PATTI’S HIGH NOTES Patti LuPone reflects on her Tony Award-winning roles ON SONG How baritone Roderick Williams became a supreme advocate for the English songbook PATHWAYS TO A CURE Focal dystonia can end a musician’s career but is a treatment in sight? INTO THE DEEP Christos Tsiolkas captures a watershed moment in a powerful new oratorio
Jaime Martín leads the MSO in Carl Orff’s thundering Carmina Burana, plus the extraordinary yidaki virtuoso William Barton performs Peter Sculthorpe’s Earth Cry.
4–6 JULY
Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall
6 On Stage
The buzz around live performance
12 In the Limelight
Arts industry news and views
16 On Song
How Roderick Williams became the “go-to guy” for English song by Clive Paget
24 Patti’s High Notes
Ahead of an Australian tour, Patti LuPone reflects on her Broadway career by Jansson J. Antmann
32 Pathways to a Cure
What is focal dystonia? How does it affect musicians? And can it be treated? by Steve Dow
40 Into the Deep
The challenge and pride in co-writing Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan by Christos Tsiolkas
46 Soundings
46 The Long and Boundless Road by Simon Tedeschi ESSAY
48 On the Record by Clive Paget RECORDINGS
50 Cutting Edge by Maddy Briggs NEW MUSIC
51 Regional Heartlands by Jo Litson CLASSICAL MUSIC
52 Looking to the Horizon by Steve Dow DANCE
54 Eight Symphonic Masterworks by Will Yeoman BOOKS
54 A Silence by Jason Blake FILM
56 On Air & Online
This month’s concert highlights from ABC Classic, independent radio and streaming 62 Coda 62 GUY
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This month’s cover features Broadway star Patti LuPone who performs her new show, A Life in Notes, in Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane this month. Photo © Douglas Friedman
Clive Paget
Clive Paget is a former Limelight Editor, now Editor-at-Large, and a tour leader for Limelight Arts Travel. Based in London after three years in New York, he writes for The Guardian, BBC Music Magazine, Gramophone, Musical America and Opera News. Before moving to Australia, he directed and developed new musical theatre for London’s National Theatre.
Jansson J. Antmann
A Prague-trained scenographer, Jansson J. Antmann designed Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Tell Me On a Sunday in Sydney and the Czech Republic. A regular guest on ABC Radio and Editor of LaVie in Europe, he was the publicist at Darlinghurst Theatre Company and acting Deputy Editor at Limelight, where he is a regular contributor.
Steve Dow
Steve Dow is the 2020 Walkley Arts Journalism Award recipient for his essay, profile and reportage portfolio. The Melbourne-born, Sydney-based arts writer’s work also appears in The Saturday Paper, Guardian Australia, The Monthly, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Meanjin, Art Guide and Vault.
Christos Tsiolkas
Christos Tsiolkas is an internationally recognised, awardwinning author, whose books include The In-Between, Damascus, Loaded and The Slap among others. He is also a playwright, essayist and screenwriter. He lives in Melbourne.
Simon Tedeschi
Simon Tedeschi is a classical pianist and writer. His first book, Fugitive, was released in May 2022 through Upswell and was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. He was awarded the 2022 Calibre Essay Prize by Australian Book Review
Maddy Briggs
Maddy Briggs is an electroacoustic composer and writer. She joined Limelight as Staff Writer in 2022. Her work has been featured in VIVID Sydney, the International Electroacoustic Music Festival and on BBC Radio 6 Music.
Guy Noble
Guy Noble is a conductor, pianist, host and writer. He conducts all the major Australian orchestras in a wide variety of music from Beethoven to Broadway, Mozart to movies. He has written his Soapbox column for Limelight since January 2008.
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Australian String Quartet: ASQ with the Sydney Symphony and Vanguard
Joining the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in early June, the Australian String Quartet performs John Adams’ Absolute Jest, originally commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony for its centenary in 2012. According to Adams, the ‘jest’ of the title is derived from the Latin gesta – a series of doings, deeds and exploits – and builds on fragments of Beethoven’s Opus 131, Opus 135 and the Grosse Fuge. This is followed by ASQ’s national tour Vanguard, featuring works by Beethoven and Korngold alongside the national premiere of Harry Sdraulig’s String Quartet No. 2. Jansson J. Antmann
6–8 June, Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House; 18 June –5 July, various venues around the country, asq.com.au
Musica Viva Australia: Kirill Gerstein
London Symphony Orchestra’s Spotlight Artist for 2024, Kirill Gerstein performs Chopin, Liszt, Poulenc and Schumann alongside Liza Lim’s Transcendental Étude, commissioned for him by Musica Viva Australia. It includes a fragment from Shervin Hajipour’s Baraye, the unofficial anthem of Iran’s Women, Life, Freedom movement. Lim writes, “In the song, grief and longing are embedded within a lyric vein. On top of that dimension in my piece is a ‘tearing up’ and ‘knotting’ of time with repetitions that create glitches in the music as well as moments of trembling or shaking.” (Read our interview with Liza Lim on page 50.) JA 10–23 June, various venues around the country, musicaviva.com.au
The Song Company: The Stars Turn and Vespers for Mother Earth
The Song Company embarks on a tour showcasing four decades of music-making by Australian composers. The program includes Peter Sculthorpe’s 1970 masterpiece The Stars Turn, Elena Kats-Chernin’s Mater, Nigel Butterley’s Nightfall from Paradise Unseen, more recent works by Katy Abbott and Alice Chance, and the world premiere of Angus Davison’s Lime Song. It also features O magnum mysterium from Ross Edwards’ Vespers for Mother Earth, which will be performed in full during the 40th Anniversary Gala Concert at Sydney’s City Recital Hall on 23 June. JA 14 June – 5 July, various venues around the country, the.song.company
Australian Chamber Orchestra: Altstaedt plays Haydn & Tchaikovsky Gramophone Award-winning cellist Nicolas Altstaedt makes his ACO debut directing a program that includes Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C major. Discovered in Prague just 60 years ago, its influence can be heard in the works of György Kurtág and Iannis Xenakis, both of whom feature here. Sándor Veress’s Four Transylvanian Dances get a look-in, as do Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations, written with the help of Wilhelm Fitzenhagen who premiered them and later made controversial changes to give the cello more prominence. JA 14–30 June, various venues around the country, aco.com.au
West Australian Symphony Orchestra: Ring Cycle
Celebrated Wagnerian conductor Asher Fisch sets out to capture the essence of Wagner’s tetralogy in this concert of highlights including The Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla from Das Rheingold, The Ride of the Valkyries from Die Walküre, Forest Murmurs from Siegfried and Siegfried’s Funeral March from Götterdämmerung. This epic journey is preceded by the overture from Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie and the world premiere of Lachlan Skipworth’s Flute Concerto, written especially for WASO Principal Flute Andrew Nicholson and commissioned by Geoff Stearn (see page 63). JA 21 & 22 June, Perth Concert Hall, waso.com.au
Queensland Symphony Orchestra: Brahms & Rachmaninov / Melbourne Symphony Orchestra: Jaime conducts Rachmaninov and Dvořák
MSO Chief Conductor Jaime Martín and piano virtuoso Denis Kozhukhin join the QSO for Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
Throughout this set of variations on Paganini’s 24 caprices for solo violin, be sure to listen out for the medieval Dies irae – a theme Rachmaninov previously used in his symphonic poem Isle of the Dead. Kozhukhin will also give a recital of Liszt and Schubert at the QSO Studio on 24 June, before joining Martín and the MSO for Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in Melbourne and Geelong. JA
21 & 22 June, Concert Hall, QPAC, Brisbane, qso.com.au; 27 & 29 June, Hamer Hall, Melbourne; 28 June, Costa Hall, Geelong, mso.com.au
Sydney Symphony Orchestra:
Alexander Melnikov performs Shostakovich Lovers of piano music are spoiled for choice, with Alexander Melnikov arriving on our shores to perform Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto. He is partnered by SSO Principal Trumpet David Elton in this remnant of what Shostakovich had originally intended to be a trumpet concerto for the Leningrad Philharmonic’s trumpeter Alexander Schmidt. Conducted by Giordano Bellincampi, the program also features Richard Strauss’s tone poems Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks While in Sydney, Melnikov will also give a recital of Schubert, Brahms and Debussy. JA
22 & 23 June, Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House; 24 June, City Recital Hall, Sydney, sydneysymphony.com
OPERA AND VOCAL
Pinchgut Opera: Dido and Aeneas
The origins of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, considered by some to be the first opera in English, are shrouded in mystery. One thing that does seem certain is that chunks of the music are missing – the entire prologue, for instance. For Lucy Clements’ staging, Kate Mulvany has written a new spoken-word prologue to bring contemporary relevance to Purcell’s setting, while Erin Helyard adds other music by Purcell to replace some of the lost dances. The cast stars Valda Wilson and David Greco as the royal lovers, with Sara Macliver as Dido’s confidant Belinda and Kanen Breen as the malignant sorceress. Clive Paget 30 May – 3 June, City Recital Hall, Sydney, pinchgutopera.com.au
Palace Opera & Ballet: Carmen
As in his Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci (much enjoyed at Opera Australia), director Damiano Michieletto sets his Carmen for The Royal Opera among a close-knit community fraying at the edges with the tragedy just another small-town calamity. In this sexual pressure cooker, the fatal attraction of Carmen for the emotionally wounded Don José is an accident waiting to happen. Stylishly set in 1970s Andalucía, Russian mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina is electrifying in the lead role, with elegant Polish tenor Piotr Beczała outstanding as Don José. Michieletto’s moralising, bespectacled Micaëla is an original take, wonderfully sung by Olga Kulchynska, with Kostas Smoriginas a sharp-suited toreador in acid yellow flares. CP 1–5 June, various cinemas, palaceoperaandballet.com.au
Opera Australia: Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan Opening to a five-star review from Limelight at the 2022 Adelaide Festival, Joe Twist, Alana Valentine and Christos Tsiolkas’ oratorio-cum-opera explores events surrounding the drowning of lecturer Dr George Ian Ogilvie Duncan in 1972. Alleged cover-ups and international outrage led to South Australia decriminalising homosexuality before the rest of Australia and the English-speaking world.
The libretto fuses inquest transcripts and press clippings spanning five decades. Neil Armfield’s acclaimed production features Mark Oates in the dual roles of Duncan and SA Premier Don Dunstan, Tomáš Kantor as the Lost Boy/narrator and Pelham Andrews in the other roles. Brett Weymark conducts the Opera Australia Orchestra and Chorus. (Read the feature by Christos Tsiolkas on page 40.) CP
14–16 June, Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House, opera.org.au
Opera Australia: Tosca
The national opera company’s new production of Puccini’s bodice-ripper moves from Melbourne’s Margaret Court Arena to the confines of the Sydney Opera House. Edward Dick’s production for the UK’s Opera North won plaudits overseas. With its suspended gilded dome and stadium lighting, it certainly sounds striking. Giselle Allen, who originated the role in this production, and Karah Son do duty as the ill-fated Diva with a capital ‘D’. Young Woo Kim is her lover Cavaradossi, with Armenian baritone Gevorg Hakobyan and Warwick Fyfe as the vicious police chief Scarpia. Johannes Fritzsch and Tahu Matheson share the conducting honours. CP
25 June – 16 August, Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House, opera.org.au
Festival of Voices
The Tasmanian celebration of all things vocal features hundreds of performers from Australia and overseas. Traditional and contemporary works rub shoulders with cabaret and educational workshops, while headline acts include Sydney’s The Song Company and the Canberrabased Luminescence Chamber Singers. Choral highlights include a program of women’s song hosted at the Cascades Female Factory, a four-choir exploration of works from the 14th century to today, and Vox Harmony and Melbourne’s Concordis Chamber Choir performing modern Australian repertoire. This year’s Classical Choral Workshop focuses on Mozart’s Great Mass in C minor, learned over five days, and performed at Hobart’s Federation Concert Hall. (Read our interview with Artistic Director Isobel Marmion on page 65.) CP
28 June – 7 July, various venues in Hobart, Launceston and other Tasmanian towns, festivalofvoices.com
Palace Opera & Ballet: Don Quichotte
Damiano Michieletto is also the creative brains behind Opéra National de Paris’ new production of Massenet’s late masterpiece. Loosely based on Cervantes, the composer zeroes in on the lonely, memory-haunted man at the story’s heart. Having divested itself of Putinsupporting Russian bass Ildar Abdrazakov, the company has drafted in American bass-baritone Christian Van Horn to sing the title role. French mezzo-soprano Gaëlle Arquez (a rising star) sings the knight-errant’s beloved Dulcinée, with Étienne Dupuis as the Don’s hapless sidekick Sancho Panza. Patrick Fournillier, currently Music Director of the Polish National Opera, conducts. Watch out for Aussie tenor Nicholas Jones as Juan. CP
29 June – 3 July, various cinemas, palaceoperaandballet.com.au
THEATRE
Opera Australia & GWB Entertainment: Sunset Boulevard
Andrew Lloyd Webber famously wrote the role of Christine Daaé in The Phantom of the Opera for Sarah Brightman. Now, the best-selling soprano stars in a brand-new, sumptuous Australian production of Lloyd Webber’s musical masterpiece, Sunset Boulevard. Brightman plays Norma Desmond, a former silent movie star, who dreams of making a comeback. When a struggling young writer, played by Tim Draxl, appears at her home, their volatile, opportunistic relationship leads to tragedy. Jo Litson Until 11 August, Princess Theatre, Melbourne, sunsetmusical.com.au
RISING: Counting and Cracking
Counting and Cracking, the award-winning saga by S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack, has its Melbourne premiere at this year’s RISING festival (1–16 June). The epic play, which moves between 1956 and 2004, draws on Shakthidharan’s own family experience and
expansive research to tell a compelling story combining Sri Lankan history and life in contemporary Australia. Directed by Flack, the Belvoir and Kurinji co-production premiered at the 2019 Sydney Festival. Featuring 19 actors from six countries, who perform in Tamil, Sinhalese and English, it was then staged in Edinburgh and Birmingham in the UK. A remarkable theatre experience. JL 31 May – 23 June, Union Theatre, University of Melbourne, 2024.rising.melbourne
Sydney Opera House & Soft Tread Enterprises:
The Gospel According to Paul Jonathan Biggins steps into Paul Keating’s shoes for a final Sydney run, following sold-out seasons around the country. The hilariously funny, astute solo show traces the life and career of PJ Keating, the 24th Prime Minister of Australia. Running 90 minutes without interval, it not only showcases Keating’s renowned wit, with which he skewered his opponents, but examines the importance of his political career. Biggins puts in such an uncanny performance, you almost forget at times that it isn’t Keating himself on stage. JL 4–23 June, Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, sydneyoperahouse.com
Adelaide Cabaret Festival
The first program under new Artistic Director Virginia Gay opens with the traditional Variety Gala, and with 79 performances over 12 nights, there’s plenty to choose from. Headline artist Patti LuPone performs her new show A Life in Notes, which she will then tour. (Read our feature on page 24.) In an Adelaide exclusive, Lisa Simone presents Keeper of the Flame, featuring some of the classic music composed and played by her mother, the great Nina Simone. There will also be cabaret shows by Gillian Cosgriff, Emma Donovan, iOTA, Reuben Kaye, Kate Miller-Heidke and Christie Whelan Browne among others, while the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra will accompany Hopelessly Devoted, a tribute to Olivia Newton-John. JL 7–22 June, Adelaide Festival Centre and other venues, cabaret.adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au
Black Swan State Theatre Company:
RBG: Of Many, One
Suzie Miller, a former lawyer and author of the internationally acclaimed play Prima Facie, returns to the bench with RBG: Of Many, One, a celebration of the trailblazing career of US Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Heather Mitchell gives a magnificent performance in the one-woman drama, which premiered at Sydney Theatre Company in 2022, directed by Priscilla Jackman, where it returned for a sold-out season earlier this year. Moving back and forth in time, from RBG’s teenage years to her 80s, Mitchell brilliantly captures her changing physicality and vocals. Now Perth theatregoers can savour her performance, followed in July by Prima Facie, starring Sophia Forrest. JL 13–23 June, Heath Ledge Theatre, Perth, blackswantheatre.com.au
Bell Shakespeare: King Lear
Robert Menzies plays King Lear in a new production directed by Artistic Director Peter Evans. Lear’s plan to share his kingdom among his three daughters leads to disaster. “The idea of succession is huge at the moment. It’s something that never goes away, but our interest in it has been so heightened by the TV show. But it’s got to be one of the top three themes explored in Shakespeare’s plays,” says Evans. The production is presented in the intimate setting of The Neilson Nutshell in Sydney and the Fairfax Studio at Arts Centre Melbourne (25 July –11 August). “It will be a way to explore whether it’s power that corrupts a person,” says Evans. “Can opportunity alone turn people into someone quite brutal, or is it in a person’s nature?” JL
14 June – 20 July, The Neilson Nutshell, Sydney, bellshakespeare.com.au
Queensland Theatre: Cost of Living
Martyna Majok won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Cost of Living. The play centres on two sets of relationships. John, a wealthy student at Princeton University with cerebral palsy, hires the secretive Jess
as his carer. Meanwhile, unemployed truck driver Eddie tries to reconcile with his ex-wife Ani, who has become a wheelchair user after an accident. This co-production between Queensland Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company is co-directed by Priscilla Jackman and Dan Daw, who plays John. “It’s an incredibly powerful story about the intersection of people [who have a] lived experience of disability and those who don’t, and people who have the privilege of money and those who don’t,” says Kip Williams, Artistic Director of STC, which stages the play from 18 July. JL 15 June – 13 July, Bille Brown Theatre, Brisbane, queenslandtheatre.com.au
GWB Entertainment & Andrew Henry Presents: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
When Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre presented Edward Albee’s corrosive black comedy in December last year, with Kat Stewart as Martha and David Whiteley as George, the season sold out before it opened. Hailed as “electrifying”, the production, directed by Sarah Goodes, is now being given a strictly limited commercial run at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre. It’s the first time a Red Stitch show has moved from its 80-seat St Kilda home to a larger venue. Snap up your tickets while you can. JL 29 June – 14 July, Comedy Theatre, Melbourne, virginiawoolf.com.au
Sydney Dance Company: momenta momenta is Artistic Director Rafael Bonachela’s first full-length work for Sydney Dance Company since Impermanence in 2021. Described as “a journey into the poetry and physicality of human bonds,” it promises “a kaleidoscope of energy, capturing moments where individual trajectories collide and intertwine”. Composer Nick Wales has created a soundscape that incorporates Distant Light by Pēteris Vasks, while production designer Elizabeth Gadsby is collaborating with Bonachela and lighting designer Damien Cooper for the first time. momenta premieres at Sydney’s Roslyn Packer Theatre (28 May – 8 June) before embarking on a national tour. JA 28 May – 9 August, various locations around the country; then Melbourne 8–12 October, sydneydancecompany.com
Queensland Ballet: Coppélia
Based on ETA Hoffmann’s tale The Sandman, Delibes’ ballet tells the story of Swanilda and her fiancé Franz, who is obsessed with an automaton he believes to be Dr Coppelius’s daughter. Choreographer Greg Horsman made the role of Franz his own, dancing it with The Australian Ballet for many years. In 2014, he created his own version for Queensland Ballet, relocating the story to 19th-century Hahndorf in South Australia. It has since gone on to enchant audiences in Western Australia and makes a welcome return to Brisbane. JA
7–22 June, Playhouse, QPAC, Brisbane, queenslandballet.com.au
Saturday 13 July, 3pm
Costa Hall
Geelong / Djilang
Sunday 14 July, 5pm
Hamer Hall
Melbourne / Naarm
A round-up of our recent news reports
The Singapore Symphony Orchestra will make its Australian debut in February 2025 with concerts in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. The tour marks the orchestra’s first overseas engagement since 2017.
