Martin Buzacott

Martin Buzacott

Martin Buzacott has been a long time Limelight contributor since. He is currently the Brisbane classical music reviewer for The Australian and an occasional broadcaster on ABC Classic FM. He is also the author of the book The Rite of Spring: 75 years of ABC Music-Making.


Articles by Martin Buzacott

CD and Other Review

Review: Mahler: Symphony No 9 (Dudamel)

At just 32 years of age, Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel is already the hottest property in classical music. Both on the mean streets of Caracas with his Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, and closer to Hollywood Boulevard with the LA Philharmonic, who’ve just re-signed him as Chief Conductor until 2019, and even over in Gothenburg in Europe, he’s presiding over a musical revolution. And his Mahler recordings have already played a big part in it, whether it’s the Fifth Symphony with the South American kids, the live DVD of the Eighth, or various download-only recordings of other Mahler masterpieces, all given extraordinarily compelling readings. But none of those previous releases could truly prepare you for an encounter with this, Dudamel’s first full-scale Mahler CD with the LA Philharmonic in arguably the greatest symphony of them all, the Ninth. Recorded live last year before an audience with jaws on floor at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, it is incredibly well played (with Australia’s own Andrew Bain on first horn) and beautifully recorded by the Deutsche Grammophon engineers. But it’s Dudamel’s command of the overall architecture, and in particular his unerring… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

May 22, 2013
CD and Other Review

Review: Prokofiev: Violin Concerto No 2 and Sonatas

Scary time, the 1930s, when the Stalinist denunciation of Soviet artists made for serious anxiety among composers just waiting for the dreaded knock at the door from the secret police, and some of the justifiable paranoia is manifested in the music itself. Take the searing opening solo melody in Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto for instance, with which Dutch star Janine Jansen opens her outstanding new all- Prokofiev disc. It’s a restless, unsettled kind of thing, and that first movement as a whole is a musical cat on a hot tin roof, jumping at its own shadows, and made all the more disconcerting by the intellectual clarity of the performance and the equivalent audio definition in a masterly production job by Decca’s engineers. Not that it’s all Reds-under-the-bed hysteria. The concerto’s slow movement is a gloriously long-arching melody, even if the mechanical accompaniment provides a menacing, albeit subtle, reminder of the machinery of war parading by outside. Every note here is made to count, and while it never fully engages the emotions, Jansen again demonstrates why her first recording back in 2004 sold 300,000 copies. She is the violinist for the age, detached yet precise, cool but considered, and when she…

May 16, 2013
CD and Other Review

Review: Vivica Genaux: A Tribute to Faustina Bordoni

Vivica Genaux’s superb recording of arias by Handel and Hasse composed for Faustina Bordoni shows why that 18th-century singer, who had a notorious catfight with her rival Francesca Cuzzoni in front of the Princess
 of Wales, was so envied. Handel wrote some glorious arias for her, most notably Lusinghe piu care from Alessandro, beautifully sung by Genaux on the opening track. Johann Adolph Hasse didn’t quite have the magic touch of Handel musically, but he married Bordoni and then proceeded to compose 
at least 15 operatic roles for her – truly justifying their contemporary reputation as the power couple of 18th-century opera. As for Genaux, she began her career singing Hasse’s music back in the 1990s with René Kollo, and her interest in his repertoire has never faltered. Her tightly controlled coloratura is ideally suited to Hasse’s technical showpieces, especially in Padre ingiusto from Cajo Fabricio. Genaux’s voice gets swamped occasionally in the Radio Bremen mix, but such is her compelling presence on disc that it hardly matters, and generally she finds sympathetic support in the Cappella Gabetta, established in 2010 with brother and sister Andrés and Sol Gabetta as the driving forces. They are sparkling interpreters of the Baroque…

March 13, 2013
CD and Other Review

Review: Opera Australia: La Traviata on the Harbour (DVD)

