Both guest artists of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s concerts this week appeared in Australia for the first time: the octogenarian Christoph von Dohnányi and the versatile violinist, less than half his age, Carolin Widmann. The great German conductor must feel a certain pride in his ancestry, as he kept the Hungarian spelling of his surname.
It takes artistic courage to devote almost a whole concert to music associated with cinema, but then Richard Tognetti, the artistic director and concert master of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, never lacked creative thinking or musical audacity.
The Sydney Symphony invited a Big Band, the Jazz at the Lincoln Center Orchestra with its leader, Wynton Marsalis to join forces for a week, and in this concert, the delighted audience quickly realised that ‘all you gotta do is swing’.
Both composers whose music was performed in Garrick Ohlsson’s Sydney solo concert were motivated by other artists, namely painters, thus an originally visual experience became audial in the resulting compositions.
The artistry of Maxim Vengerov is an uncommon phenomenon: it represents a rare amalgamation of repertoire spanning both traditional and modern, of musical interests firmly single-minded at times but broadly versatile elsewhere.
Only a few days ago, the newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made history and provoked frenzied headlines by forming his cabinet with an equal number of men and women.
Combining instruments and performing practices old and new, Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra render Mozart symphonies with panache.
It is not often that the nominal title of a concert would consist of simply the name of its protagonists. Yet this is exactly what happened this week when the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s programme was called with laconic brevity: Cirque de la Symphonie.
On his current Australian tour, the indefatigable Pinchas Zukerman seems to cherish playing a different programme in every venue. He appeared with his own chamber ensemble, the Zukerman Trio in Sydney, partnered with two Canadian musicians, Amanda Forsyth (cello), and Angela Cheng (piano).
Giuseppe Verdi’s Don Carlos has finally arrived, for the first time in the 21st century, as a much anticipated highlight of Opera Australia’s current season.
The idea of bringing together a country’s best players from all around the world to show off their combined might is all too familiar for football fans during any FIFA World Cup. It is far less common, indeed, almost unknown in classical music.
Presenting a cello—piano recital of mostly Gallic works spiced up with a contemporary British composition might appear counter-intuitive to most musicians. Not so to Steven Isserlis, who performed an unusual, challenging, inspiring and highly satisfying concert with pianist Connie Shih in Sydney on Monday night.
Schoenberg's extraordinary orchestration of Brahms' G minor Piano Quartet completes a satisfying Sydney Symphony Orchestra concert under the baton of Matthias Pintscher.