Led by its Music Director Hans Graf, the program features 17-year-old violin star Chloe Chua and the orchestra’s Sydney-born Principal Cellist Pei-Sian Ng performing Brahms’ final orchestral work, the 1887 Double Concerto for Violin and Cello. Singaporean composer Koh Cheng Jin’s shimmering evocation of the Singapore firefly, Luciola singapura, is also on the bill, alongside Tchaikovsky’s towering Fifth Symphony.
The orchestra’s 2025 season includes a collaboration between the Singapore and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras and Choruses for a performance of Carl Orff’s much-loved Carmina Burana, performed at Singapore’s Esplanade Concert Hall on 22 and 23 August. Led by Chief Conductor Jaime Martín, the MSO and MSO Chorus will be joined by soprano Siobhan Stagg, tenor Andrew Goodwin and baritone Christopher Tonkin. The program also includes Fanfare for a City by Australian composer Maria Grenfell, Stravinsky’s The Firebird Suite and De Falla’s Three Dances from The Three-Cornered Hat in homage to Martín’s Spanish roots. The MSO signed a four-year cultural partnership with Singapore Symphony Group in 2018, which was later extended until the end of 2025.
Orchestra Victoria has appointed conductor Jessica Gethin as Artistic Advisor, the orchestra’s leading artistic role. Gethin will work with orchestral management on musician recruitment and performance. She will also offer expert guidance in order to uphold performance standards as a pit orchestra for performance partners including Opera Australia and The Australian Ballet, for which she recently conducted Études/Circle Electric
Gethin currently holds the positions of Principal Conductor of the West Australian Ballet and Head of Orchestral Studies and Conducting at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA). She was Founding Chief Conductor of the Perth Symphony Orchestra until 2019 and remains the Ambassador for its Women on the Podium conducting initiative.
Meanwhile, French violinist Matthieu Arama has been appointed as the new Concertmaster for the Opera Australia Orchestra, commencing this August. The role has been covered by Associate Concertmaster Huy-Nguyen Bui since the previous Concertmaster Jun Yi Ma left in August 2022 after a stormy meeting with OA management at which he refused to accept the new terms of his contract. Relations between Ma and the orchestra had been strained since September 2020 when the musicians posted a vote of no confidence in him for his alleged involvement in helping decide which musicians were to be made redundant due to losses incurred during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Arama is currently Concertmaster of the orchestra of the Opéra National de Bordeaux, France’s secondlargest opera house. He will be responsible for leading
the OAO through an annual program of more than 250 performances of opera, ballet, musical theatre and concerts for OA and The Australian Ballet. He has already served as Guest Concertmaster for OA on La traviata and with The Australian Ballet on Swan Lake Australian pianist David Helfgott is to embark on a final tour of Australia in July and August. Presented by Andrew Kay & Associates, Helfgott will bid farewell with a two-piano arrangement of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, played with British pianist Rhodri Clarke. He will also perform solo ballades by Chopin and Liszt, as well as Mendelssohn’s Rondo capriccioso in a series of concerts in Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Sydney. In Adelaide, he will perform a solo recital featuring Beethoven’s Appassionata Piano Sonata and Richard Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto
Helfgott’s life and career was the subject of Scott Hicks’ Academy Award-winning biographical drama Shine starring Geoffrey Rush. The 1996 film traces his turbulent childhood and his struggle with schizoaffective disorder while practising the Rach 3 after being awarded a scholarship to study at London’s Royal College of Music at the age of 19. In 2023, he was one of four musicians featured in an Australian documentary spotlighting neurodiversity, The Musical Mind: A Portrait in Process, also directed by Hicks.
Anthony Hopkins is to play Handel in a biopic scheduled for release in late 2025. The two-time Academy Award winner has been announced as the star of The King of Covent Garden, a film about George Frideric Handel set during the period when he composed his choral masterpiece Messiah. Directed by Andrew Levitas from a screenplay by Tim Slover (based on his 1998 play Joyful Noise), the film is pitched as “a powerfully majestic celebration of genius breaking all the rules to create an anthem inspiring the popular imagination of global audiences”.
Omega Ensemble has announced the four composers chosen for its 2024 CoLAB: Composer Accelerator program. Zinia Chan, Katia Geha, Klearhos Murphy and Felix Wallis will undertake an eight-month mentorship with principal members of the ensemble and visiting composers. They will also develop a new work, which will be premiered during Omega Ensemble’s New Now concert in November at the Sydney Opera House and at Melbourne Recital Centre.
Geha and Murphy have also been chosen to participate in Ensemble Offspring’s 2024 Hatched Composer Intensive. They will join two other emerging composers, Courtney Cousins and Alexander Maltas, for the week-long intensive in November where they will develop and workshop a brand-new work. Each composition will receive its world premiere at the end of the week at EO’s Future Classics concert in the Sydney Opera House’s Utzon Room, alongside new works by Holly Harrison and Kirsten Milenko. For the first time, EO will commission one of the participants to write another work for the ensemble, providing them with a $4,000 fee.
Donne, Women in Music has set a new Guinness World Record for the Longest Acoustic Music Live-Streamed Concert, undertaken to highlight the need for greater diversity and access in music. The YouTube livestream, called Let HER MUSIC Play, invited artists from various music genres, including classical, jazz, pop and folk, to take part. Among the participants were baritone Roderick Williams (who features in a profile on page 16), sopranos Carolyn Sampson, Helen Lacey and Donne founder Gabriella Di Laccio, and pianist Jelena Makarova. The performance took place at the Sala Brasil at London’s Embassy of Brazil and lasted 26 hours, 18 minutes and 57 seconds – during which it showcased 96 musicians and music by 140 women and non-binary composers, arrangers and songwriters.
Donne, Women in Music released its latest report Equality & Diversity in Global Repertoire in 2022, examining the representation of female composers in orchestral programming across the world. It found that 92% of works were written by male composers, 87% of whom were white.
Finally, we pay tribute to two musicians who recently passed away. British conductor Sir Andrew Davis died in Chicago on 20 April, aged 80. He had been undergoing treatment for leukaemia. Known for his insightful conducting and unwavering dedication to the art form, Sir Andrew spoke to Limelight not long ago for a feature in our April issue about Elgar’s Enigma Variations, which he was scheduled to conduct for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in October. Sir Andrew was Chief Conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (2013–2019) then Conductor Laureate (2020–2024). His other positions included Principal Conductor of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (1975–1988), Music Director at Glyndebourne (1988–2000), Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1989–2000) and Music Director and Principal Conductor of Lyric Opera of Chicago (2000–2021). In 1992, he was made a Commander of the British Empire, and in 1999 he was designated a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours List.
Renowned Australian piano technician and philanthropist Ara Vartoukian died in April. He was 64. The son of migrants from Armenia, Vartoukian grew up in Sydney and undertook the Piano Tuning and Technology Course at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. He later studied at overseas piano factories for companies including Yamaha, Bechstein, Steinway & Sons and Bösendorfer, becoming an expert technician. Over the decades, he tuned and serviced many concert grade pianos in venues across Australia and was the in-house technician for Sydney’s City Recital Hall from its inception in 1996. In 2019, he was Steinway’s head technician in the International Tchaikovsky Piano competition. Vartoukian was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia in 2016. Vale. Jo Litson These and other news stories can be read in full on our website.
The latest arts appointments and departures
Kate Wickett has been appointed as the new CEO of City Recital Hall in Sydney. Wickett is the former CEO of Sydney WorldPride, which took place in 2023, and has an extensive and diverse background spanning law, infrastructure, arts, strategic advisory and corporate leadership. She plans to expand the venue’s role “as a cultural nucleus that not only entertains but fosters musical and orchestral excellence, performance and dialogue”.
The Australian Ballet School has appointed Megan Connelly as its new Artistic Director & Head of School, succeeding Lisa Pavane. Having received her early training in Melbourne, Connelly studied at the Princess Grace Academy in Monte Carlo. She joined The Australian Ballet in 1991 before following her passion for teaching. From 2010 to 2020, while working at TAB, she was
a member of The Australian Ballet School’s teaching faculty. Since 2010, she has been a repetiteur and the Rehabilitation Specialist at TAB.
Leanne Benjamin, the new Artistic Director of the Queensland Ballet, has announced her first addition to the company. Australian dancer Alison McWhinney, who hails from Port Macquarie, is returning home to join QB after performing with English National Ballet since 2005. In 2017, she was promoted to First Soloist.
Meanwhile, Joel Woellner, a Principal Artist at QB, has accepted a contract with Ballett Zürich in Switzerland, run by Director and Chief Choreographer Cathy Marston, who created a ballet based on Miles Franklin’s book My Brilliant Career for QB in 2023. Woellner joined QB in 2015 and was promoted to Principal Artist in 2021.
In another key appointment, renowned pianist Tonya Lemoh is to become Head of the Classical Piano Program at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA). She takes up the position in July. JL
At King Charles III’s coronation, baritone Roderick Williams was showcased as a singer and a composer. As he prepares to flex both muscles at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, he chats with Clive Paget about being in the right place at the right time, and how he became “the go-to guy” for English song.
There are many remarkable things about Roderick Williams, not least a consummate ability to communicate through song. And yet, the British baritone and OBE, whose profile skyrocketed last year when he both sang at and composed music for the coronation of King Charles III, puts a great deal of his professional good fortune down to gentle encouragement and being in the right place at the right time.
In fact, it’s notable how often words like “random”, “coincidence”, “accident” and “fortunate” crop up as we chat for well over an hour on a sunny Tuesday afternoon. Williams has invited me to chew the fat at his London club, a hipsterish hidey-hole safely tucked away from the hustle and bustle of Soho. The quietly stylish singer is sipping water and playing the raconteur. That’s another thing at which he excels, perhaps unsurprisingly, considering his preternatural ability to hold an audience in the palm of his hand.
This winter, Williams – known throughout the trade as “Roddy” – will be resident at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville as well as appearing in concerts in Adelaide and Melbourne. Budding soloists keen to learn something about the fine art of song should be queuing up in Newcastle where he will be giving a masterclass and performing in recital.
Williams was born in Barnet, North London in 1965 to a Welsh father and Jamaican mother who had met in Paris before deciding to return to live in the UK. “My dad is a mathematician who became an accountant and then an actuary and a management consultant, so there’s nothing there that says struggling Renaissance artist, but he’s one of the most well-read, most classically versed people I know,” he tells me. “His study, which was underneath my bedroom, was full of poetry and plays.”
“I get the feeling my mother escaped Jamaica to a certain extent,” he continues. “Her intellect demanded she come to Europe where she read modern languages. But they did bring us up in a classical music domain. Looking back, they were not helicopter parents. They didn’t push us into anything. When they came to concerts, they weren’t sitting on the sidelines giving us last-minute pep talks or towelling us down afterwards, so we grew up really enjoying the music we were making.”
At school, Williams sang and played cello, though he never thought of making a career of music. “If you want an easy life, do the thing you’re good at,” he laughs, “but I was no great shakes as a singer. Nobody picked me out; I just enjoyed myself in choirs and had fun. It’s a bit random, but that’s how it happened.”
When his elder brother became a chorister at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford, Williams followed suit, becoming a choral scholar at Magdalen College and singing one or two services a week. “It was a really happy accident that I never got into the main choir; it meant I never had the chance to get sick of it. My brother used to have to stay on at Christmas and sing services, but I never had that pressure. Performing while studying music meant I had a purpose and I had structure in my week. It was a good, rigorous training, particularly for sight-reading.”
After graduating, Williams became a teacher, a decision he puts down to “naivety” or “lack of imagination”. It was something he enjoyed for three years, all the while singing a Messiah here or a Creation there. And then one day he had what he calls a fateful conversation with his wife on Wimbledon Common.
“We were married but both in our early 20s and she asked me out of the blue what my ambition was,” he recalls. “Without having processed it, I said, ‘I’d quite like to try singing.’ And she said, ‘If you don’t give up your teaching job, you’ll never know if you can.’ So, it was a surprise when I went in and resigned my post to set up my stall as a singer.”
After a couple of years of private singing lessons, Williams was encouraged to join the opera course at Guildhall School of Music & Drama. “[I’d never] acted on stage – I’m discounting my 11-year-old appearance as a belly dancer! – and I discovered that this opera malarky is a lot of fun,” he smiles.
Although he’s always been a dab hand at opera’s jollier side – he’s a genuinely funny Papageno, for example –conductors quickly picked up on his instinct for the music of Benjamin Britten. To date, he’s recorded roles in Peter Grimes (Ned Keene for Richard Hickox in 1995 and Balstrode for Edward Gardner a few years ago), as well as appearing in Hickox’s Billy Budd and Albert Herring (his portrayal of Sid, the local wide boy, is definitive).
But it’s song – and especially English song – where Williams reigns supreme, winning the 2023 Limelight Recording of the Year for his album A Shropshire Lad. A collaboration with Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé, the disc features 21 songs by Vaughan Williams, his friends and several of his female pupils, orchestrated by the singer himself.
These days, he’s positively evangelical about singing in the vernacular as opposed to worrying about learning German or Italian, a stumbling block for some students. His feeling for language, stimulated by hours spent in his father’s study, has only deepened
“The singing stuff takes enough time as it is . . . I’ve never had time to market myself as a composer, but I suppose people have cottoned on.”
over time. By way of example, he cites the hymn There is a green hill far away, without a city wall.
“As a child, I thought, ‘What a shame that city didn’t have a wall!’ because I didn’t understand what ‘without’ meant in that context,” he explains. “As I grew older, lightbulbs went off and I understood what the poem actually meant. At another stage, I understood what the poem meant for me, and at another stage, I understood how I could shape a poem in the way I wanted to, to make it mean something for people listening.”
His current standing as an ambassador for English song is something, once again, that he puts down to being the right voice at the right time. (“I have been turned into an advocate for English song because I have done a lot of it,” is how he puts it). His early relationship with the Naxos label was a part of that.
“I happened to be in the right place when they needed someone to record the Finzi cycles,” he says. “I don’t know who put my name forward, I certainly
didn’t tout for business, it just fell into my lap. That led on to Vaughan Williams and Britten and Butterworth and John Ireland; I scooped them up one after the other. The perception grew that I was the go-to guy for English song, and I was very happy.”
With his reputation on the rise, it wasn’t long before the Three Choirs Festival came knocking. English song societies and promoters active in the UK were quick to follow suit. “I was more than happy to go in to bat for them,” he admits.
In his 30s, a handful of competition wins resulted in Williams trekking the length and breadth of Britain singing recitals for music clubs. “They’re quite frightening,” he confesses, “but I cut my teeth doing loads of them. That’s how I became aware that singing to English language audiences meant that the poetry could land on people in real time. You can see if you’re entertaining them or losing them; they begin to yawn and get fidgety up the back.”
“ [I’d never] acted on stage – I’m discounting my 11-year-old appearance as a belly dancer! – and I discovered that this opera malarky is a lot of fun.”
As for the fine art of programming, for Williams it isn’t always a case of more is more. “As any foodie knows, you have to have a sorbet every now and again, but with truly great songs – hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck songs –if you have a whole recital of them, it can dull the effect,” he shares. “Sometimes the audience just needs to relax and cough a bit, that’s quite useful.”
Our extremely pleasant conversation involves a great deal of nerding out over favourite composers and favourite songs. We’re both passionate fans of Finzi, for example, the only composer Williams reckons consistently sets Thomas Hardy to memorable effect. He’s not only encyclopaedic on poetry, he’s quick to put his finger on what works and what doesn’t, even if that means taking a pop at the greats.
“I can think of very few successful settings of Shakespeare sonnets,” he opines. “With the songs from the plays, he’s imagining music, but as I prepare the sonnets, I need to read them backwards, frontwards, sideways. I need to hunt for the verb. It’s the closest English gets to being Germanic in its grammatical structure. Trying to communicate that through singing, I can tie myself up in knots.”
“On the other hand, Purcell is one of those composers who is adept at taking some fairly duff
text and turning it into absolute gold. Even the text for Dido and Aeneas is ho-hum, but that final aria is bulletproof.”
These days, he spends a good deal of time coaching young singers on the importance of looking directly at an audience, a technique by no means embraced by all recitalists. “Most singers begin by looking over the heads of the audience at the fire exit – know your escape route,” he laughs, “so I always challenge them by saying, ‘What happens if you look them in the eye?’ to tease out that vulnerability.”
“I suspect my three years of teaching knocked that right out of me, because there’s no way you can communicate with a classroom of boys if you stare over the tops of their heads. And it’s the ones at the back I’m after – if I can reach them, even for just a few minutes, then I’m really doing it.”
It’s that ability to read the room – and if necessary, alter tack – that makes a Roderick Williams recital feel refreshingly organic. “If you sing Winterreise in German,” he suggests, “you become aware that the audience is very perky in the first song, and they’re quite perky in the last song, but [during] the 22 songs in the middle, they come and go a bit, you know?”
That brings us neatly to the subject of Schubert, a composer whose song cycles he has performed to considerable acclaim over the last eight years. By happy chance, Williams’ decision to study Winterreise seriously for the first time coincided with the pianist Christopher Glynn asking if he would perform it in a new English translation by Jeremy Sams. They later recorded it for Signum Records, and very fine it is too.
“I think Jeremy’s Winter Journey is a work of genius,” Williams enthuses. “It works better than any translation of art song that I’ve seen, because Jeremy is a composer as well as a wordsmith and a director – he’s probably a unicyclist as well. He’s done it in such a way that if he’d given those texts to Schubert, then Schubert would have come up with the same melodic lines. That’s the acid test for me. It’s not fussy; it’s not clever-clever; there’s no ‘quoth’ or ‘thee’, ‘thy’ and ‘thou; it’s totally brilliant.”
And so, in 2016, Williams stood up at London’s Wigmore Hall and sang his first Winterreise – in English. “There were no riots, no one asked for their money back, and I’ve been zealous about it ever since, particularly in schools,” he says. “Mind you, I did it in Enniskillen at the Beckett Festival where they sing Winterreise each year. I explained my workings to them, and a gentleman came up to me afterwards and said, ‘Thank you for singing that in English. Now I’ve heard it, I never want to hear it like that again!’”
In Townsville, he will sing selections from Die schöne Müllerin (in German) in his own arrangement for string quartet and voice. That’s another deliberate choice, as he explains. “A decree went out sometime in the 1940s to say, ‘You must sing Schubert in the original language –irrespective of whether anyone gets anything out of it at all – and you must sing all of it in one go before anyone is allowed to leave.’ But in the 19th century, you would be more likely to get five Müllerin songs in a funny order, then someone would come out and play on the spoons, and then there would be a slow movement from a Brahms piano trio. This idea of completism is a very modern thing.”
