaps – but in there Viking horns and all, giving these neglected, indeed virtually unknown, remnants of Australia’s British Empire history every opportunity to stake a belated claim to greatness. Have we been too neglectful of these treasures? Probably not on this evidence, but the disc’s seven Roy Agnew songs are moving. Geoffrey Allen’s Two Chinese Songs, Op 1 are worthy of historical study, as they were composed 20 years before it became fashionable for any Australian besides Grainger to look to the north for musical inspiration, while Raymond Hanson’s five songs – led by a lovely setting of Tagore – demonstrate not just his giftsas a composer, but their free-flowing piano parts also show his experience as an accompanist. Using Shakespearean texts, Paul Paviour wrote the seven songs that give the CD its title, doing valiant (if not always successful) battle against better-known musical settings of them. This defiantly…

Jean Mouton (1459–1522) was a beneficed priest whose composing career developed slowly in provincial France until 1501, when he took a position in Grenoble. Spotted by Anne of Brittany, Mouton jumped ship to work in her chapel and subsequently that of her son-in-law Francis I. He was probably therefore in charge of the musical festivities when the latter monarch hosted Henry VIII on the famous Field of the Cloth of Gold. From these lofty heights he attracted the attention of the Medici Pope, Leo X and died a revered master and wealthy man at a respectable age. His most frequently recorded piece is the sublime Christmas antiphon, Nesciens Mater. The work has an instantly memorable main theme and an ingenious canonic structure, combining constraint with variety, to create one of the choral masterpieces of the 16th century. This disc, however, contains all of Mouton’s eight-part choral works in a veritable feast of polyphonic discoveries. The centrepiece is his Missa Tu es Petrus which demonstrates that while Mouton may be rhythmically uniform, “his melody flows in a supple thread,” as 16th-century music theorist Heinrich Glarean put it. Indeed, it is this tuneful quality that makes the program so beguiling – it’s not…

I found these performances of Schubert’s two Piano Trios sublime. I’ve long admired Schiff’s Schubert Sonatas, especially his intimate affectionate phrasing – which is, admittedly, sometimes a little too affectionate. The performances are wonderfully persuasive, with steady tempos which never drag and impressive chemistry (he and the violinist are married). I’d never sampled Miklós Perényi’s playing before, but on the strength of these performances, I thinks he’s been seriously underestimated. The trio play off each other and don’t “break out” jarringly with their solos and remain, in character, as it were, to preserve the existing mood and the architecture of the whole. What I also loved was the balance between exuberance and reflection. I sometimes think this calibration is even more important in Schubert than in Mozart. The B-major trio is obviously the sunnier of the two but it’s the later, E flat D 929, one of Schubert’s last chamber works, composed under the shadow of death, which moved me indescribably. Despite the key signature, which in Beethoven heralds heroic deeds etc, here is Schubert at his most declamatory, but also at his most ruminative. Some commentators discern a decline in quality of the last two movements but you’d never…

The opening titles of this DVD show pianist and conductor in rehearsal: two old men who first played in concert together 50 years earlier. Boulez is no longer the zealous young maverick who wanted to burn down concert halls (figuratively and, possibly, literally speaking); Barenboim has, of course, long been a conductor himself. In a printed interview the pianist relates that he didn’t come to appreciate Liszt until after he had accompanied Claudio Arrau in the Second Concerto. The concert opens with Wagner’s early Faust Overture, filled with hints of the master to come but still in the thrall of Weber. The burnished tone of the Staatskapelle Orchestra and clarity of Boulez’s conducting sit well together. This could well be one of the conductor’s favourite pieces, although his impassive face never gives the game away. Barenboim’s weighty touch is, in my view, not entirely suited to Liszt. While he produces a lovely full tone in the quiet passages (especially impressive in the Second Concerto), thundering fortes and double-octave passages sound and look effortful. In fact, despite excellent aural results, there is not a lot of the joy of music-making on show here. The Second Concerto precedes the better-known First, where…

At just 29 years old, conductor Robin Ticciati has already been named as the next music director of Glyndebourne, a position he will take up in 2014. If this charming Hänsel und Gretel, recorded in 2010, is anything to go by, the venerable festival is in very safe hands indeed. Ticciati’s account of Humperdinck’s opera is both expansive and electric, tripping through Humperdinck’s numerous folksong quotations while still maintaining the grand sweep of his score, and best of all evoking a true sense of fairytale magic. He’s aided and abetted by two first-rate siblings in the form of Alice Coote and Lydia Teuscher. Coote’s robust and earthy mezzo is tailor-made for breeches roles, and she’s a delightful Hänsel, conveying perfectly the boy’s ongoing battle between bravado and complete terror. Teuscher is a sweet and sparkling Gretel, her light soprano convincingly girlish but thankfully never too cutesy or twee. Together they’re a perfectly matched pair, and even without the benefit of visuals, their playful dynamic is palpable. Indeed, vocal acting is a strength throughout the cast: Irmgard Vilsmaier is a mother to be reckoned with, her bluster underpinned by the full force of a dramatic soprano, while William Dazeley’s Father… Continue…

Released to coincide with this year’s Sydney International Piano Competition, this disc of Russian music showcases a previous winner. In 2008, Konstantine Shamray won not only the First Prize but also the People’s Choice award. Listen to the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Sonata and you will understand the excitement caused by this young pianist. The piano was not Tchaikovsky’s natural medium, and parts of his sonata of 1878 sound like the keyboard reduction of a symphony. Understanding this, Shamray revels in the quasi-orchestral gestures of the first movement (Chopin’s heroics a clear influence), and savours the dark lyricism of the slow movement. In the fleet scherzo and dazzling finale his light touch impresses. A crucial section of the scherzo involves the repetition of a simple melodic figure with a descending scale in the bass. This passage could easily sound trivial, but so spry is the pianist’s response that instead it sparkles. He creates a mood of half-lights and shadows most effectively in four late pieces by Scriabin, especially the Feuillet d’album. Scriabin’s fragrant, introverted music is as impressionistic as anything by Debussy. By contrast, Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No 8 occupies a more robust emotional terrain. The third of Prokofiev’s so-called…