By any standards, Opera Australia’s staging of La Traviata on Sydney Harbour in April was 
a triumph. The terrifying logistics included a purpose-built raked stage on foundations driven deep into the harbour bed, a signature oversized chandelier rising and falling above the action, and amplified singers coordinated by video-link with conductor Brian Castles-Onion and the AOBO Orchestra underneath it all. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, and did anyone mention how much this all must have cost? In the end, the critics were unanimous in their praise for 
a production that had so many unforgettable visual images associated with it, from the fireworks at the end of the drinking song, to the high notes in Sempre Libera being sung mid-air above Sydney Harbour, and on to the party guests in Act Two arriving by water-taxi. But as this incredible DVD demonstrates, what made this production one for the ages was the exact opposite of spectacle. With its superb casting, Francesca Zambello’s staging of the Verdi masterpiece centres ultimately on the deep and profoundly human relationships that occur against that tawdry world of the beautiful people and their glitter-ball existence. Librettist Francesco Piave’s intense psychological drama features lengthy duets wherein the…

March 12, 2013
CD and Other Review

Review: Lang Lang: The Chopin Album

It can’t be easy being Lang Lang, what with the hype surrounding him as the world’s favourite pianist and all. And yet as a commercial commodity the 30-year-old’s been delivering that showmanship and technical excellence ever since he wowed Beijing and the world more than half his lifetime ago. The hard bit comes in translating the unparalleled reputation into musical performances that truly take your breath away year after year. He remains a wonderful player, the recording quality of his discs is a given, and in the show- off works like those featured on his previous Liszt album, his extrovert style is hard to beat. But Chopin? Sure, it’s well- known that Lang Lang has built much of his career on this beloved composer’s work, and for the non- specialist music-lover buying on the performer’s well-deserved reputation alone, there will be more than enough musical ability here to leave a favourable impression. But for those comparing Lang Lang’s Chopin
 with recent efforts by the now- septuagenarian Maurizio Pollini
on DG, and Lang Lang’s labelmate, young tearaway Khatia Buniatishvili, things become more competitive. With all the poetry and sadness deriving from a lifetime of supreme musicianship, Pollini’s take on
the 24 Preludes Op…

March 11, 2013
CD and Other Review

Review: Brahms/Berg: Violin Concertos

Despite the academic narrative that suggests opposing aesthetics, the pairing of the Brahms and Berg Violin Concertos makes perfect historical sense, Berg’s anguished tribute In Memory of an Angel 
to Alma Mahler’s daughter, who died aged just 18, representing a logical extension of the late Romantic sensibility from which the Second Viennese School took its lead. But French violinist Renaud Capuçon’s performance of the two works, conducted by fellow 30-something Daniel Harding with the Vienna Philharmonic, almost makes Brahms sound postmodern compared with the merely “modern” Berg, courtesy of the vastly different characters that he brings to each of its three movements. Technically excellent throughout, the first movement of the Brahms faffs about interpretively for nearly its entire 22-minute duration, not really engaging the emotions, until the Kreisler cadenza (so much spikier and self-conscious than the usual
 Joachim one) suddenly resolves into the most sublime conclusion imaginable. The slow movement then continues in the same
 vein, making it a candidate for a standalone Swoon compilation. Then the finale sounds like it’s had its structure rearranged by Picasso in his cubist phase, passages of clashing genres and rhythmic gear shifts being emphasised (à la Boulez with Mahler) rather than reconciled. And…

March 11, 2013
CD and Other Review

Review: Schubert: Complete Symphonies (Minkowski)

What a journey is traversed in Schubert’s nine symphonies, from the adolescent pomposity of the opening flourish of the First, through the genuine drama of the Fifth and onto the pure, unadulterated inspiration of the final two. And along the way are the under-appreciated gems, the Third in particular that, please forgive me, beats hands- down anything that Mozart or Mendelssohn had written in the symphonic form by the same age of barely 20. No wonder so many of the great conductors have had a crack at the complete set, and let’s just list von Karajan, Böhm, Barenboim, Muti, Abbado and Harnoncourt for starters, not to mention the Peter Maag LP-era and the Jos van Immerseel sets. So Marc Minkoswki and Les Musiciens du Louvre Grenoble are mixing it with the big boys in this new boxed set recorded live in March 2012 in Vienna’s Konzerthaus. Good thing they know what they’re doing. Using the same technique they applied to Haydn’s London Symphonies, the 30-year-old French group performed the entire series in a week and recorded the lot, the upshot of the spontaneity being some really exciting performances, and the downside being the occasional ouch-moment when the period instruments remind…