He’s also adamant that we should reject the idea that Die schöne Müllerin is a young man’s cycle and Winterreise is for older men. “I think we’ve constructed a folklore around these things in order to intimidate the unwary, both audience and singers,” he says. “This idea that a wizened old singer like me can say to young students, ‘Well, you can try singing this song, but you won’t plumb its true profundity until you’ve been divorced five times and slept rough on Hampstead Heath’ . . . it’s such bollocks!”
As his Shropshire Lad album demonstrates, orchestrating songs is something else for which Williams has shown a remarkable aptitude. It all stems from 2014 when he was asked to sing at the Last Night of the Proms. “The BBC Symphony Orchestra said, ‘What light
music do you have?’ and I said, ‘Oh, I’ve done Ol’ Man River for voice and piano – I could orchestrate that.’ And they said, ‘Yeah, OK!’ At no point did they say, ‘Have you orchestrated anything before? Could we have a listen? Are you sure you know the range of the tuba?’ They took a punt on me, because I haven’t written symphonies or anything like that.”
And then there is Roderick Williams the composer. Queenslanders will get to hear a fascinating juxtaposition as he performs Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved) – in an English translation specially written by Sams – back to back with Australian mezzosoprano Lotte Betts-Dean, who will sing the world premiere of a song cycle composed by Williams himself. Written on commission during lockdown, Not Yet Here considers the relationship from the perspective of Beethoven’s adored one, a remote figure who doesn’t get a word in edgeways. Curious to imagine what ‘die ferne Geliebte’ might have to say for herself, Williams commissioned the texts from his friend Rommi Smith. (The Leeds-based poet had previously worked with him on The Rain is Coming, a feminist response to Die schöne Müllerin with music by British composer Emily Levy.)
“The Beethoven singer has all these wonderful thoughts in his head about his faraway beloved, but he never seems to be communicating to her, which is why the piece is called Not Yet Here,” he explains. “That’s the great thing about poetry and art. You spend all this time in a fog of your own brilliance, while the object of your attention is sitting there in the corner thinking, ‘Is he ever going to come over and ask me to dance?’”
As a composer, Williams describes himself as a functional musician who started out arranging things for family gatherings. His father, for example, played classical guitar in his spare time and wrote an arrangement of Silent Night that the Williams family still sings.
“Growing up, if you were in any way musical, you sang, you played, you wrote, you arranged, whatever was necessary to make it happen,” he explains. “If you liked –and I’ll whisper this quietly – the theme from The Muppet Show and wanted to play it in your string quartet for the old ladies on a Friday afternoon, you simply wrote it out. It was the same if you wanted to play the theme from E.T. with your school orchestra.”
“I also wrote stuff. My father produced a cassette recording a few years ago – he called it Roderick Williams,
the Barnet Years – which is him and me and my younger brother playing these tiny, Haydnesque pieces I’d composed.”
Practical beginnings then, but after dabbling at school and university, composing went onto the back burner. “The singing stuff takes enough time as it is,” he confesses. “I’ve never had time to market myself as a composer, but I suppose people have cottoned on.”
At first, much of his output was written for singer friends who wanted a new piece. “If you need something quickly, or something funny for a revue, Roddy can do that. Then choirs started thinking the same way, and now the word seems to have got round that I can do things quickly, efficiently and cheaply,” he laughs.
I presume their Royal Highnesses paid him handsomely for rustling up something for their coronation, I joke, before pointing out that he must have been the only composer present who also sang at the event. “It was a huge compliment,” he replies, “but I cannot for the life of me tell you how any of that came about.”
“I’ve come across King Charles’ radar because as Prince of Wales he was patron of the Three Choirs Festival. There must have been sufficient subliminal product placement for him to think, ‘Who is that chap who keeps turning up and singing at these things?’ But this was absolutely ‘right place, right time’ stuff.”
This will be Williams’ third trip to the Australian Festival of Chamber Music and this time around it comes with a chance to visit several other Australian cities. “Going to Townsville the first time I was really excited by all these chamber musicians, and I’d like to think they were excited by me,” he explains. “In classical music, singing is a niche within a niche – you’re on your own a little bit – so to be embraced by all these other musicians felt important.”
“And the Australian embrace is different to an English embrace,” he smiles. “I’m English, and we’re very friendly people, until you meet an Australian and then you understand what it really means. I love the unstuffiness and openness of it, and it comes with a great can-do culture. You know, there’s a feeling that to make classical music appeal to audiences these days, you have to dilute it in some way – well, I don’t see any of that going on in Townsville.”
Roderick Williams performs in eight concerts at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville, 26 July – 4 August, while his own song cycle Not Yet Here will receive its world premiere on 3 August. He performs with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra at Elder Hall on 31 July. He sings in recital and gives a masterclass at the Newcastle Music Festival on 23 August. He and Siobhan Stagg join Melbourne Symphony Orchestra to perform Fauré’s Requiem at Hamer Hall on 29 & 31 August and give a recital at Iwaki Auditorium on 1 September.
‘UKARIA has something else up its sleeve that is truly special and can only be compared with events in Europe […] its three-day cluster of exploratory concerts named UKARIA 24, in which musicians of international profile are invited in for a period residency to try out their most inventive ideas, unrestricted by the usual boundaries of concert design.’
– Graham Strahle, InDaily, 2022
Full program and tickets available now: www.ukaria.com
Patti LuPone has created some of the most iconic roles in musical theatre, and those she hasn’t originated, she’s made her own.
Ahead of an Australian tour of her new show
A Life in Notes, beginning at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, the three-time Tony Award winner talks to Jansson J. Antmann about her extraordinary career as the undisputed queen of Broadway.
Patti LuPone is all smiles. Her latest show, A Life in Notes, has opened to rave reviews at Carnegie Hall, and rumours have begun circulating about an imminent return to Broadway with Mia Farrow in Jen Silverman’s play The Roommate
“I know! Somebody leaked it,” she says with a laugh. “I swear I didn’t do it.”
I congratulate her on the previous night’s opening, or was it two nights ago?
“Who knows? I’m in Palm Desert,” she replies, still laughing. “It was Monday night. What is today? Wednesday?” We quickly give up trying to figure it out.
A Life in Notes is the latest show created for her by writer Jeffrey Richman and director and lyricist Scott Wittman, whom she met in 1993.
“My best friend in the world, Jeffrey Richman, took me to three housewarmings in one day, and one of them was Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman’s.”
LuPone was in California at the time, filming the final season of the drama series Life Goes On
“I hadn’t been on stage and I wasn’t singing, so I said to Jeffrey, ‘Do you know anybody who could put together a show for me?’ and he introduced me to Scott.”
“Our first show was a goodbye to Los Angeles at the Westwood Playhouse, because I was leaving Los Angeles to go and do Sunset Boulevard in London.”
LuPone was signed to take the show to Broadway, but during the West End run, it was controversially announced that Glenn Close would take her place as Norma Desmond.
The Westwood Playhouse concert was reworked as Patti LuPone on Broadway, and as she puts it, “My farewell to LA became my welcome home in New York.”
Richman and Wittman added the song As If We Never Said Goodbye, which LuPone had sung when she originated the role of Norma, and she received a standing ovation mid-song. The New York Times noted, “she was a proud queen who had been stripped of her crown, returning from exile, her head held high.”
Five more shows followed, all created by Richman and Wittman. They included Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda which marked LuPone’s solo debut at Carnegie Hall in 1999.
She has always kept the same team together, from her dresser and stage manager to the sound and lighting designers. When her musical director Dick Gallagher passed away in 2005, Joseph Thalken took over and has stayed with her ever since.
“We’ve been doing this for over 30 years,” she says. “If you find a tribe within the tribe then you hold on for dear life.”
LuPone’s latest show –which she has described as “a musical memoir” –charts her life, beginning with her childhood during the burgeoning rock and roll scene.
LuPone’s latest show – which she has described as “a musical memoir” – charts her life, beginning with her childhood during the burgeoning rock and roll scene.
“It’s about my musical experience growing up in America,” she explains. “I’m a child of the 50s and 60s; I’m a child of rock and roll. I believe the hit song on the radio before Elvis was (How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window? and then Elvis burst onto the screen.”
“That was my music. My mom loved opera and Broadway musicals, my dad loved jazz, but I was a rebellious teenager. It starts there, growing up on Long Island with some songs that mean something to me [. . .] and the impact some of the songs had in the period I lived through.”
From Rosemary Clooney’s 1951 hit Come On-A My House and I Wish It So from Marc Blitzstein’s 1959 musical Juno to Bob Dylan’s lullaby Forever Young, Janis Ian’s Stars and Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s more recent Saratoga Summer Song, the set list reveals songs one might not immediately associate with LuPone alongside those one does from her Broadway career.
Played against a backdrop of social upheaval and change including the sexual revolution, the hippies and the MeToo movement, A Life in Notes captures a passage of time which LuPone describes as “historic and distressing”.
“Think about it. It’s been a pretty volatile lifetime; not mine, but in America. We haven’t been out of war. I can’t remember it, but there was the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War . . .”
Through it all, LuPone has pursued her passion for the performing arts, first attending dance classes at the Ocean Avenue Elementary School where her father was headmaster, and later taking up the sousaphone in a marching band, a talent she would one day put to good use in Sweeney Todd.
In 1968, she was awarded a Juilliard scholarship and joined Michel Saint-Denis and John Houseman’s newly formed Drama Division.
In 1970, LuPone was one of three actors who joined the Juilliard Orchestra and the American Opera Centre to represent America at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto where, as she wrote in her self-titled memoir, she felt free for the first time in her life. I ask her what she meant by that.
“We clawed our way into the chorus of the opera Il giuramento [by Saverio Mercadante] just to go to Italy. It was a blast. But then, of course, it was the first time I’d been to Europe. People had to take me at face value, and that’s what I understood. I understood that I was free of emotional and familial bonds. It was incredible.”
After graduating in 1972, she remained with her cohort, which spent four years touring as Houseman’s fledgling Acting Company. In 1976, she endured six months in the doomed pre-Broadway tour of Stephen Schwartz’s musical The Baker’s Wife, only to have her song Meadowlark cut. She found solace working with David Mamet, creating the role of Ruth in his 1977 play The Woods, and became a household name as Evita in 1979. However, it was in Les Misérables that she felt truly vindicated in her decision to become an actor.
“It’s about my musical experience growing up in America. I’m a child of the 50s and 60s; I’m a child of rock and roll.”
Shakespeare meets Hugo
LuPone has often referred to the original 1985 production of Les Misérables at London’s Barbican as the “perfect theatrical experience”.
“It felt like the halls and the main stage of Juilliard,” she explains. “It was the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company so when I was there rehearsing, I felt like it was familiar territory. The only time I had worked in London up until that point was at the Young Vic.”
LuPone had visited London in 1971 to make her professional debut in The Public Theatre’s rock-musical adaptation of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis with music by Peter Link. She was in her third year at Juilliard and only had one line: “Grip your oars and pull hard . . . pull hard and grip your oars.”
Now, 14 years later, she was creating the role of Fantine in a musical adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil.
“There I was, working with RSC actors . . . with [directors] Trevor Nunn and John Caird,” she recalls fondly. “When [producer] Cameron Mackintosh approached me and I heard the first four bars of the French recording, I knew it was a hit.”
She was right. Les Misérables swept the Olivier Awards, with LuPone taking home Best Actress in a Musical for both her performances as Fantine in Les Mis and as Moll in The Acting Company’s production of Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, which had been presented at the Old Vic earlier that year.
She stayed with Les Misérables when it transferred to the Palace Theatre in the West End. On the opening night, Nunn told her if anyone belonged there, she did.
LuPone has written about how greatly she valued the intrinsic link Michel Saint-Denis had forged between the RSC and Juilliard, and how Nunn’s compliment validated
the connection she was feeling. Nevertheless, she knew she couldn’t take the show to Broadway.
“One day, during the barricade scene, I said to myself, ‘I can’t do this in New York. I’m in a perfect cast with Sue Jane Tanner, Alun Armstrong, Colm Wilkinson, Roger Allam . . . it was an extraordinary cast of actors in a musical, some for the very first time because they were Shakespearean actors, in a perfect theatre that reminded me of my training and the commitment I had made to the theatre.”
When LuPone told Mackintosh of her decision, he replied, “I know, it’s the part. It’s too small.”
“I knew he wouldn’t get it. The only thing stage actors have is their performance and the memory of it. And I didn’t want anything to interfere with this memory. When I saw a little bit of it in New York, I understood that I had made the right decision, [because] Trevor and John and Cameron were putting the English actors’ performances on American actors. It didn’t look as though they were allowing them to discover the roles for themselves.”
LuPone won the Tony Award as Best Actress in a Musical for both Evita and Gypsy on Broadway, but first she had to overcome the cookie-cutter approach of the directors Hal Prince and Arthur Laurents.
She recalls that after she’d been cast in Evita, she started thinking about the adventure she was embarking on in terms of Eva Perón’s own journey.
“I thought, ‘My God, she must have gone on a roller coaster ride,’ and I discovered I had this smile on my face. I went, ‘That’s how I’m going to play her, with a smile on her face that says: Look what I got!’”
Things did not go according to plan. “First day of rehearsal, Hal said, ‘No smiles; I want gnarled hands.’”
The UK creative team began moulding LuPone into a replica of Elaine Paige, which wasn’t how she wanted to play Eva. After a few days, she famously told them to shut up.
“You want an audience to like you, regardless of how heinous your behaviour is,” she says of her portrayal of Eva. “They have to like you whether they agree with what you’re doing or not.”
Without Prince’s knowledge, she began making changes during the out-of-town run.
“I turned my performance around in Los Angeles and my hairdresser thought I was going to get fired,” she admits. “When Hal saw it, he said, ‘That’s exactly what I wanted,’ so who can trust a director?”
LuPone faced a similar problem when Laurents directed her in Gypsy at the New York City Center as part of the 2007 Encores! Summer Stars program. She had already wowed audiences as Momma Rose in Lonny
Price’s staging at the Ravinia Festival the previous year and was looking forward to tackling the role again. Broadway also beckoned.
However, Laurents was set in his ways, having already mounted the first West End production with Angela Lansbury in 1973, as well as two Broadway revivals with Lansbury in 1974 and Tyne Daly in 1989.
“Arthur showed up with the 1989 prompt book and the 1989 stage managers,” LuPone says, “and in the read-throughs, he would stop and say, ‘This is how you get the laugh.’”
“You can’t do that to an actor! They’ll find the exact same laugh, but it has to be organic in order to maintain the laugh and for it to come every night.”
LuPone says Laurents left her alone, but everyone else suffered. “He was on Laura Benanti’s case, he was on Boyd Gaines’ case, he was on Alison Fraser’s case, and the company started to implode. We thought, ‘We’re not going to get anywhere with this guy. We’re not going to be able to explore the script,’ and that script can stand by itself without music.”
Refusing to give in, they appealed to Laurents’ sensibilities as a writer. After all, it was his book.
“Laura, Boyd and I just kept asking him questions about the play. He took off the director’s hat and put on the playwright’s hat, and he started to explore his play with us. Without him even knowing it, he subconsciously let that 1989 production go and started to investigate his play with the actors he’d chosen. We asked him, ‘Is this how it was rehearsed in the original production?’ and he said, ‘We never rehearsed the scenes in the original production.’”
LuPone let’s this sink in before adding, “That’s musicals.”
Even when she doesn’t originate a role, LuPone still makes it her own. Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd, Desiree Armfeldt in A Little Night Music, Fosca in Passion, Yvonne in Sunday in the Park with George, Cora Hoover Hooper in Anyone Can Whistle and Momma Rose in Gypsy all bear her indelible mark.
LuPone’s association with the Stephen Sondheim canon was cemented by her performances in these roles at the Ravinia Festival between 2001 and 2006 under President and CEO Welz Kauffman. All were directed by Lonny Price.
In 2005, she also enjoyed a tuba-playing turn as Mrs Lovett in John Doyle’s revival of Sweeney Todd on Broadway.
When she appeared as Joanne in Price’s concert version of Company at the Avery Fisher Hall in 2011, The New York Times singled out her rendition of The Ladies Who Lunch as “close to definitive”.
She reprised the role in Marianne Elliott’s genderswapped UK revival in 2018. Describing Elliott as a “wizard”, LuPone says she’d follow the director of War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time to the ends of the earth.
The production transferred to Broadway in 2021, having bagged four Olivier Awards including Best Actress in a Supporting Role in a Musical for LuPone.
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it in New York, like I did [with] Les Mis,” she says, laughing.
Like Doyle’s Sweeney Todd, the Broadway run of Company came as a surprise to LuPone. “Nellie Lovett and then Joanne? Excuse me?! It’s not something I would have thought of.”
As Joanne, she won her third Tony, this time for Best Featured Actress in a Musical.
She ranks working with the show’s London and New York casts alongside her experience at the RSC creating Les Misérables
“Marianne let the actors discover. She didn’t put the British performances on the American actors. I was there; I saw it.”
Conversation turns to Sondheim, who passed away two weeks shy of the Broadway premiere.
“Steve’s tough,” LuPone says, as though he were still with us. “He’s the master and the taskmaster. To have approval from him is big, maybe not for somebody else, but it is for me.”
She pauses, clearly still affected by the loss of her longtime collaborator.
“He was so frail in London and even frailer in New York. And of course, we were interrupted by COVID, so we weren’t able to open on his 90th birthday, which was the original plan.”
“He saw the first preview, and then I think he died a week later. It was tough.”
At the Broadway opening of Company, she told Vanity Fair that Sondheim was “the composer, the lyricist, that elevates us”.
In A Life in Notes, LuPone honours Sondheim by performing The Ladies Who Lunch and Some People from Gypsy
She rounds out her Tony-winning trifecta with Don’t Cry For Me Argentina from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita Les Misérables gets a look-in too. LuPone still ponders her decision not to play Fantine on Broadway, saying, “I don’t know what my impact would have been in New York in that role.”
According to Playbill, she “pierced the heart” with her performance of I Dreamed a Dream during the opening night of A Life in Notes at Carnegie Hall.
Meanwhile, BroadwayWorld described the show as “a transcendent experience”, saying, “LuPone is dripping with personality: when she sings, when she tells a story, even when she gestures . . . [She] manages to put so much of herself into everything she does that no matter how many times you’ve heard a song before, when she’s singing there truly is no comparison.”
Australian audiences will soon see for themselves. Patti LuPone: A Life in Notes headlines the Adelaide Cabaret Festival at the Adelaide Festival Centre on 19 June, before touring to Sydney’s City Recital Hall on 21 & 22 June; Palais Theatre, St Kilda, Melbourne on 24 & 25 June; and Brisbane’s QPAC on 27 June.
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
DIRECTOR PETER EVANS
What is focal dystonia? How does it affect musicians? And can it be treated?
Steve Dow talks with a musician, a neurologist and a specialist physiotherapist and health researcher to investigate the movement disorder that can end a musician’s career, and the search for a cure.
When Margot Dean played bassoon, she felt completely connected with audiences, especially as a member of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, a musical community that sated her creative desire.
Dean rose to section Principal Bassoon with the ASO in 1992, at the age of 25, playing in that position for most of the decade afterwards. Her favourite moments in the orchestra pit were playing opera, unleashing her instrument’s warm vibrato and distinctive tone as the musicians and singers breathed communally as one.
She played Wagner’s Ring Cycle in 1998 under the late British conductor Sir Jeffrey Tate. “Something never to be forgotten,” she says, smiling at the distant memory. “The experience of playing was so fulfilling – emotionally, physically, spiritually and intellectually.”
Years earlier, Dean’s mother, a primary school music teacher and pianist, had come up with the idea that her
then 12-year-old daughter should learn to play the bassoon, because a teacher at the Canberra School of Music was auditioning students for lessons. Part of the appeal, her mother suggested, was that the instrument was uncommon. “You won’t have to compete with all the flautists and violinists,” she reasoned.
An insurmountable physical health challenge would ultimately force Dean’s retirement as an elite musician. Today, she can hardly play her instrument at all. In 2000, at 33, Dean was diagnosed with focal dystonia, a movement disorder caused by abnormal brain signals, which are triggered by repetitive tasks such as playing a musical instrument, akin to writer’s cramp.
Muscle contractions result in abnormal movements and postures in, say, the hand or the embouchure (the mouth as it interfaces with a brass or wind instrument). Dean eventually realised her vulnerability was her neck.
“ When I finally got the diagnosis, I understood it’s not about relaxing, it’s actually the brain misfiring, and not something you can control.”
“Even nine years before it was diagnosed, I felt like there was something blocking my playing,” she recalls now. “It took me years to identify it was in my neck. It went undiagnosed for so long.”
Receiving multiple misdiagnoses is a common story among focal dystonia sufferers. “I had a lot of being told it was all in my head and anxiety, that I was creating it psychosomatically,” says Dean. “I had a general practitioner who treated me for anxiety and psychoanalysed me.”
Dean’s husband insisted she didn’t need psychotherapy of any sort, reassuring her, “I really think you’re a well worked-out person, Margot.” Dean saw a physiotherapist who tried different physical treatments, which made her condition worse.
So, the physio referred her to a neurologist, who straight away diagnosed cervical dystonia – of the neck, which is not the typical site for a musician’s dystonia.
“I had assumed it was some muscle tension, that I couldn’t relax; I assumed I had to find a way to relax my body,” says Dean. “But when I finally got the diagnosis, I understood it’s not about relaxing, it’s actually the brain misfiring, and not something you can control.”
Often, focal dystonia ends elite musical careers, yet the lack of knowledge about the disease is surprising as there have been numerous famous cases. The late
American classical pianist and conductor Leon Fleisher lost the use of his right hand due to focal dystonia in 1964, forcing him to switch to repertoire written specifically for the left hand. Decades later, he regained some control of the right hand and was able to return to playing two-handed.
In the 1990s, Canadian violinist Peter Oundjian was struck by what he called this “fascinating and baffling condition” in the left hand, so he embarked on a new career in orchestral conducting. Brazilian-born oboe player Alex Klein resigned from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2004 because hand dystonia impacted two of his fingers. Like Fleisher, he became so despondent he contemplated suicide but was later able to resume his career when his oboe was fitted with some modified keys so his left hand could play sideways, almost like a saxophonist.
“In neurology circles this is referred to as a ‘sensory trick’,” Klein told The Seattle Times in 2016. “I trick the brain into thinking I am playing some other instrument, and since focal dystonia is task-specific, this allowed me to bypass some of the trouble. To this day, if I play a normal oboe for a few minutes, the old pathway will be accessed and I will be playing like a beginner in no time. But the adjusted position allows me to play with enough confidence that my difficulties go unnoticed to me and to the audience.”
Approximately one percent of all professional musicians are affected by the disorder. The warning signs of focal dystonia include cramps, muscle pain, twitches and abnormal postures of the affected body part. Musician sufferers often complain of fatigue, lack of coordination, a loss of dexterity, as well as involuntary movement when trying to play their instrument.
According to a 2009 paper co-authored by Professor Eckart Altenmüller, Director of the Institute for Music Physiology and Musicians’ Medicine in Hannover, Germany (and also a classical flautist), focal dystonia was once classified as a psychological disorder, but over time it came to be understood as a multifactorial neurological problem. Contributors to its development include “family history, neurophysiological, physical and environmental factors, trauma and stress”.
Associate Professor Bronwen Ackermann, a specialist musicians’ physiotherapist, musculoskeletal anatomist and health researcher at the University of Sydney, tells Limelight that focal dystonia is a “confusion of brain wiring”, of “maladaptive neuroplasticity”, but musicians lacking a diagnosis for the discomfort often fail to seek help and try to push through, “neither of which has a good success rate”.
Advice that muscles are impacted from overuse is misguided, says Ackermann; the problem is the musician can’t use particular muscles in the correct way anymore, because these muscles fight one another in a “disinhibition” and “co-contraction”. Hence, she says, “retraining” muscle use “seems pretty critical”.
In 2021, Ackermann and Altenmüller co-authored a small pilot study for the Journal of Hand Therapy in which four musicians with focal hand dystonia undertook a program of progressive daily muscle activation and movement exercise. All four subjects improved, with two subjects returning to pre-dystonia performance levels.
Ackermann says it takes about a year of dedicated, technical motor control retraining to establish new patterns of muscle usage and “recreate brain pathways”. Skills and education around hand therapy in particular are improving, she notes.
External stress can complicate treatment, however. Ackermann has a few such stressed patients at the moment. “It’s really difficult to work on [retraining] in a focused, calm way while you’re very stressed about something else,” she says. “One thing that’s very interesting, and it’s considered to be part of the relationship of where the basal ganglia is in the brain, is that stress absolutely creates havoc with dystonia; it slows down progress and makes symptoms appear more severe.”
A common treatment, particularly for hand dystonia, is to use Botox to try to “reduce over-contraction of muscles that are firing at an inappropriate time or intensity – but that doesn’t resolve the issue,” says Ackermann.
“Usually the contraction comes back, after three months on average. Some people can still seemingly manage quite well with regular Botox [administered] by very experienced neurologists to very specific muscle groups. I wouldn’t say they’re back at their old skill level – there’s a certain reduction of facility, because that’s what Botox does.”
Ackermann says such Botox treatment is most successful in hand dystonia, reducing the tension with targeting of specific finger muscles. There is a much lower success rate in treating embouchure dystonia, however, which is experienced by brass and wind players. (Occasionally, vocalists can also suffer focal dystonia.)
“When you’re talking about the face, this is a difficult apparatus, because muscles attach to muscles,” she says. “If you take one muscle out, so to speak, with Botox, you unravel the whole apparatus.”
“Even the best neurologist in treating embouchure dystonia, if they Botox [the mouth], generally the musician loses any capacity to play. A South African horn player I was working with just couldn’t do anything for six months after an attempt at Botoxing the facial muscles.”
Ultimately, some sufferers of dystonia cannot be cured, despite the best efforts. In Adelaide, armed with her hard-won diagnosis of cervical dystonia, Margot Dean received Botox injections in the neck and shoulder from her neurologist. To further try and mitigate the discomfort, awkwardness and fatigue, Dean saw a neurological physiotherapist, who worked on retraining her muscles.
Dean took a year off playing bassoon to undergo these two therapies combined. She then returned to playing for nine months, which was “the best thing ever”, she recalls, “freely” performing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. “Finally, I was playing without symptoms.”
But, she says, “the treatments only lasted for a while, and eventually the symptoms started coming back. Playing was too intense and demanding for the condition.”
In 2003, three years after her diagnosis, Dean was forced to retire from the ASO, cutting her performing career decades short. “It was massive, having to give up the music that I love.”
She found an entirely different line of work: initially, data entry and opening mail in various Commonwealth public service departments. Last year, she retired from the workforce completely at 55, due to her cervical dystonia.
Retirement gave her time to compose her first piece of music, yet the ongoing condition means it is rare for her to pick up the bassoon these days.
“A few minutes, that’s all I can really manage,” she says.
French harpsichord extraordinaire Justin Taylor makes his Australian debut in a program boasting works from Couperin, Rameau, Bach and more.
Neurologist Dr Joel Maamary meets Limelight over coffee in Sydney’s Darlinghurst, near St Vincent’s Hospital, where in 2023 he began a small trial to examine the safety and efficacy of magnetic resonance imaging focused ultrasound technology (MRgFUS) on 12 elite musician recruits – cellists, violinists, percussionists and recorder players – all suffering focal, task-specific, upper-limb dystonia.
The procedure creates a highly targeted little lesion in the brain. The trial is ongoing.
Maamary says focal dystonia is seen more in elite, higher performing players than in casual players. “There’s this theory that training in terms of intensity and hours of training might predispose to development; that repeated task performance.”
“That seems to be the case in musician’s dystonia, as opposed to writer’s cramp, where people might not necessarily be writing more than their peers, but for some reason they develop it, whereas among musicians it tends to [affect] those who practise for hours and hours, with really intense, sometimes quite stressful training.”
“Focal dystonia is a notoriously difficult condition to treat. Medications tend to be poorly efficacious, and they have side effects associated. There are some specialist rehabilitation programs here, and we’re really blessed and lucky to have them, but they’re quite laborious, their level of evidence in terms of support in the literature is not that strong, and they often require months and years of retraining, which is really hard if you’re an elite musician.”
In Maamary’s trial at St Vincent’s, the MRgFUS technology has guided the creation of a lesion in the brain to disrupt the abnormal brain pathway driving dystonia. The study is yet to be published but represents the first time this technology has been used on focal dystonia patients in Australia, having already been used successfully on some people with Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor disorder.
The Sydney trial follows a study of the same technology on 10 focal dystonia patients in Japan, which Maamary read and wondered if it was too good to be true. The earlier trial at Tokyo Women’s Medical University, published in 2021, included a mix of musician’s dystonia and writer’s cramp patients. It showed seven subjects experienced almost complete remission of their symptoms at the 12-month follow-up.
At St Vincent’s, nine of the 12 patients have thus far been treated in the safety and efficacy trial. “It’s too early to say definitively what the outcome is,” says Maamary. “What we’re certainly seeing is an early benefit in almost all of [the nine] patients. The question we’re really interested in is, what sustainability are we going to see over the long term? Twelve months is our final outcome point [in the trial], but are we going to see that same success that the Japanese trial published?”
In the past, disrupting neural pathways required open brain surgery, with probes passed deep into the brain, using radio frequency energy to burn a hole, but with the risk of stroke and bleeding. MRgFUS technology, on the other hand, uses a less invasive array of ultrasound beams that target a focal point in the brain.
“The easiest way I can liken it,” says Maamary, “is when you’re a kid and you get a magnifying glass, and you focus beams of sunlight into a small focal point, and you can create a burn on a leaf or a piece of paper, but you can pass your hand through it because you can’t feel any heat at all.”
“Instead of using sunlight, we’re using ultrasound energy, so those sound waves are passed through the scalp, through the skull, deep into the brain . . . converging onto a focal point, and we can target that within a tenth of millimetre.”
Task-specific dystonia requires treating the thalamus at the centre of the brain. “The thalamus is essentially a relay station within the brain. We target a part of the thalamus called the ventro-oral complex, which is where motor programming runs through,” explains Maamary.
It is important for orchestras and music schools to forge and maintain links with physical therapists who are focal dystonia specialists – namely, neurological physiotherapists.
“Individuals who might have musician’s dystonia over years have accessed these programs that are stored in their brain to perform, say, scales, and for some reason, that program becomes abnormal.”
But not everyone is convinced by such procedures. “I think the lesion-based approach is good for generalised dystonia,” says Bronwen Ackermann. “But when you’re in a skilled profession like musicians, putting a lesion like that in the brain . . . there’s too much risk you’re going to affect the pathways behind doing the fine movements, not just the ones that are in this inhibition cycle.”
“[The technology] can reduce the intensity of the cramps, potentially, but it’s all a bit experimental at the moment,” she cautions. “What it doesn’t seem to do is give them back the fine control and dexterity they need to be able to play their instruments. We’ve got to be careful with some of the more radical treatments, which should be a last resort at this point.”
Nevertheless, violin player Ella Laskova, one of the St Vincent’s trial participants who underwent the three-hour MRgFUS procedure after suffering hand dystonia, told the ABC’s 7.30 program last year that the technology worked. “I feel my connection between what I want to do and actually what my hand does,” she said. “It is much stronger.” Laskova later withdrew from the trial partway through; Maamary says this was for “nonprocedure-related issues” that are confidential.
“Just hearing them play is a joy.” —InReview
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Experience the vibrancy of Korngold’s second string quartet alongside the first of Beethoven’s legendary late quartets and a new work from Australian composer Harry Sdraulig.
Maamary says the precision of MRgFUS, guided by a heat map of the patient’s brain while the procedure is being done, allows neurologists to quickly see both temporary benefits, such as loosening of the dystonia, as well as temporary side effects, such as tingling sensations or speech impacts, allowing neurologists to adjust the target slightly. The lesion spot, which will measure half a centimetre to a centimetre, disrupts the pathways “while sparing the surrounding brain tissue”.
“By doing that, we avoid the risk and the operative complications that some of those older, more traditional [open brain] lesioning procedures used,” he says. “It’s a phenomenal technology.”
In the meantime, Maamary says it is important for orchestras and music schools to forge and maintain links with physical therapists who are focal dystonia specialists –namely, neurological physiotherapists.
“That increases awareness and potentially could increase early identification and early treatment, which is important,” he says.
“I have so many patients [who were] told they were [just] stressed or depressed, or to go away for a while [from their instrument] and then give it another go.” Dystonia Awareness Month will be held in September. For more information, visit the Dystonia Network of Australia Inc. website at dystonia.org.au.
Asked if he would co-write the libretto for an oratorio about the murder of Dr George Ian Ogilvie Duncan in Adelaide in 1972, Christos Tsiolkas was apprehensive. The acclaimed author explains why he felt compelled to put his fear aside and accept this “gift”, and how the libretto came about.
In early 2020, after Neil Armfield got in touch to invite me to be part of the collaboration that eventually became Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan, I got scared. I knew Neil through his work as a director, on stage and on screen, and was inspired by the vitality and poetry of his staging. He explained that he envisaged the work as an oratorio, to be premiered at the Adelaide Festival in 2022, and that he wanted me to be co-librettist with Alana Valentine. That too was seductive. I had seen Alana’s work on stage, most recently her collaboration with Ursula Yovich, Barbara and the Camp Dogs, which I found rousing: I leapt to an ovation. Neil wanted this new work to be a queer collaboration, and he invited a young composer, Joseph [Joe] Twist, to be part of the project. Of course my instinct was to say yes. I put down the phone, and that’s when I got scared.
I love music, a passion that is indelibly part of my prose writing. I often think of sentences in terms of rhythm and in terms of harmony, speaking the words aloud to hear their dance and cadence. Yet I knew that there was a large gap in my education, that I had not been raised in the Western tradition of classical music. I had grown up in a working-class, migrant household. My mother, who loved to sing, had a large record collection of Greek popular song. My father loved the folk songs of the Balkans. There were anomalies – Mum loved Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin. Most Saturday nights our house would be filled with people, eating and drinking and arguing and laughing, young women and men enjoying a reprieve from the harsh working week. Inevitably, someone would put on a record, and I’d watch the nimble young men leap and swirl to the animated melancholy of the rembetika, the Greek blues.
We children would join in with the women as they shimmied sensuously to the tsifteteli, the music that accompanied the belly dance.
Music and dance were in my blood; that’s how it feels. Yet I was apprehensive of Neil’s invitation. That word –oratorio – seemed so grand, so intimidating. Did I dare think I could do it justice? I feared failure. Yet I also knew that that terror can be the most debilitating curse for an artist. I got up from the desk and I went for a walk.
Walking had been integral to my writing practice for years. So much of a writer’s activity is, of course, the work of the mind. Yet it is often in the physical discipline of walking that I first distinctly hear the voice of a character or settle on the right structure for a story. Losing myself in the physical seems to animate the unconscious. On this day, as I moved through the familiar streets of my suburb, I was thinking of a man who was murdered 50 years ago. Would I be able to hear his voice?
The oratorio would commemorate the murder of a gay man, Dr George Ian Ogilvie Duncan, who was drowned in the Torrens River in 1972. Six weeks before his death, he had returned to Australia from the UK to take up a position in the law faculty of the University of Adelaide. On 10 May, he left a dinner in the city’s north and walked across the park to the university. At some point in the night, he stopped at a toilet block by the river’s edge. That ‘beat’ was well-known to the city’s police, and often a group of cops, after a night’s drinking,
would go to the park to engage in ‘poofter-bashing’. It was Duncan’s misfortune to be one of their victims. After he had been assaulted, humiliated, he was thrown into the cold river and drowned.
Now, striding down the high street, a memory was jogged. When we first fell in love, my partner Wayne and I decided to pack our belongings into his second-hand Renault and follow the coast lazily, driving west from Melbourne. We eventually landed in Adelaide. It was the summer of early 1986, and we discovered the Colonel Light Hotel, where we would often go drinking to escape the heat. It was there one evening that an older gay man advised us to stay away from the river. “The cops bash poofters there.” He told us about what happened to Dr Duncan.
As I recollected those words - the cops bash poofters there – my feet started pounding the footpath. There wasn’t doubt or fear in my body anymore; there was anger, and also sadness. I realised I had been offered an opportunity for commemoration, and to expose an appalling legacy of homophobic violence. Duncan’s murder had incited gay and lesbian and trans people, and through their protest and activism, alongside the far-seeing enlightenment of politicians like Don Dunstan, it had led to South Australia being the first state in the English-speaking world to decriminalise homosexual behaviour. I would be proud to be a part of telling this story, this truth.
As my body settled back into a less hurried tread, another memory came to me, of early adolescence, when I was on school holidays during Western Easter. Flicking through the TV channels, I had settled on the ABC. I had found myself fascinated by a shot of a proscenium stage decorated sparsely with Christian imagery. The musicians were preparing in the orchestra pit, and there was a phalanx of singers on stage. There was the sound of coughing, of chatter from the unseen audience. Then there was hush. And then the music.
It was a performance of Handel’s Messiah, and I recall being entranced from the first commanding yet elegiac notes. If one’s ears are untrained to premodern classical music, there is a formality to the sound that is disconcerting. I was used to music that was immediate to the body, that urged the body into motion. However, there was nothing clinical in what I heard in Handel. It was as if the stern chanting of the Eastern Orthodox tradition had been infused with a more benign spirit. I loved – and still cherish – the austere beauty of Orthodox iconography and liturgy. However, that sombreness is also a recognition of the hierarchies of the celestial order. Handel’s oratorio was the first music I heard that intimated that there need not be some mediating persons or institutions between myself and a notion of the sacred. I was shaken and deeply moved by the performance. It suggested that my queer body and my queer self could also be loved by God.
I had made my decision. I walked back home and phoned Neil back to say I would accept his gift.