March 7, 2013
CD and Other Review

Review: Alison Balsom: Sound the Trumpet

When any classical musician wears milliondollar jewels and designer micro-dresses to industry events, is dubbed by Fleet Street as the “Trumpet Crumpet”, and sends the tabloids into a frenzy when she breaks up with her boyfriend, you could be forgiven for assuming that she’s just a rubbish player trading on her good looks. But from the moment Alison Balsom enters on Sound the Trumpet, her fifth album since the career-defining Caprice of 2006, all cynicism and doubts are cast aside. Playing natural (valveless) trumpets, the 34-year-old multi- Classical Brit award-winner is in rare form and this follow-up to last year’s Seraph, which featured scary contemporary concerto repertoire, contains ceremonial music by Britain’s two greatest early masters in the form. With an inspired English Concert, reunited on disc with their founder Trevor Pinnock for the first time since 2002 and captured vibrantly within the album’s rich sound palette, Balsom’s trumpet at first seems strangely subdued by comparison. But it soon becomes clear that it’s the less flashy tone of the period-instrument itself – blending rather than dominating like its modern successor would – and also part of an overall strategy to keep the trumpetweaving in and out of the album fabric…

February 28, 2013
CD and Other Review

Review: Bloch & Bruch (Natalie Clein, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Ilan Volkov)

Ever since she won two major competitions as a 16-year-old nearly two decades ago, Natalie Clein has had a reputation in her native Britain not just as one of the finest cellists going around but also as one of the most intelligent, a fact borne out in her extraordinary previous recording of music by Kodály. But that acclaimed disc – one of only a handful of commercial recordings she’s made in her entire career – was only a warm-up for this magnificent new CD of masterpieces for cello and orchestra by Bloch and Bruch. In her succinct addition to the main liner notes, Clein describes Bloch’s “deep sense of longing and loneliness” – qualities which are more than demonstrated in a stunning reading of the immortal Schelomo. The very first notes on solo cello sear the soul, before burning their way deep down in a rich sound mix, and when Ilan Volkov fires up the BBC Scottish Symphony in the big tuttis it’s almost overwhelming. Clein has a way of making the cello wailand keen like a lamenting voice drifting in from some windswept hill, wild and untamed in its spirit but with never a note out of place. And…

November 14, 2012
CD and Other Review

Review: Valentina Lisitsa: Live at the Royal Albert Hall

Behold the quintessential 21st-century classical musician, Valentina Lisitsa, an American-based Ukrainian whose homemade videos have garnered 50 million YouTube hits (and counting), and forged for the formerly unemployed pianist an international career that culminated in this recital in June at the Royal Albert Hall. Decca are the Johnny-Come-Latelys in all of this, but have given it the due sense of urgency, releasing the completed package online just a week after YouTube viewers had watched the whole thing unfolding live. Minor-league pianists making such a dramatic leap to major success usually have some marketable eccentricity, like a potty mouth or a tragic autobiography or a swimsuit model’s figure, but aside from a shock of blonde hair à la Claudia Schiffer, Lisitsa doesn’t. What she does have, though, is a sincerity about her playing and an ability to communicate with her audiences visually and emotionally, together with a refreshingly olde-worlde technique honed in the East European tradition of Josef Hofmann and Rachmaninov. Purists will still find plenty to hate about her playing, especially her stilted Chopin, but she has more than enough artistic credibility to take on the kind of repertoire featured here in this plebiscite concert programmed, naturally enough, by… Continue…

November 2, 2012