Not that my doubts and fears now miraculously vanished. We began our collaboration in the middle of the COVID pandemic, and there was a moment, after our initial discussions on Zoom, where my resolve wavered and I contemplated leaving the project. I doubted if I was capable of writing in a lyrical form and was anxious that my inexperience would compromise the work. Neil, Alana and Joe were patiently kind through this period, indicating that the directness of my language was something they were seeking for the oratorio. Their goodwill made me recommit. I spent my days listening to Handel, Britten and Sondheim, to John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and to Osvaldo Golijov’s St Mark Passion. Over and over, I played John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Duke Ellington and Mahalia Jackson’s Black, Brown and Beige and Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues. The urgent and the sacred: I was seeking guidance on how to stay faithful to both.
In that wondrous respite between lockdowns, I travelled to Alana’s place on the NSW south coast. While her wonderful partner Vicki fed us, Alana and I got to work developing a possible structure of the oratorio, imagining the characters and the voices within it. That initial work owed so much to the historical research of the historian Tim Reeves, who has spent
a large part of his intellectual working life detailing the tragic circumstances of Duncan’s death. Without Tim’s knowledge, and without his involvement in the project, the oratorio would not have been possible. He gave us a vivid sense of the man and a lucid sense of the time he lived in.
Alana and I read and reread this immense research, made it part of our waking and our dream lives. We knew and had experienced ourselves the legacies of shame and silence that had long dominated queer lives. Tim’s research had revealed that Duncan was a deeply spiritual man and we recognised that he would have been scandalised that the circumstances of his death – being killed at a ‘beat’ –were now public knowledge. Alana and I wanted to take seriously the sacred tradition of the oratorio. We knew that one of the gravest injustices done to LGBTQIA+ people historically is denying us the possibility of grace, of the love of the divine. We were united in wanting to create a song cycle that embodied the possibility for the body and the spirit to be in communion, and that countered a history of shame. Most importantly, we wanted to offer a tribute to Duncan, and to protest the evil of his murder. We also
were united in wanting to honour the other queers that were bashed and murdered along the Torrens, those who were not educated and born to privilege, who had disappeared from history. We created the character of the Lost Boy, who would give voice to these unavenged ghosts.
Soon after, the creative team met in Adelaide, and we started workshopping in the rehearsal rooms of the State Opera South Australia.
From my first involvement in theatre, I have loved the rehearsal room; that is where the true magic happens. Alana and I had sent our tentative sketches of lyrics to Joseph Twist, and he had set them to music. Working with Joe, physically in the one space, observing him respond emotionally to a new verse or couplet, and then rush to the piano to give it sonic form, I finally comprehended that music was a language. It was clear in the notations and symbols that Joe was pencilling onto the sheet music: that technical grammar of sound. But I felt it most acutely in how, through the music, he was giving further shape to the characters and to the physical setting of our libretto. Joe was such a patient teacher. He’d take on anything we offered him and try to make it work.
“We were united in wanting to create a song cycle that embodied the possibility for the body and the spirit to be in communion, and that countered a history of shame.”
He got me to listen, to hear when my words or rhyming were clumsy or overwrought. I learned that I could strip back language, and to trust that musical language could often create an image or convey a mood with greater clarity than words. With Joe’s involvement, Dr Duncan and the Lost Boy emerged from the shadows, and the world of the river at night took firm and solid shape.
There were further workshops and further collaborations. There was the exhilaration of hearing the Adelaide Chamber Singers performing our words for the first time, and the thrill of seeing the physical compositions being created by the choreographer Lewis Major. There was the excitement of watching how the performers – Mark Oates, Pelham Andrews and Ainsley Melham – committed so passionately to their roles. It felt as if all of us involved in this project were somehow graced, that we all felt the responsibility
and the joy involved in telling this story. Everybody gave their all – body and soul – to this collaboration.
When we had arrived in Adelaide for that first workshop, we had attended a commemoration for Duncan at the University of Adelaide. After the speeches, we all walked across to the river to the plaque now erected to honour his memory. Alana and I were struck by the number of young queers attending that day, wanting to honour an elder. That morning, in that hushed silence, I felt the responsibility of telling his story. But I was no longer scared. I felt blessed. I whispered, “Thank you.”
Now, every time I return to Adelaide, I go down to the Torrens to offer thanksgiving. To George Ian Ogilvie Duncan and to all those others who were lost. There are many ghosts there; you can hear their songs.
Opera Australia presents Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan at the Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 14–16 June.
Classical pianist and author Simon Tedeschi reflects on the power of art, having been inspired by Ralf Yusuf Gawlick’s 2022 oratorio O Lungo Drom (The Long Road), recently released by Decca Australia.
A few years ago, a friend said something that stuck in my mind. The music being written today, he said, has no common style; there is no longer any unifying ‘movement’ to speak of. This rang true: given that we live in a world of limitless perspectives, it stands to reason that classical music has followed suit. But once in a while, there emerges a composer who reminds me that no matter how many times the death of classical music is portentously announced, ‘new’ music, with its uncanny knack of telling us what we already know, bursts into the atmosphere like a comet, tracing the contours of the future and becoming, as American literary critic Harold Bloom wrote, “a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange.”
For my money the composer Ralf Yusuf Gawlick fits firmly in this category. His oratorio for soprano, baritone and chamber ensemble, O Lungo Drom (The Long Road), is a work of great power that speaks directly to some of the problems confronting our culture.
It was written for the Alban Berg Ensemble Wien, which premiered it in Berlin in 2022 and then recorded an album, released by Decca Australia/Eloquence in March this year.
Gawlick’s life has prepared him for this moment. Up until the age of 40, he believed that he had been born to a Kurdish mother who had relinquished him into the care of his adopted mother, a Caucasian German woman. But in a story spanning a string quartet, nine years of travel from Boston to Istanbul, the exhuming of old records and listening for clues in conversations, he discovered that his biological mother was not only living in a small village overlooking the Black Sea, but Romani.
This was only the beginning, for with his discovery came a renewed determination to use his talent and education, both only available to him by virtue of two women’s sacrifices, to craft the musical journey of a people.
And so O Lungo Drom was born, a hymn of tears and jubilation, a mosaic of ghosts and those who remained, a refusal to relinquish the cries of the dead. For even now, with all we know of the 20th century, the Porrajmos or ‘the harrowing’ – the word the Romani people use for
their near-obliteration at the hands of the Nazis – is still not spoken of with sufficient force. There is so much more to say, and my hope is that this oratorio, a long and boundless ‘road’ along the path to historical redemption through the void of near annihilation, is a reclamation of both past and future. For art at its greatest ebb is not merely a beholding of truth but an ongoing treaty with time.
O Lungo Drom is structured in three sections: Ascent, Nadir and Vista, incorporating the words of 13 poets in 10 languages and dialects. Most striking are the recurring motifs which, to me, hang in the air like obsessive traces: the Totentanz, or Dance of Death, recalls the open wounds of history that, defying the slick notion of ‘closure’, refuse to heal cleanly, reaching out across the decades with grief and terror, demanding recompense for past deeds.
After all, how can there be any clean breaks in time when art itself was co-opted as an accomplice in the greatest atrocity in modern history? As Franco-American literary critic and essayist George Steiner wrote, “We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.”
It is from this very antagonism that O Lungo Drom derives much of its power. Erschütterung (meaning shock or trembling) was a term used by German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin to describe a visceral response to the modern city, in which startling new technological innovations allowed not only for film and music to be mass-produced but entire races to be annihilated with mechanical precision.
This was the first word that sprang to my mind when listening to Lili Marleen, the final section of Nadir Upon being ushered into the camps, the Romani prisoners twisted this love song, the most popular of World War II, into a snarling paean to the unimaginable: “Angekommen sind wir im Auschwitz-Paradies (Arrived we did in Auschwitz paradise).” It is these very words that Gawlick has set to music, using the same melody. Upon listening, my first reaction was shock; I was unable to make sense of what I was hearing. Killing as kitsch? How was I meant to feel?
But after a few minutes, I began to feel dawning on me a quiet complicity followed by a silent smile. For what is the darkest joke but a sudden apprehension, a spasm of recognition, the sublime in its most shocking import? This is a somewhat different but related conception of shock, for Erschütterung was used much earlier by Kant to describe the ‘tremor’ of the sublime, the feeling of awe when we are in the presence of the infinite. When we are transported by a piece of music or poem, it can feel painful because we are reminded of our own finiteness. To be sublimated is to be taken away from all that we are sure we stand for, all markers of identity and purpose, the stories we tell ourselves. It is to be undone and then remade. It is to change our minds about everything we thought we were.
For as the titular protagonist in Siddartha by Hermann Hesse (a writer both I and Ralf love) came to realise, far from being a mode of ascetic severity, to live is to plunge into the vast vat of existence, to delve into the immense terror of presence. Isn’t this what we all secretly want? We are richer for this shudder of knowledge, for like an elderly person who, remembering the pain of relinquishing their child, sees on their body a colloquy of lines speaking to a life lived in pleasure and pain, [we realise] life is not merely a banal notion of ‘lived experience’ but rather experience-as-lived. Art can be a lightning rod, a restorative for what ails us today, with the increasingly narrow, straitened landscapes of public commentary, unremitting growth and exploitation.
And this is how O Lungo Drom speaks to me now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, living in a world both deadened to and dependent on shock, poised once more on the paradox that with infinite perspectives flow only base certitudes and clannish hatreds. Deep down perhaps we fear that we have been stripped of the future promised to us. But listening to O Lungo Drom did for me what only art can do: it forced me to reorient my emotional compass, primed me towards a sense of discovery and reminded me that to live is to be uplifted by the shock of the sublime as it works its way through us. For I am convinced that art need not trail behind us but must lead the way.
O Lungo Drom is, I feel, more than just another piece of new music to be ‘consumed’; it is an invocation to defy the exigencies of our culture with its hot takes and typologies. It is a work that corrals us into its spirit, permitting us if we are sufficiently open to be active in its very generation. As Australian conductor Richard Gill once entreated a group of kids, “I don’t want to know whether you like this piece of music or not; I want to know what it makes you feel.”
I believe that art must live through and by us instead of serving us, and so, our lives enriched, we may be remade into more sensible, sensitive beings. To me this is the true morality of art. Trembling, we feel our way through the abyss, allowing ourselves to pass into deeper and more vital strains of human experience.
Ralf Yusuf Gawlick’s O Lungo Drom (The Long Road) is available on the Decca Australia/Eloquence label.
A sublime new recording of Handel’s Theodora, recitals from Véronique Gens, Roderick Williams and Michael Spyres, and a Russian blockbuster from Sir Antonio Pappano.
by Clive PagetHandel’s dramatic oratorio Theodora bewildered 18th-century audiences but has come into its own in our current troubled times when it is regularly staged. Our June Recording of the Month is a very special interpretation indeed from conductor Jonathan Cohen and his period ensemble Arcangelo. (Alpha ALPHA1025).
In his five-star review, Will Yeoman admires “the sheer fluency and splendour of the singing,” as well as the way each singer inhabits their character. “Listen to Louise Alder’s exquisite Angels, ever bright and fair, her floating tone and purity of diction binding fragility and strength in phrase after lissom phrase,” he writes, or “try countertenor Tim Mead’s Kind Heav’n, if virtue be thy care, despatched with a grace and tenderness befitting its devotional flavour.”
The rest of the cast is just as fine. Anna Stéphany as Theodora’s confidant Irene is heartbreaking in As with rosy steps the morn, Stuart Jackson brings depth and eloquence to Descend, kind pity and Adam Plachetka is virile and commanding in Go, my faithful soldier, go. “Where innocents everywhere are being persecuted for their beliefs, religious or otherwise, Arcangelo’s Theodora is timely, affirming the power of art to speak across all ages and cultures,” Yeoman concludes.
It’s a strong month for song recitals, beginning with Paysage, a collection of fin-de-siècle orchestral songs by Véronique Gens (Alpha ALPHA1030). In another five-star review, Phillip Scott lauds Gens as “today’s reigning soprano in this repertoire,” and he’s not wrong.
Composers here include Reynaldo Hahn, Ernest Chausson and the underrated Théodore Dubois, the centenary of whose death we celebrate this year. And while Gens’ recital contains one or two well-known mélodies, most of it is refreshingly rare.
“Inevitably, there is a sameness about the style and emotional range,” Scott observes, but “Gens, to her credit, does not attempt to compensate by overdoing climaxes or pointing too much detail: instead, she concentrates on interpreting each setting as an individual creation.”
“To add variety, a few short orchestral interludes are included, such as Fauré’s gorgeous Nocturne from Shylock and interludes from Esclarmonde and Sapho by Massenet,” Scott concludes. “A wonderful singer, in very inviting repertoire.”
From the other side of the channel comes the latest disc from British baritone Roderick Williams. A Birthday Garland is a collection of songs by Vaughan Williams, his teachers, his contemporaries and students, along with a brand-new song cycle and one of Williams’ own charming schoolboy efforts (Somm SOMMCD0683).
“To celebrate RVW’s 150th in 2022, Williams devised a ‘fantasy birthday party concert’ with pianist Susie Allan and their collaboration has been honed to perfection for this 76-minute album,” writes Steve Moffatt. Composers include Stanford, Parry and Charles Wood; RVW’s European mentors Ravel and Bruch; and friends like Holst, Butterworth and Howells. His students include an impressive array of women: Ruth Gipps, Elizabeth Maconchy and Rebecca Clarke (with a lovely setting of Yeats’ Down by the Salley Gardens).
“RVW’s setting of Tennyson’s The Splendour Falls with its full-blooded refrain of ‘Blow bugles blow’ shows Williams’ superb sensibility and excellent diction,” Moffatt continues, praising the singer’s gift for storytelling and his way with the vernacular, delivering Linden Lea with a subtle Dorset burr.
Fear No More is the debut recital disc from British bass-baritone Brindley Sherratt featuring songs by Schubert, Mussorgsky, Warlock and others, perceptively accompanied by Julius Drake (Delphian DCD34313). After training as a trumpeter, Sherratt altered course and won a coveted position with the BBC Singers. Only after 13 years of financial security did he leap off into the unknown, which is why he’s recording his first solo album at the relatively mature age of 59. It has, however, been worth the wait.
Take Gerald Finzi’s masterly setting of Shakespeare’s Fear no more the heat o’ the sun, performed with a lugubrious relish for the text’s gloomier aspects. Sherratt’s obsidian bass is the living personification of the Grim Reaper. The same sensitivity to words and taste for the macabre informs dramatic accounts of Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death. He’s at his finest, however, in a bleak yet salty account of Ireland’s Sea Fever and the aching resignation of Michael Head’s Limehouse Reach
Ahead of his 2024 Bayreuth debut, American ‘baritenor’ Michael Spyres investigates the music that inspired Wagner during his childhood and early career. The result, In the Shadows, is an eclectic blend of the familiar and the intriguingly obscure, stylishly accompanied by Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques (Erato 5419787982).
Florestan’s Gott! Welch dunkel hier from Fidelio benefits from plenty of orchestral bite in Beethoven’s lengthy introduction and Spyres savours every word. Similar virtues inform Max’s Nein, länger trag’ ich nicht from Weber’s Der Freischütz and an aria from Marschner’s once popular Hans Heiling. Wagner’s passing enthusiasm for Italian bel canto is represented by Bellini’s Norma, which exploits Spyres’ firm lower register as well as his ability to showboat above the stave.
Meyerbeer, Auber and Spontini all get a look-in, while Wagner himself is represented by arias from Die Feen (unproduced in his lifetime), Rienzi and Lohengrin. Spyres’ ethereal rendition of Mein lieber Schwan from Lohengrin makes you long to hear him recorded in the title role with original instruments.
A new disc from the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome under Sir Antonio Pappano combines Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade with two rarely performed versions of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain (Warner Classics 5419793369).
“Pappano’s Scheherazade is gorgeous with Carlo Maria Parazzoli’s violin solos making a sensuous, sinuous temptress out of the title character,” declares Greg Keane. “In The Story of the Kalendar Prince, the capricious clarinet and bassoon solos are exquisitely virtuosic . . . In the final movement, one senses the implacable
sultan’s increasing impatience and Scheherazade’s panic as she redoubles her efforts before Sinbad’s ship crashes against the rocks and the transfigurative happy ending.”
Night on Bald Mountain portrays a witches’ sabbath and at one stage found its way into Mussorgsky’s uncompleted opera The Fair at Sorochyntsi. Around 1880, he revised it as a work for orchestra, adult chorus, children’s chorus and solo bass. “The two versions here sound almost like different compositions,” says Keane. “Pappano’s forces unleash their inner barbarian so wonderfully that the experience is almost an assault on the senses.”
Equally revelatory is Bird Spirit Dreaming, an all-Australian album of music for soprano saxophone and piano by Peter Sculthorpe, Ross Edwards, Matthew Hindson and others, performed by Michael Duke and pianist David Howie (Da Vinci Classics 5419789127). It’s unusual repertoire, played with grace and panache.
Sculthorpe’s Rockpool Dreaming, originally commissioned by the Australian Chamber Orchestra for the 10th anniversary of Neil Perry’s Sydney restaurant, has been deftly rearranged with violinist Evgeny Sorkin and cellist Julian Smiles stepping in as well. “It’s a lovely work where the whirling, accompanying arpeggios twist and turn and Duke’s saxophone weaves in and out of Sorkin and Smiles’ parts,” writes Paul Ballam-Cross.
Another jewel is Ross Edwards’ Bird Spirit Dreaming, originally written as an oboe concerto for Diana Doherty. “I was prepared for the chamber version to lose some of the orchestral work’s colour, but that’s simply not the case,” Ballam-Cross continues. “Duke and Howie absolutely capture its free-spirited nature, and their ensemble interplay is impressively tight.”
It’s always refreshing to finish with a sorbet, and nothing fits the bill quite so deliciously as Maurice Yvain’s effervescent operetta Yes! presented here by Les Frivolités Parisiennes (Alpha ALPHA974). Yvain was once the undisputed king of the boulevards, his catchy tunes whistled and hummed dans les rues Parisiennes. Opening in 1928, Yes! was an immediate hit. The plot is frivolous, funny and typically French, though with its emphasis on marriage, morals and mistresses, it is somewhat of its time.
The heady brew includes a Parisian playboy and his married paramour, a wealthy pasta manufacturer known as ‘the Noodle King’, an exotic beauty from Valparaíso, and a manicurist who agrees to a quickie wedding in London (hence the title).
Yvain’s gift for melody owes debts to Weill and Offenbach. Then there’s a perky duet that could be by Poulenc, while a song about life among the gauchos channels Gershwin. Les Frivolités Parisiennes has done a thoroughly convincing job of reviving this petit bijou, a work chock-full of good tunes and delivered with all the fizz of a freshly opened bottle of Dom Pérignon. All of our reviews are available in full online, and there’s a monthly Spotify playlist offering an hour of highlights.
Liza Lim unveils three world premieres in Australia in the coming months. She unpacks them with Maddy Briggs and explains why she sees artists as “antennae”.
Liza Lim is one of Australia’s leading composers, with an international reputation. In a monograph called The Music of Liza Lim, Tim Rutherford-Johnson describes her sound as “lyrical and dramatic, contemplative and vigorous, intimate and wild”.
“Composition really is trying to attune to the situation and people; that’s where I get inspiration from, really,” Lim tells Limelight.
“I don’t know everything about my music when it starts; it unfolds as I go, as I discover more things about it. Even when it’s finished, I don’t know everything about it – which, I think, is a good thing.”
A highly accomplished composer, Lim is in huge demand at home and abroad. She has three world premieres in Australia this year, while her existing works also feature on several 2024 programs.
In February, cellist James Morley played her gorgeously eerie work an ocean beyond earth at Phoenix Central Park in Sydney, a cotton thread connecting his instrument to the strings of a nearby violin. The New York-based JACK Quartet gave the Australian premiere of String Creatures while touring here in April. Lim wrote the work for the quartet and its US premiere in 2022 was described by The New York Times as “gripping”.
Meanwhile, Australian violinist Harry Ward (who now plays with the Berlin Philharmonic) will be the soloist when the ELISION Ensemble performs the Australian premiere of Lim’s concerto Speak, Be Silent at Melbourne Recital Centre on 5 July.
Overseas, her cello concerto A Sutured World, dedicated to its soloist Nicolas Altstaedt, will have its premiere at the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in October, followed by performances with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, which is one of the co-commissioners, will perform the work in 2025.
The first of Lim’s world premieres on home soil, Transcendental Étude, was commissioned by Musica Viva Australia for Russian-American pianist Kirill Gerstein, who performs it on a national tour this month. It borrows its title from a series of piano works by Liszt as a “little nod to the great traditions of virtuosic piano playing”.
“Kirill is an extraordinary pianist. He brings this incredible depth of tone. There’s a sort of dark richness in his playing which I really love; it’s something I kept in mind,” says Lim.
While there are no direct references to Liszt in the work, Lim does refer to Iranian singer Shervin Hajipour’s
Baraye, which became an anthem during the 2022 protests in Iran following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini for “improper hijab”.
The song “is just the most incredible outpouring of longing and grace,” says Lim, whose own sustained and powerful advocacy for gender equity in music means that the “fight for freedoms” is close to her.
A “short and modest” work, Transcendental Étude begins simply with a single note. In fact, Lim is adapting the opening into a grade three piano work; a piece with a “quiet virtuosity” embedded within it.
She finds something quite vulnerable about a solo performer. “One person, one instrument – there’s an immediacy about it. With a virtuosic performer, there is a technical prowess, but there’s also that aspect of the human body, a person confronting the boundaries of possibility that’s very fascinating.”
In August, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra will premiere Lim’s Salutation to the Shells, commissioned as a part of its 50 Fanfares project. Lim’s acute thoughtfulness to the work’s physicality – one of her musical stamps –fuelled the composition.
The shells refer to a few things, Lim explains – the Sydney Opera House’s sails, yes, but also the Indigenous monuments or middens of shell, some around 12 metres tall, that used to line Sydney Harbour but were destroyed by the first colonial administrators to source lime for construction.
“[Those shells] are now amongst the brickwork of [many Sydney] buildings and rocks. This idea of layers upon layers [and] the way in which Sydney is built upon an earlier Indigenous city; that work reflects upon these layers of different resonances and tries to do it musically as well.”
A week later, another premiere will mark her exit as the Sydney Conservatorium of Music’s inaugural Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music. Lim describes her time as Chair as “a really extraordinary and beautiful period”, during which she commissioned works to be performed by the JACK Quartet and won a 2020 Classical:NEXT Innovation Award for the Composing Women program, among a host of other accomplishments.
Debuting alongside a talk Lim will give at the Conservatorium, the new work, Calling the Ancestral River, will be performed by ELISION and Swedish violinist Karin Hellqvist. (Lim has a longstanding, deep connection with ELISION, one of Australia’s leading new musical ensembles, of which her husband Daryl Buckley is Artistic Director).
Calling the Ancestral River is a “more portable” version of another work of hers, Multispecies Knots of Ethical Time, which she describes as a “collaboration with the Eigenthal river in Switzerland” where she made video and sound recordings in 2023 in a project for the Lucerne Festival.
“It’s about the living qualities of the more than human – not just animals and plants and ecologies of landscape, but actually everything, the way in which we’re all interconnected. Performers, space, time and
histories are part of how I think, and that’s what structures the work,” she says.
“I think artists are doing that all the time. I think of artists like antennae that pick up on resonances and signals, hidden messages and unsaid things, that are accompanying us all the time. I think that’s one of the things art-making can do.”
Kirill Gerstein plays Liza Lim’s Transcendental Étude on a national tour for Musica Viva Australia, 10–23 June. Sydney Symphony Orchestra premieres Salutation to the Shells at the Sydney Opera House, 2 & 3 August. ELISION Ensemble performs Speak, Be Silent at Melbourne Recital Centre on 5 July and premieres Calling the Ancestral River at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music on 8 August.
Music in the Regions heads for Broken Hill to present William Barton and Véronique Serret’s Heartland by Jo
LitsonWhen Catherine Farry heard that Create NSW was to fund a new independent organisation called Music in the Regions, which would tour top-notch musicians and small-to-medium ensembles to places not usually visited by classical musicians, her heart leaped.
Farry is the Executive Director of West Darling Arts, the Regional Arts Development Organisation for Far West NSW, based in Broken Hill.
“I’ve known about Music in the Regions since it was first set up [in 2021] and have been counting down the days until they could organise something to come out this way because, as you can imagine, [with] Broken Hill being so far from Sydney, it is really difficult to tour anything here because of the costs and the time,” she says.
“We are 500 kilometres from Adelaide and 1,300 from Sydney, so it’s really hard to [attract] good quality musical experiences. So, when Ian [Whitney, the General Manager and Producer of Music in the Regions] said that he had the Heartland project in mind, it was wonderful news. We have an audience, not huge, but a very dedicated audience of classical music and contemporary music lovers who will really love it.”
“We were lucky enough to have the Sydney Youth Orchestras come out to Broken Hill last year and perform at the Civic Centre, which seats a few hundred. It was jam-packed and it was so well received.”
Heartland is a musical duet between didgeridoo virtuoso William Barton and violinist Véronique Serret. Commissioned for the 2019 Canberra International Music Festival, the seven-minute work has since expanded into an hour-long “chamber oratorio” blending the sounds of didgeridoos, voice, violin, guitar and electronics, and has gone on to tour widely.
Inspired by the poetry of Barton’s mother Aunty Delmae Barton, it explores Country, landscape, culture, language and identity.
Heartland received a five-star review from Limelight, which described it as “a work of deep spirit” that “evokes Australia’s vastness, its mystery and wonder, its dryness and heat. In it, one can hear echoes across mountainous canyons and desert swales. There are the sounds of wind, fire, rain, animals and birds.”
Thanks to Music in the Regions, Heartland will now tour to the Darling and Sunraysia regions with performances in Broken Hill, Robinvale, Balranald and Mildura. The program will also include the duo’s Kalkani and Didge Fusion.
Asked about the tour, Barton and Serret say, “[We are] absolutely privileged to have the opportunity to connect with these communities. In fact, we have never been to Broken Hill and are super excited to check it out!”
“It is of the utmost importance to us that we are able to connect and share our music and story far and wide,” adds Serret. “Our musical story is largely influenced by Australia’s vast landscape. I grew up in Western Sydney and always appreciated it when live artists visited my community although [that only happened] rarely.”
Since March 2022, Music in the Regions has supported tours by musicians including Acacia Quartet, Luminescence Chamber Singers, Duo Histoire and Inventi Ensemble. The Heartland tour will be the 14th and marks the conclusion of Whitney’s tenure as producer.
He feels a great sense of pride at what the initiative has achieved thus far.
“We have found this untapped need in a lot of regional communities, and particularly the smaller communities. You’ve got your regional centres, which are fantastic and there is a great audience there, but we have had this real impact in the next ring of communities,” he says, citing places like Condobolin, Tarcutta, Nundle and Ganmain.
“In the last two and a half years, we have worked with over 100 local partners [to present the tours]. It could be a small business; in Nundle, it was a landcare group. Some of them work really well; for some of them it’s a learning experience; and some of them don’t work, but that’s the luxury of the subsidy in that we’re able to take the financial risk.”
Asked about the choice of Heartland for the current tour, Whitney praises the artistic quality of all their projects. “It hasn’t been ‘classics to the bush’. Last year, 40 percent of the repertoire was by living composers, so we haven’t just been doing greatest hits tours, but the geographic symbolism of [touring to] Broken Hill and Sunraysia had to be matched by a project with the same ambition.”
“[Heartland ] is such a musically rich and fascinating project. You’ve got two artists who are absolutely at the top of their game, with not only a national but an international profile, so this project will be extraordinarily powerful.”
In Broken Hill, Barton and Serret will perform at the City Art Gallery, an old, restored building with an impressive art collection.
“A gallery is at the traditional end of where we perform,” says Whitney. “Obviously churches and community halls are the backbone, but we’ve performed at golf clubs, a train station, services clubs and a cinema in West Wyalong.”
The Heartland tour is not only the first Music in the Regions visit to Far West NSW, it will also venture into North West Victoria where Robinvale and Mildura are located. “Mildura is on the border, but in Victoria,” says Whitney. “So, it’s exciting to cross the border – even if it is only 100 metres!”
Music in the Regions will tour Heartland to Broken Hill City Art Gallery on 22 June; Robinvale Community Arts Centre on 26 June; Theatre Royal, Balranald on 27 June; and Mildura’s Powerhouse Precinct on 30 June. Tickets are free for people under 18 but pre-booking is recommended.
First Nations choreographers Moss Te Ururangi Patterson and Deborah Brown talk to Steve Dow about working together on Bangarra Dance Theatre’s first mainstage international collaboration.
In a rehearsal space in Sydney, two First Nations choreographers are finding common cultural threads that have shaped them – bodies of fresh or salt water, the southern sky and generations of strong women.
Together, they are creating a new work, The Light Inside, for Bangarra Dance Theatre’s first-ever mainstage international collaboration, as part of its forthcoming major touring show Horizon.
Māori choreographer Moss Te Ururangi Patterson, a proud mokopuna (grandson) of the Ngāti Tūwharetoa tribe, speaks of his childhood in Tokaanu, a small settlement close to Tūrangi at the southern tip of Lake Taupō, which fills the caldera of a volcano on Aotearoa/ New Zealand’s central north island.
He was raised there by his grandmother and her sisters, his “giggling aunties”, as he calls them, whose beautiful singing would waft across the marae (meeting ground). These women were formative influences on Patterson, who rose to become Chief Executive and Artistic Director of The New Zealand Dance Company in 2023.
“I remember them like it was yesterday,” he says. “The village sits next to a geothermal area. It’s ancient, you know, and it’s humble at the same time.”
His co-choreographer on The Light Inside, Bangarra alumnus Deborah Brown, speaks to Limelight via video conference from her Brisbane childhood bedroom, where the walls and ceiling are painted bright pink. She gives a short history of her elderly parents, who are in the adjoining rooms.
Her mum and dad met on Waiben (Thursday Island) in the Torres Strait, 60 kilometres south of Badu, where her mother was born and raised with the cultural knowledge and practices of the Meriam Mir people, because her own mother (Brown’s grandmother) had been born on Mer (Murray Island), formed from an extinct volcano.
“My mother has an amazing connection with traditional dance and culture,” says Brown, warming to her theme. “The Light Inside is about how we carry knowledge, and how it’s passed on.”
Growing up in mainland suburbia, Brown has sometimes felt “diluted” in her cultural understanding, but says, “there’s a little bit inside of me. Moss and I were talking about that: he talked about a displacement point of view; I see it as a thread.” Brown raises her arms and curls her fingers, as though she is pulling at strands. “We never get displaced; we carry it within us.”
Brown’s father, a Scotsman and public servant, helped draft the Torres Strait Treaty between Australia
and Papua New Guinea, signed in 1978 and entered into force in 1985, which sets out borders but also recognises traditional activities of Indigenous peoples, such as fishing and ceremony.
Part of Brown’s contribution to The Light Inside includes an eight-minute section about borders and native title. In 1992, the High Court recognised that a group of islanders, led by Eddie Mabo, held ownership of Mer, thereby holding that native title existed for all Indigenous Australians.
Brown and Patterson say that while it is important to acknowledge intergenerational trauma, The Light Inside will place greater emphasis on the strength of continuous culture and intergenerational resilience.
One challenge for both choreographers, however, is that none of the current Bangarra ensemble of dancers are from the Torres Strait, while this will be the first time the Indigenous Australian troupe has taken on Māori cultural traditions.
Within The Light Inside, Patterson is exploring the “100 winds” of Lake Taupō with the Bangarra dancers, as well as teaching them kapa haka movements and ancient stories from his country. “It’s very pacey, the work that we’re making at the moment; it’s very lyrical and beautiful. I’m getting the dancers to explore Māori symbology, to take that into their body,” he says.
“I feel like the [Bangarra] dancers can grasp it at a deeper level, in a way, [compared] to non-Indigenous
dancers. They’ve been able to take quite a simple, symbolic form, and a story about that form, and build it and grow really fast. It’s quite extraordinary.”
In terms of “cultural safety” of dancers working across First Nations traditions, Patterson says the most practical approach is to begin offering ideas and tasks for the dancers to enter into the work, based on his own lived experience. “That is the most truthful and honest way I can come into the work and develop the stories,” he says.
Brown notes that Bangarra has worked with Torres Strait Islander culture before, notably in 2023 with the children’s show Waru – journey of the small turtle, helmed by guest artist and Bangarra alumnus Elma Kris, who grew up on Waiben. Waru returns to the Sydney Opera House this October.
I ask Patterson what role First Nations dance and arts can play in the shadow of Australia’s failed referendum for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, while New Zealand grapples with some conservatives’ efforts to undermine the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi).
“I’d like to say they have the most important role to play, of course,” he laughs. “It’s movement poetry. We speak to the hearts of people.”
Horizon premieres at the Sydney Opera House, 11 June – 13 July; then Canberra Theatre Centre, 18–20 July; Queensland Performing Arts Centre, 7–17 August; and Arts Centre Melbourne, 28 August – 7 September.
✭✭✭✭ Slatkin’s guidebook for maestros can easily be enjoyed by all.
by Will YeomanRowman & Littlefield, PB, 204pp, $60 approx, ISBN 9781538186794
While the utility of this guide to conducting eight of the most important orchestral works of the 20th century will be obvious to emerging and established conductors, it may be less so to the general listener. Yet, while a perfectionist, the great American conductor and educator Leonard Slatkin is no elitist.
As he writes, “The essays in this book are intended for those who are considering entering the conducting profession or are already on that path. At the same time, I hope that my insights into how a maestro learns the score and the techniques used to get the desired results might also be of interest to the general music lover or orchestral musician. If you have a little musical knowledge, most of what is contained in these pages will be understandable.”
That they are of such interest to the general music lover is due, in no small part, to Slatkin’s breezy prose, clear, unfussy analyses, historical contextualisation and practical tips and tricks. Sometimes he almost squeezes all this into one sentence. To take just one example: “La Mer is all about the sound world, and therefore it is important to study the visual art of this era that influenced Debussy’s aesthetic.”
Slatkin is currently Music Director Laureate of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. His previous conducting posts, whether as music director, chief conductor or principal guest conductor, include positions with St Louis Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.
Slatkin has written elsewhere about the basics of the conducting profession. He’s even produced a series of videos, which you can see at leonardslatkin.com or on YouTube. With these essays, he takes on “the role of the devil, working out the details”.
The eight works, which Slatkin believes “all conductors need to have in their repertoire,” are Debussy’s La Mer, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Gershwin’s An American in Paris, Copland’s Appalachian Spring Suite, Barber’s Adagio for Strings and Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.
In each case, Slatkin provides a detailed yet concise analysis, explores interpretive challenges, and offers advice on matters such as score study, tempo and dynamics, phrasing and articulation, instrumental
balance and expression and interpretation. And although he encourages conductors to “find their own unique interpretations”, he also recognises the value of observing the great conductors of the past and listening to their recordings.
As for us listeners, this book will prove a treasure trove of insider knowledge that can only enhance our understanding and enjoyment of the music. I love, for example, Slatkin’s elegant description of conducting the closing moments of Barber’s Adagio for Strings: “Here is a lovely effect that you can try for the final four bars. In my experience, it results in the best possible fadeout and ending, as the sound literally disappears. Your hands should be somewhat separated, with the left hand sustaining the first violins. Slowly bring your hands together while at the same time turning over your left hand so that the palm faces downward to indicate to the musicians that they should stop their vibrato. Instead of a traditional cutoff, simply close your hands.”
✭✭✭✭ Based on real-life events, this meticulously crafted, deeply unsettling mystery thriller features stellar performances.
by Jason BlakeThis measured, dread-filled family drama from Belgian writer/director Joachim Lafosse deals with the most difficult of subjects.
The film begins in a car. We are travelling with Astrid Schaar (Emmanuelle Devos) as she drives through the city streets. Captured in the rearview mirror, her eyes betray the tension she feels, her face a deep weariness. She pulls up outside a building – a police station, where she’s informed that her teenaged son Raphaël (Matthieu Galoux) has been charged with attempted murder. Of whom and why is revealed next in a lengthy flashback.
The film is set in the French city of Metz. Astrid’s husband François Schaar (Daniel Auteuil) is a high-profile lawyer prosecuting a paedophile network. The case has the nation gripped and, it would appear, some in the establishment are unnerved. Dark forces are working against him, François suggests, as he prepares to take part in a public demonstration to commemorate victims and grant them a kind of visibility.
Meanwhile, journalists, paparazzi and TV camera crews are parked outside the Schaar’s home 24/7, pushing the envelope of the right to privacy and alerting the world to his family’s every move.
Inside the house, things are even more tense. Raphaël has been expelled from school again. Astrid and François occupy the same bed at night but otherwise share little. It seems that the appalling details of the case – which we
are mostly insulated from – have infected the atmosphere, corroding their relationship. François isn’t immune to its insidiousness. At night, he compulsively views evidential videos of children being abused.
Then, a shattering revelation: Raphaël’s sister Caroline (Louise Chevillotte) informs Astrid that devastating revelations against François are about to be aired. Made by a family member and dating back three decades, they will destroy his credibility, his life and the case he has spent five years prosecuting.
Lafosse, who has co-written the screenplay with regular collaborator Thomas van Zuylen, draws on real-life events for A Silence (you may distantly recall the name of the paedophile and serial murderer Marc Dutroux and what happened to the lawyer, Victor Hissel, who worked for some of his victims, but it’s not essential) and turns them into a meticulously crafted mystery thriller with the core of a classical tragedy. Later, the film makes a move into the realm of the police procedural but does so in a way that maintains the same dread-laden tension.
When he’s not stalking his characters with dolly shots, Lafosse likes to position the viewer uncomfortably close, right on their shoulders sometimes, creating an unsettling intimacy and sense
of witnessing. When he breaks the convention for Raphaël’s murderous assault, the sudden impression of distance makes your breath catch.
The central performances are superb and complex. Auteuil, one of France’s most respected and prolific screen stars, is exceptional in a role that many actors in his elevated position might have shied away from. It’s also smart casting by Lafosse. Shaped over the decades, our moviegoer instincts tend to make us side with anyone Auteuil plays. We can’t help but be initially impressed by his lawyer on a mission. It makes the revelation about François’ past deeds, and his attempts to reframe them, even more difficult to watch. (Side note: Auteuil’s presence in a depiction of a bourgeois family being destroyed by the unsaid and unacknowledged might bring Michael Haneke’s even more unsettling 2005 drama Caché to mind.)
Galoux, making a brooding screen debut here, gives little away as the disturbed Raphaël, but he carries the weight of the final scenes very capably. However, the film belongs to Devos. Maintaining a disciplined stillness, she reveals Astrid’s conflicted emotions in micro-gestures and the expressive eyes of someone staring into an abyss of guilt and complicity.
Opens: 27 June; Genre: drama; Duration: 101 minutes.
Jack Symonds’ String Quartet No. 2 –Australian String Quartet
The ASQ takes this demanding string quartet “by the scruff of the neck”.
The Australian String Quartet premiered Jack Symonds’ String Quartet No. 2 on a 2022 national tour, beginning at Adelaide Town Hall.
The work was originally commissioned by the ASQ to be performed in the ANAM Quartetthaus as part of the 2021–22 UK/Australian Season – a joint initiative of the British Council and the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Speaking to Limelight ahead of the world premiere, Symonds acknowledged that his Second String Quartet is technically challenging but said that from the first rehearsal, he realised the ASQ had taken his score “by the scruff of the neck” and that he had no need to worry.
You can see for yourself by watching a performance recorded in the Sydney Opera House’s Utzon Room, which can be viewed for free on the ASQ website.
In the Limelight interview Symonds said, “I am very interested in music (and art in general) that achieves its tension and dynamism from the instability of material within a given form, and I was fascinated to make a relatively large-scale string quartet that explored this. The work is in two movements, which to me is a very special and rare structure (particularly in music before World War II) that invites a kind of dialectic that couldn’t be achieved otherwise.”
“I called the first movement an abnormality of growth as I wanted to create a form and expression where the music grew too quickly for the unfolding of the structure and pushed its way into all sorts of unstable places that ‘well-behaved’ development wouldn’t dare go.”
The second movement is called a continuity of paradoxes and approaches the ‘problem’ of development in a very different way. “Here, dissimilar kinds of music are forced to reconcile their differences and find an unlikely throughline to create a single arc of music,” said Symonds.
“However, in some ways, all this can be safely ignored by the listener,” he added. “My ultimate aim is to make a work that pulls you through a huge variety of expressive states in surprising ways that nevertheless add up to a satisfying whole, even if the choices I make at key junctures may seem wilfully perverse at the time.”
Reviewing the work for Limelight in Adelaide, Melanie Walters said that Symonds explores the notion of instability “through a great variety of textures and techniques, with gorgeous, fragile, sustained, soft timbres, and glissandi and microtonal shifts contrasting beautifully with extremely fast, dexterous passagework and frenetic moments throughout both halves. Although it is an incredibly technically demanding work, Symonds shows a great understanding of the idiomatic playing style of the ASQ and the performers meet the demands with much vitality.” Jo Litson
The Australian String Quartet’s performance of Jack Symonds’ String Quartet No. 2 can be viewed on demand on the ASQ’s website: asq.com.au.
Gurrelieder – Sydney Symphony Orchestra
This once-in-a-lifetime performance ticks all the boxes, and then some.
It’s a safe bet that not many people in the audience for the two sold-out performances of Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder (The Songs of Gurre) had seen this massive work played live – including the person wielding the baton, Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s Chief Conductor Simone Young.
But there could not have been a better candidate for Australia’s fourth staging, and the orchestra’s first. And “staging” is the appropriate word, with several rows of stalls in the Sydney Opera House’s Concert Hall sacrificed for the extended apron needed to accommodate the 400-plus musicians.
A member of the Schönberg 150 Artistic Honorary Committee, Young calls on all her experience as one of the world’s most respected exponents of Wagner for Schoenberg’s lavish 110-minute farewell to tonality. Composed over nearly a decade and premiered in 1913, the song cycle tells a Danish tale about medieval king Waldemar, who falls in love with the beautiful Tove and sets her up in the castle of Gurre. Waldemar’s queen Helvig, who we never meet, is jealous and has Tove murdered, which we learn from the wood dove Waldtaube. Waldemar rails at God, describing him as “tyrant rather than a ruler”, and is consequently condemned forever to be a “court jester”, calling his cavalrymen from their graves to ride with him through the night skies looking for his lost love.
As Waldemar, New Zealand tenor Simon O’Neill shows why he is in such demand for heldentenor roles. His timbre has an edge to it that enables his voice to cut through the 185-piece orchestra for the great heroic moments in his nine solos, ringing out beautifully in the farewell aria Du wunderliche Tove! (My wonderful Tove!).
In the hour-long first part, O’Neill and German soprano Ricarda Merbeth swap arias (but no duets). There is great musical chemistry between their voices, although Merbeth’s lower register does occasionally get swamped. This is not surprising when you consider the size of the orchestra required to play the score, with 24 musicians from the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) augmenting the SSO.
Merbeth is particularly treasured for her Wagner and Strauss roles and her glorious high note in the climactic (in every sense of the word) aria Du sendest mir einen Liebesblick (Your eyes meet mine in a lover’s glance) is a crowning moment. The orchestral interlude that follows is as erotic as anything in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.
Deborah Humble’s creamy mezzo-soprano is ideal for Waldtaube’s long pivotal aria Tauben von Gurre! Sorge quält mich (Wood Doves of Gurre! Woeful tidings I bear) at the dramatic close of Part I.
The final part features three terrific soloists. Serbian bass Sava Vemić is suitably urgent and nervous as the Peasant who describes the king’s retainers being summoned from their graves, while local tenor Andrew Goodwin is outstanding as Klaus the Fool who refuses to leave his grave and waffles on nonsensically for one of the work’s rare light moments. Opera Australia veteran bass-baritone Warwick Fyfe also provides some humour as the Speaker.
The three choirs – Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra Chorus and the men from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chorus – are only needed for the last part, culminating in the final number, Seht die Sonne (See the sunrise), surely a radiant ending to rival that of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. Steve Moffatt This concert will be broadcast at 1pm on 30 June by ABC Classic.
Friday 26th July, 7pm – James O’Donnell (USA)
Saturday 3rd August, 5pm – Marko Sever (Sydney)
Sunday 1st September, 5:30pm – “The First Hurrah”
A Celebration featuring former St James’ Organists
Saturday 16th November, 5pm – Sarah Kim (France)
Bicentenary 2019-2024
Celebrating the inauguration of The Bicentennial Pipe Organ Proudly sponsored by:
173 King Street, Sydney sjks.org.au
1PM
SYDNEY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Yeol Eum Son p, Edo de Waart cond
A Howes Luminifera – Wild Light for Orchestra (WP)
Brahms Variations on a Theme by Haydn
Mozart Piano Concerto No. 20 Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances
1PM WEST AUSTRALIAN
SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Sophie Foster voc, Dan Golding and Andrew Pogson hosts, Nicholas Buc cond Zimmer Music from The Da Vinci Code, Interstellar, Inception, Gladiator, Pirates of the Caribbean and more
1PM
WEST AUSTRALIAN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Emma McGrath v, Fabien Gabel cond Pépin Laniakea
Vaughan Williams The Lark Ascending
Saint-Saëns Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso
Brahms Symphony No. 3
1PM
FRANKFURT RADIO
SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Pablo Ferrández vc, Manfred Honeck cond
Moussa Elysium
Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1
Casals El cant dels ocells (Song of the Birds)
Beethoven Symphony No. 7
1PM
SWEDISH RADIO
SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Alexandre Kantorow p, Elim Chan cond
Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 1 Liszt Sonetto 104 del Petrarca Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances
1PM
WEST AUSTRALIAN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Sara Macliver s, Dane Lam cond Prokofiev Symphony No. 1, Classical Golijov Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra
Sibelius Symphony No. 5
1PM CAMERATA –
QUEENSLAND’S CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
Karin Schaupp g Dvořák Serenade for Strings Mendelssohn arr. Albertz Selections from Songs Without Words Vine Endless (chamber orchestra premiere) And Wild Card mystery guest
CLASSIC 100 COUNTDOWN
5PM
SYDNEY PHILHARMONIA CHOIRS
Katie Noonan s, AVÉ, ChorusOz 2024, Brett Weymark cond Jenkins The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace
Sibelius Finlandia
Parry Jerusalem Noonan and O’Connor An Instrument of Peace (WP)
1PM
HAVANA LYCEUM ORCHESTRA
Sarah Willis hn Egües El bodeguero Mozart Serenata notturna Mozart Horn Concerto No. 3
Amado La danza de los fugitivos Various Cuban Dances for Solo Horn, Strings and Percussion And other works
1PM
QUEENSLAND SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Irit Silver cl, Johannes Fritzsch cond M Eötvös The Saqqara Bird Mozart Clarinet Concerto Martinů Symphony No. 1
1PM
BERLIN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA
Maurizio Pollini p, Claudio Abbado cond
Mussorgsky Selections from Oedipus in Athens
Brahms Gesang der Parzen
Kurtág Stele
Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1
1PM
MELBOURNE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Tine Thing Helseth tr, Lawrence Renes cond Shostakovich Festive Overture
Weinberg Trumpet Concerto Rachmaninov Symphony No. 3
1PM
WEST AUSTRALIAN
SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Laurence Jackson v, Alpesh Chauhan cond Elgar Violin Concerto
Shostakovich Symphony No. 12, The Year 1917
1PM
TASMANIAN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Emily Sun v, Johannes Fritzsch cond H Sdraulig Flashout (WP)
Korngold Violin Concerto Beethoven Symphony No. 3, Eroica
1PM
ORCHESTRE NATIONAL DE FRANCE
Joyce DiDonato ms, Pierre Bleuse cond Bernstein Candide Overture
Heggie Camille Claudel: Into The Fire
Adams Harmonielehre
1PM
UKARIA CULTURAL
CENTRE
Trio Karénine
Saint-Saëns Piano Trio No. 1
Turina Piano Trio No. 1
Beethoven Piano Trio, Archduke
8PM
ADELAIDE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Andrew Litton p/dir
Finzi Eclogue
Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue
Rachmaninov Symphony No. 1
1PM
FRANKFURT RADIO
SYMPHONY
Julia Fischer vl, Alain Altinoglu cond
Sibelius The Oceanides
Sibelius Violin Concerto
Debussy La Mer
1PM ORCHESTRE
PHILHARMONIQUE DE RADIO FRANCE
Valentina Nafornita s, Jérôme Boutillier bar, Nour Ayadi p, Mikko Franck cond Fauré Ballade
N Boulanger Three Pieces for Piano
L Boulanger Pie Jesu Fauré Requiem
1PM
MELBOURNE CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
Claire Edwardes per, Sophie Rowell v/dir
Price Selections from Folksongs in Counterpoint
Williams Steeling Fire
Vivaldi Concerto in C major
Beethoven arr. Mahler Quartet No. 11
1PM
WEST AUSTRALIAN
SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Jenna Smith tr, Jen Winley cond Bonis Trois femmes de légende
Hummel Trumpet Concerto
Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazade
1PM
QUATUOR ÉBÈNE
Dubugnon Säkulare Suite
Ravel String Quartet in F Schumann String Quartet No. 3
1PM
WDR SYMPHONY
ORCHESTRA
Marek Janowski cond Bruckner Symphony No. 5
1PM
MUSICA VIVA TASMANIA
Orava Quartet
Borodin String Quartet No. 2
Haydn String Quartet in D minor, Fifths
Sculthorpe String Quartet No. 9
1PM
CONCERTO COPENHAGEN
Jane Gower bs, Lars Ulrik Mortensen hc/cond Jacquet de La Guerre Céphale et Procris Overture
Wilhelmine von Bayreuth
Harpsichord Concerto
Vivaldi Bassoon Concerto in A minor
Lykke A world seen from above
And other works
1PM
OMEGA ENSEMBLE
Debussy Première rhapsodie
Fauré Piano Quintet No. 1
Alice Chance Échappsodie
1PM
UKARIA CULTURAL
CENTRE
Dudok Quartet Amsterdam
Mozart String Quartet No. 23
Bacewicz String Quartet No. 4
29
Tchaikovsky String Quartet No. 3
Beethoven’s Eroica –
Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra 16 June at 1pm
1PM
SYDNEY SYMPHONY
ORCHESTRA
Ricarda Merbeth s,
30
Deborah Humble ms, Simon O’Neill t,
Andrew Goodwin t, Warwick Fyfe b-bar, Sava Vemić b, Musicians of ANAM, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chorus, Sydney Philharmonia Choirs
Simone Young cond
Schoenberg Gurrelieder
The world premiere of young Australian composer Harry Sdraulig’s Flashout makes a lively start to this program. Commissioned by the TSO, the 10-minute piece begins with rousing brass fanfares followed by deftly scored woodwind and percussion sounds. The music maintains rhythmic energy throughout while the orchestral textures are colourfully varied.
The Violin Concerto in D epitomises Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s luxuriant, late-Romantic style. Emily Sun’s reading does not emulate the dash and swagger of the work’s dedicatee Jascha Heifetz in the outer movements, preferring something gentler and sweeter. Although a tougher approach brings dividends in such harmonically lush material, she scores in her lyrically poetic rendition of the central Romance: Andante. Sun always produces wonderfully rich tone and unwavering technical accuracy, while conductor Johannes Fritzsch and the TSO supply finely balanced and attentive accompaniment. Aleksey Igudesman’s ¡Si Señor! is the virtuosic encore.
It is instructive to observe Fritzsch and the orchestra bringing Beethoven’s Eroica freshly to life. This is a core repertoire work for the TSO and the opportunity to refine details of phrasing, balance and rhythmic emphasis in this interpretation results in something special.
The first movement, Allegro con brio, has all the drama, rhythmic resilience and forward momentum needed, along with a certain dancing quality that avoids any feeling of the music being hard-driven. The Marcia funebre is also focused in its feeling of stoic grief, while the Scherzo is buoyant and the Finale headlong and triumphant.
Superbly played, there is unanimity of purpose and dedication that conveys a sense of the impact the symphony must have had on its first audiences. Peter Donnelly
All concert listings are correct at the time of publication. ABC Classic broadcast plans are subject to amendment for production and editorial reasons. Please check abc.net.au/classic for up-to-date listings.
J.S. Bach Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, Prelude and Fugue No. 1 in C major BWV 846
J.S. Bach ‘Sonata sopr’il sogetto Real’ from Das Musikalische Opfer BWV 1079
J.S. Bach Final 5 variations of ‘The Goldberg Variations’ BWV 988
J.S. Bach Violin Concerto in A minor BWV 1041
J.S. Bach Aria No. 3 ‘Wie zittern und wanken der Sünder Gedanken’ from Cantata BWV 105
J.S. Bach Die Kunst der Fuga, final 3 Contrapunctus
J.S. Bach 6 part Ricercar from Das Musikalische Opfer BWV 1079
DATES
Friday 21st June, 7.30pm Paddington Uniting Church, Paddington
Sunday 23rd June, 2.30pm
Our Lady of Dolours Church, Chatswood
785 377 bachakademieaustralia.com.au
RADIO *All times local
Peggy Glanville-Hicks
Breaking from serialism and neoclassicism, Peggy GlanvilleHicks embraced non-Western music traditions. Her 1951 Sonata for Piano and Percussion was one of the first works to emerge from her research. It’s performed here by Susanne Powell and the Canberra School of Music’s percussion ensemble. 3 June, 10am, 3MBS, 3mbs.org.au
In the Spotlight
Georges Bizet died on this day in 1875, leaving a memorable body of timeless music including his ever-popular opera Carmen. Spotlit this evening is his patriotic Patrie Overture, as well as a minuet arranged by Rachmaninov and played by acclaimed pianist Lance Dossor, and selections from Shchedrin’s celebrated Carmen Suite. 3 June, 7pm, 5MBS, 5mbs.com
Queensland Day
For those in the Sunshine State, it’s time to celebrate homegrown musicians and composers. For most of the day, programs will consist of music by Queensland soloists and ensembles – and there is no shortage of them!
6 June, 8am, 9am, 10am & 2pm, 4MBS Classic FM, 4mbs.com.au
Modern Romance
This program of mostly French post-Romantic music begins with excerpts from the Masquerade Suite by Soviet-Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian, followed by works by Debussy, Ibert and Messiaen. 6 June, 8pm, 5MBS, 5mbs.com
Evenings with the Orchestra
Tonight’s menu is drawn from the second decade of the 20th century with music by Elgar, Ravel, Stanford and the Danish great Carl Nielsen.
7 June, 8pm, 2MBS Fine Music Sydney, 2mbsfinemusicsydney.com
In the Mood
Australian composer Anne Boyd has had a long interest in the traditional music from Indonesia and Japan, and her Bali Moods No. 1 and No. 2 have become firm favourites with flautists around the world. Geoffrey Collins and pianist Nicholas Routley perform them here.
9 June, 10pm, 3MBS, 3mbs.org.au
Milhaud in America
This is the first in a series broadcast this month commemorating the 50th anniversary of the death of French composer and conductor Darius Milhaud. Future episodes will examine his membership of Les Six and the influence he had on his students at the Paris Conservatoire and Mills College in Oakland, California.
12, 19 & 26 June, 2pm and 22 June, 8pm, 2MBS Fine Music Sydney, 2mbsfinemusicsydney.com
Bach’s St John Passion
This performance by the Canberra Bach Ensemble was recorded in St Christopher’s Cathedral with tenor Richard Butler as the Evangelist. The ensemble has been performing in Germany this month as part of Bachfest Leipzig.
15 June, 8pm & 18 June, 2pm, ArtSound FM 92.7 and 90.3 Canberra, Artsound.fm
Blue Hills Revisited
For decades, Australians were enraptured by the ABC radio serial Blue Hills. The theme music was written by British-Australian composer Ronald Hanmer, who later expanded it for concert purposes and recorded it with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. Revisit it here. 16 June, 12pm, 3MBS, 3mbs.org.au
Sounds Classical
Alfredo Casella’s 1937 Concerto for Orchestra gives different sections of the orchestra the chance to really shine, while the finale takes listeners on a thrilling ride. It’s
the perfect opener for a program featuring works by Edward German, Myaskovsky and Sibelius.
16 June, 2pm, 5MBS, 5mbs.com
Early Borodin
Alexander Borodin identified with the 19th-century Russian-centric musical movement. However, his String Sextet from his student days exhibits an emerging craft that pays homage to Mendelssohn rather than the Russian style, which transpired later.
20 June, 8pm.3MBS, 3mbs.org.au
World Refugee Day
Erich Korngold, an internationally renowned pianist, composer and conductor, fled Vienna for the US just days before the Nazi invasion of Austria. Hollywood embraced him. Best known for his film scores, he also wrote major orchestral works, operas and songs, some of which can be heard here.
20 June, 9am, 4MBS Classic FM, 4mbs.com.au
A Sharpe Firebird
Canberra’s National Capital Orchestra, conducted by Louis Sharpe, presents Stravinsky’s dramatic Firebird Suite, alongside Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 with soloist Mia Stanton. Works by Sally Greenaway and Thomas McConochie also feature.
23 June, 8pm & 26 June 2pm, ArtSound FM 92.7 and 90.3 Canberra, Artsound.fm
Our World at Sunrise
Dawn is a time of hope and rebirth, whether creeping through a forest or bursting grandly over an ocean horizon. Australia’s own Sean O’Boyle captures it in his Uillean Sunrise, programmed here with the first movement from Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite. Bonis, Britten and Haydn also get a look-in.
29 June, 4pm, 4MBS Classic FM, 4mbs.com.au
Sunday Special
This program commemorates the 200th anniversary of the birth of German composer and conductor Carl Reinecke, best known for his flute sonata Undine, but also remembered as one of the most influential and versatile musicians of his time.
23 June, 3pm, 2MBS Fine Music Sydney, 2mbsfinemusicsydney.com
Baroque and Before
A highlight of this program is the 1721 opera-ballet Les Élémens (The Elements) by French composers André Cardinal Destouches and Michel Richard Delalande, an extravaganza about the cyclical renewal of time.
Christopher Hogwood directs the Academy of Ancient Music.
30 June, 6pm, 5MBS, 5mbs.com
Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra
Australian soprano Stacey Alleaume joins the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and TSO Chorus for a feast of French music by Lili Boulanger, Debussy, Poulenc and Ravel. Benjamin Northey conducts this livestream.
1 June, 7:30pm AEST at tso.com.au
National Symphony Orchestra
Live from The Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., Italian maestro Gianandrea Noseda leads the orchestra through Mahler’s enigmatic Seventh Symphony.
2 June, 10am AEST at medici.tv
Teatro Real
Lithuanian conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla leads the Madrid Symphony Orchestra in David Pountney’s iconic production of Mieczysław Weinberg’s 1968 opera The Passenger, first staged at the
Bregenz Festival in 2010, 14 years after the composer’s death. Set on an ocean liner, it focuses on the meeting of a Holocaust survivor and a former SS guard she remembers from Auschwitz.
2 June, 4am AEST at stage-plus.com
Melbourne Recital Centre
Following her thrilling 2022 debut at the venue, South Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son returns with a solo program comprising music by Alkan, Bizet, Czerny and Liszt, closing with Beethoven’s monumental Piano Sonata Hammerklavier.
4 June, 7:30pm AEST at australiandigitalconcerthall.com
Berlin Philharmonic
Ending its season with a bang, the Berlin Philharmonic performs Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain Prokofiev’s First Piano Concerto with Yuja Wang, and a selection of works by Ravel, including a Boléro chaser.
23 June, 4:15am AEST at digitalconcerthall.com
Wigmore Hall
Ahead of his Pinchgut Opera debut in Handel’s Julius Caesar in November, catch English countertenor Tim Mead perform a program of Barber, Purcell, Betty Roe and Schubert, accompanied by pianist James Baillieu. Available to livestream or on demand.
28 June, 5:30am AEST at wigmore-hall.org.uk
Australian Haydn Ensemble
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In 1816, William Watts performed at the British premiere of Beethoven’s Fifth, and his arrangement is the centrepiece of this program which also includes Ries’ Flute Quintet and Boccherini’s Night Music of the Streets of Madrid. 30 June, 4pm AEST at australiandigitalconcerthall.com
Get ready to laugh until you cry as Guy Noble dreams up an explosive festival program. All he needs now is an investor.
Ithink it would be great fun to be a festival director in Australia, bringing together so many ideas and international performers. I have put together my own festival program and eagerly await offers from any regional towns with a spare $22 million, which would be keen to invest in this amazing opportunity.
My festival opens with Organic featuring replicas of six grand organs from around the world in an open field, which will be used to play a specially commissioned work by Elena Kats-Chernin. At the conclusion, fireworks will erupt from the 64-foot pipes. Equally incendiary, a visit by the Flamme Quintet from Mexico, the world’s only fire-breathing wind quintet. Their performance of Stravinsky’s Firebird will set the town on fire, almost literally.
In a more intimate mode we have Cirque du Müllerin, an acrobatic retelling of Schubert’s song cycle. In the original, the miller’s girl is unseen, but in this version, she will be very much on display. Ukrainian aerial artist Ekaterina Movova will astound as she gyrates on silks suspended from the ceiling of a disused paint factory (if we can find one). Below her, Icelandic
baritone Eilífr Goðrúnarson will sing, accompanied by Belarusian accordionist Yegor Zabelov.
I am very excited to present Nut Lake (or The Swancracker), an intriguing mashup of two of Tchaikovsky’s most beloved ballets. Clara and Princess Odette join forces to battle the Mouse King and Rothbart in a watery Christmas spectacular.
In a similar vein, I have also commissioned a new opera, Consumption, drawing on music from Verdi’s La traviata and Puccini’s La bohème and featuring the story of Mimì, who ignores the advances of Rodolfo and instead falls in love with Violetta. They party wildly with their friend Musetta and then die together in wrenching tuberculotic scenes that will move the audience to tears.
Perhaps I am most excited about a special project entitled Long-Haul Bach. This is a seven-day, non-stop event that will feature every single note that JS Bach ever wrote, all 175 hours of it. The audience will sit in a specially constructed auditorium in tiers of first-class seats reclaimed from retired Qantas Boeing 747 jets, currently parked in the Arizona desert. In-seat screens will display the scores as they are played with an estimation of time of arrival. The audience can sleep whenever they wish and staff in costumes from Bach’s time will bring meals designed by German chef Helmut Knuststeadtler, who is a specialist in Baroque cuisine. Roasted peacock canapés and grilled beaver tails are some of the delicacies we can expect. There will only be 60 seats available at a price of $47,000 each, so when I get the go-ahead for this festival, make sure you book quickly.
Lachlan Skipworth has always enjoyed writing for the flute. But, as he explains, he has consciously avoided any references to impressionism in his new concerto, written especially for West Australian Symphony Orchestra’s Principal Flute, Andrew Nicholson.
Iknew I would enjoy composing a flute concerto.
Indeed, flutes abound in all my orchestral works, and I have even written a sonata for the soloist and dedicatee of this new concerto, Andrew Nicholson, which is included on my album Chamber Works Vol. II, released in 2022. But I also knew I wanted to avoid the textures of impressionism – definitely no Pan, fauns or mythological beasts this time; here I sought melodic immediacy and rhythmic drive, perhaps reflecting the Mozart, Weber and Copland clarinet concerti I learned in my student days.
Don’t be fooled, then, by the mysterious flute-laden introduction. It’s just a momentary ruse; the music soon surges and spirals up to a whirring tutti. The main theme arrives in the solo flute, its plaintive character singing with the melodic quality I was seeking. And the rhythmic energy is born in the flute’s ornamental flashes which soon overflow into the accompaniment. Such music calls for clarity and lightness, so I kept the orchestra itself quite small with reduced strings, winds and brass, and a preference for mallet percussion over timpani or other large drums. Most important is the positioning of the piano right in the centre of the orchestra, so its clear attack accentuates the very front of the beat.
So, with my sonic vision established, I let the music pour out and soon found I had four movements rather than the standard three.
I: Misterioso – Poco allegro – Lento – Agitato – Poco allegro
II: Larghetto espressivo
III: Misterioso – Tranquillo
IV: Molto allegro – Presto subito
Much of their material I coaxed from a threenote melodic cell made from a falling step followed by a rising leap. Simple, innocuous even, and its shape echoes throughout the piece – forwards, backwards, upside down and skewed to the edges of recognition. You will hear it in the first movement’s theme and vibrant outbursts, in the melodic contour of the Larghetto espressivo second, and later in the third’s ethereal Misterioso. And it’s still there, squashed, in the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants fourth movement.
But by this stage I suspect my compositional twists and turns will have been forgotten, because it’s a concerto after all, and I definitely didn’t hold back on writing a virtuosic solo part. While I hope the music itself lingers as we leave the hall, I know we’ll likely all be swept up in the dazzling flute work as the concerto builds to its finale.
I knew I would enjoy composing a flute concerto. The West Australian Symphony Orchestra performs the world premiere of Lachlan Skipworth’s Flute Concerto at Perth Concert Hall on 21 & 22 June. The work was commissioned for WASO by Geoff Stearn.
Iranian-Australian musician Gelareh Pour explains how she fell in love with the “deeply Iranian” string instrument, sometimes called the Persian spiked fiddle.
Iwas born in Tehran, the vibrant capital of Iran, a city steeped in rich cultural heritage and artistic tradition. Growing up there provided me with a deep appreciation for music and the arts. Music was a significant part of my upbringing. From traditional Persian music to Western classical and contemporary genres, our home was always filled with diverse sounds and melodies. My father also regularly took me to different concerts.
My mum was a Persian miniature painter and she knew lots of amazing artists. I remember going to her friend’s house and sitting next to her at the piano while she played a very famous Persian piece by Rouhollah Khaleghi. I think that was the first time music thoroughly touched my heart. I had never heard anything more beautiful and started crying. For years, hearing piano live made me cry. At first, this was embarrassing, but I got used to it and now I don’t hold back any emotions that music makes me feel.
When I was seven, a friend mentioned they were taking music lessons outside of school. I was fascinated and asked my parents to send me to music classes. They took a bit of convincing, but eventually my siblings and I were signed up.
I began learning flute, recorder and xylophone. I always wanted to play the piano as my main instrument, but we lived on the fourth floor of a building with no elevator, so it was out of the question. My teacher then introduced me to the
kamancheh, an instrument that reminded me of ancient buildings I had seen in Shiraz and Isfahan.
At that time, the kamancheh had drifted out of popular musical culture in Iran, so many teachers, like mine, were trying to encourage students to play the instrument. The enchanting world of musical expression captivated me from the moment I picked it up and set the stage for a lifelong infatuation and devotion. Not long after, I also started taking singing classes.
The kamancheh is a traditional Persian bowed string instrument with a distinctive appearance, a captivating sound and a sense of mystery and allure. It is usually made of walnut or white berry tree wood. It features a small, round body/resonance box, which is traditionally made of gourd and covered with animal skin like sheep or goat, and a long cylinder neck with four strings that sit across a bridge. The sound, which is quite nasal and earthy, is produced by drawing a horsehair bow across the strings. The instrument sits on a spike which is placed on a chair or the player’s lap and that is why some call it the Persian spiked fiddle.
Learning to play the kamancheh is a formidable challenge, requiring years of dedicated practice and commitment. From mastering intricate bowing patterns to navigating complex melodic ornamentation, every aspect of playing the kamancheh presents its own set of challenges. Unlike the violin, where you move the bow to play different strings, the kamancheh requires you to move the instrument, pivoting on its spike. This rotating motion can take some time to master.
I am fortunate to own several kamanchehs, crafted by master luthiers in Iran, each with its own unique character and tonal qualities. My most treasured kamancheh was made by one of the most amazing makers, Bayaz Amir Ataie. It is one of the last instruments he made himself.
The powerful statement “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS” adorns one of my instruments, serving as a poignant reminder of the transformative power of music in challenging oppression and injustice. Inspired by Woody Guthrie’s iconic guitar inscription, these words symbolise my unwavering commitment to social and political activism through music. The instrument in this image is not my main kamancheh.
I also play the qeychak, another traditional Persian string instrument with its own distinct charm and sound.
I relocated to Melbourne in 2012. The transition to life in Australia had a profound impact on my musicmaking, inspiring me to explore new sonic territories and embrace diverse influences from around the world.
Shortly after arriving, I met Brian O’Dwyer who is a drummer. We hit it off instantly and began playing together. In 2016, we formed a duo called ZÖJ (meaning ‘couple’ in Farsi). ZÖJ makes contemporary Australian music with a Persian accent. Our music always starts as free improvisation. I still play my traditional Iranian instruments, though I now use effects like an electric guitar player would, and I still sing in Farsi. But the music is made here; it is of this place.
ZÖJ’s album Fil O Fenjoon is available via gelarehpour.com
The Artistic Director of Tasmania’s Festival of Voices shares her excitement at what’s in store this year.
Your program spans classical, pop, gospel, country, musical theatre and cabaret. Why was this important to you?
The great luxury of programming a music festival focused on singing is that we don’t have to limit ourselves to one genre. Not only is it interesting and fun to be able to hit so many different notes (pun intended), but it’s also so important for me to make as many people as possible feel welcome at the festival. A great way to engage audiences is by programming artists and genres that they’re already invested in. Then, hopefully, while they’re with us, they will explore a bit and try something new.
Can you tell us about this year’s highlights including The Song Company and Luminescence Chamber Singers?
Gosh, I’m so excited about both of those concerts! It’s the first time The Song Company and Luminescence Chamber Singers have come to the Festival of Voices.
They’ll both be performing in the stunning Ian Potter Recital Hall [at The Hedberg in Hobart, which has] absolutely world-class acoustics. Both concerts will feature works by Australian composers – something that has always been incredibly important to the festival. There are so many other highlights, but personally I’m excited to have Marliya performing Spinifex Gum. On the more contemporary front, we have Montaigne and the ever-iconic Macy Gray, who is touring in celebration of the 25th anniversary of her first album [On How Life Is]. I also have to mention The Big Sing, our free, outdoor, singalong concert, which is back at Salamanca [in Hobart] this year.
Your program contains various singalongs besides The Big Sing, including Country Pub Chorus Is community involvement a key factor?
We’re hugely invested in getting EVERYONE singing, and we really do mean everyone. I’m a firm believer that everyone deserves access to arts and cultural events [and] is enriched by engaging with the arts. There’s a lot of research suggesting that communal singing has both physical and mental health benefits, as well as enriching our communities socially, economically and culturally. Workshops and singalongs are absolutely key to this; they facilitate connection, they are welcoming spaces for people of all experiences and backgrounds, and they’re a lot of fun!
This year’s Classical Choral Workshop culminates in a performance of Mozart’s Great Mass in C minor. How did that come about?
We have been running a major Classical Choral Workshop annually since 2012, and each year it’s hugely popular. This year, we are excited to be working with Dr Elizabeth Scott, who has long been a favourite of many of our regular Sydney-based attendees. These workshops take a really long time to organise [as there are] a lot of moving pieces, so I need to give a big thank you to our Senior Choral Producer Joan Wright, who leads this aspect of the festival. Joan and Elizabeth first met to discuss the workshop back in December 2022, and Elizabeth suggested Mozart’s Great Mass. It hasn’t been performed in Hobart in recent years, so we’re thrilled to have it as the workshop offering.
Can you tell us about the range of venues you use and if that helps attract different audiences?
We’re using a wide range of venues for a mixture of ticketed and free events. Concert halls, pubs, churches, parks – you name it, we’ve got people singing there! I absolutely think that it helps attract different audiences. A lot of the ticketed venues have their own in-house mailing lists and social media, and it’s great to reach new people that way. The free events generally take place in venues with a lot of organic foot traffic, and that’s a great way to connect with new audiences. The 2024 Festival of Voices plays at venues in Hobart, Launceston and other towns around Tasmania, 28 June – 7 July.
Ahead of a Sydney season, the French dancer and choreographer (of Black Swan fame) reflects on the music that shaped him and explains how he fell in love with Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet all over again.
Iwas born in France but grew up in Senegal. I had the same relationship to music as the African kids; you walk, you dance. Growing up with those West African rhythms deeply impacted me, and I learned drumming at a young age. This led to my love for minimalism and composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich, who was inspired by that kind of music. It’s never left me throughout my life as a dancer or in how I approach dance. The way I choreograph involves a lot of variations on a theme.
I had a very musically rich family environment. My mum taught dance and my dad was a very good singer with a big love for chanson française, so that was part of the household growing up. Barbara, Léo Ferré and Claude Nougaro were the singers who really blessed us. There was a real passion for that sort of writing, in particular Ferré’s poetry.
My middle brother is a flautist and played classical music every day; my oldest brother played the guitar. For years, he practised jazz and flamenco, and he listened to a lot of interesting jazz records from the US in the 80s. Miles Davis was a big presence and I remember his album Tutu My brother saw him perform live, but I was too young.
My grandparents played classical music a lot, and I remember listening to records of violin concertos from a really young age. By the time I came to Lyon, I was 13 and discovering music from Schumann to Chopin.
Even in New York, in the dorms, I had a lot of records and started going to the opera. I was actually in the first opera I saw – Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore
In New York, I discovered composers like David Lang and Meredith Monk, and I started to work with Nico Muhly. I’ve commissioned him many, many times and we just premiered a new piece [Me. You. We. They] at the Philharmonie de Paris in March. Minimalism became something that I started to love and choreograph to. Obviously, Nico is not considered a minimalist composer, but I love the atmosphere of that kind of music.
When I began to work on Romeo and Juliet, I had to reconnect with Prokofiev’s score. It had become almost like elevator music to me, in the sense that it had been used so much. As I watched more and more old American films, I started to hear it like a film score. There’s so much film music it inspired when you think about Bernard Herrmann and the generation of composers that was inspired by Ravel and later Prokofiev.
I approached Romeo and Juliet as a movie and shot a short film of Shakespeare’s balcony scene with two actors in LA. I used Prokofiev’s music for the balcony duet and started to love it again. The orchestration is really marvellous.
Recently, I discovered the arias of Reynaldo Hahn, who directed the Paris Opera for a short time. He was Proust’s lover and an incredible melodist. It’s funny that a composer who’s really not well known could be so outstanding.
I can have a day where I feel like listening to Hahn and Schumann, or I might want some Portuguese, Brazilian or 1950s American music. Right now, I’m listening to a song by [British folk singer] Laura Marling called What He Wrote; it’s on my playlist next to Oscar Peterson’s Hymn to Freedom. The music I listen to really depends on the mood, and the world I want to dive into.
Benjamin Millepied’s Romeo & Juliet Suite plays at the Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 5–9 June.
TRAVEL CLOSER TO HOME WITH HAYLLAR MUSIC TOURS
Celebrate the incredible music-making happening a little closer to home this year with Hayllar Music Tours. From the splendid bustle of the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville and two spectacular trips to Sydney, to our unique and inspiring Hayllar Chamber Music Weekends in Grandchester and the Hunter Valley, we have something for every music lover looking to keep things local this year.
AUSTRALIAN FESTIVAL OF CHAMBER MUSIC - PART I | 26–31 JULY 2024 | LIMITED AVAILABILITY
AUSTRALIAN FESTIVAL OF CHAMBER MUSIC - PART II | 30 JULY–5 AUGUST 2024
MAXIM VENGEROV IN RECITAL, WITH OPERA & MUSIC IN SYDNEY | 8–11 AUGUST 2024
THE ART OF THE PIANO TRIO, GRANDCHESTER, QLD | 15–18 AUGUST 2024 | SOLD OUT THE ART OF THE ROMANTICS, HUNTER VALLEY, NSW | 17–20 OCTOBER 2024 | LIMITED AVAILABILITY
TASMANIAN CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL | 8–11 NOVEMBER 2024
DIE WALKÜRE IN CONCERT IN SYDNEY | 13–16 NOVEMBER 2024 | LIMITED AVAILABILITY
BENDIGO CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL | 5–9 FEBRUARY 2025
