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New York Arts in Australia

Music
Nikolai Medtner

The Sydney Symphony with Vladimir Ashkenazy and Alexei Volodin in Medtner and Holst

October 19, 2019Steven Kruger

Who would ever suppose an obscure one-movement piano concerto could produce this sort of triumph? Alexei Volodin simply and unexpectedly swept away his Sydney listeners at this concert to frenzied screams with his performance of the Medtner Piano Concerto No.1. Our audience came to hear The Planets no doubt, but many just as surely emerged, like me, a dazed convert to Medtner, as if taken over by pods in my sleep from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It was a stunning experience.
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Music
Mozarts Geburtshaus. Photo by Marion Kalter.

The Australian Brandenburg Orchestra’s All Mozart Program Including the C Minor Mass in Sydney

May 28, 2013Andrew Miller

Since the resurrection of certain large and important Mozart works, Idomeneo being the main example which only came back to theatres and concert halls again around 60 years ago, much of his sacred music remains unsung or at least rarely heard. The Requiem mass, the C minor mass, the Coronation mass, Ave verum corpus are more or less ubiquitous, and do deserve many hearings. There are certain others a little less often heard, but there remain very many masses, mainly short youthful ones, litanies and fragments, starting from Mozart's childhood in the late 1760's through the '70's, with many fewer in the '80's when he was writing his finest operas. These sacred pieces, as well as the church sonatas which are thought to have been played as part of some of the masses, and also I might add Mozart's ceremonial masonic music which also has a particularly strong and direct metaphysical sense (though masonic music has its own peculiar style), approach the universe in a very Mozartean way, surprisingly similar to his secular music, even though they respond to different texts or purposes. These sacred pieces' clear dramatic sense makes them well suited to the concert hall, even if they can loose some of their gravity in the more modern workaday venues. Still they aren't operas and obviously the separate religious importance matters greatly whatever the occasion which sees them played, even if both Mozart's sacred choral and secular music span human existence with such deep and sensitive empathy. Mozart's thoughts and music-making about the divine are al the more powerful when one considers that though he wrote less sacred music in the 1780's, at the same time (or at the latest by 1790), he greatly desired the job of St. Stephen's cathedral composer, to the point of volunteering to assist the aging incumbent.
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Music
Carlo Braccesco. Detail of Annunciation, part of a triptych. Fourth quarter 15th century. Tempera, oil on poplar board. 52 x 105 cm. Musée du Louvre.

Christmas Music As It Was Meant to Be: Noël! Noël! with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra

December 15, 2012Andrew Miller

The stuff of music is not stuff. Music’s physical presence, like dance’s too, is gone forever almost as soon as it is played. As Christmas and the planet Earth become more and more burdened with stuff, permanent stuff at that — at least permanently in the landfill — and people seemingly more and more frantic that they’re not spending enough money, you can feel more and more by contrast how music had to have such an enormous part of the festival. To fill an honest need of another person you love is another thing, but even if there is a physical thing involved, it is not the thing itself but the love to which the thing is a mere shadow and the mutually filled need itself. Carpeting one’s wants and feelings of insufficiency with stuff will always miss.
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Dance
Antony Walker conducts the Orchestra of the Antipodes for the Pinchgut Opera's Caster & Pollux with Andy McDonell's set in background. Photo by Simon Hodgson.

An Awesome Trek Through the Cosmos with the Pinchgut Opera’s ‘Castor et Pollux’ by Rameau

December 10, 2012Andrew Miller

Back in the day, when music in the theatre manifested itself dramatically as dance and singing together — specifically ballet and opera — it did so in a myriad of different forms. Though we now call them opera-ballets (or even just operas), they can be difficult to imagine now that the two art forms are not only separate themselves, but tend to have separate audiences in many cities, sharing only their theatre in common. Conveniently, but unfortunately, the choreography has been lost in all cases and the works are revived as what we now call opera in the main. A dance of course is much more difficult to write down than music — though written music is not itself trivial, in fact, baroque composers had no desire to write down every note, and quite a bit of the creative act we now assign to composers was originally given to musicians and singers, ornamentation in particular, were and are very important and in most cases these improvisations were not thought to be written down since that would defeat their whole purpose of expressive dramatic spontaneity. These baroque operas, even the French ones of Lully and Rameau in which the dancing is particularly important, are first and foremost watched and listened to today as opera, even when some care, attention and time are given to recreating the choreography.
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New York Arts in Australia

The Sydney Symphony Becomes Opera Impresario with a Memorable Queen of Spades by Tchaikovsky in Concert

December 4, 2012Andrew Miller

Tchaikovsky wrote Queen of Spades, in 1890, and one other opera, Iolanta, in 1891, near the end of his life after having promised never to write another opera because of the unpopularity of The Sorceress (1887). For theatre, these were very fertile years for Tchaikovsky. The Mariinksy first performed Sleeping Beauty in 1890 and Nutcracker in 1892. He wrote Queen of Spades at a Mozartean rate in Florence where it is said he composed the music faster than his brother Modest wrote and sent the libretto scene by scene. Perhaps living in Florence gave him enough distance from the darker, more repellent aspects of the story to avoid getting run down by it, but anyhow it seems a strange subject for him to choose, especially surprising to hear the incredibly lyrical music he created for it. The antihero Hermann is repellent, but for some of the beautiful music Tchaikovsky gave him, yet even so Hermann’s are not as beautiful as Don Giovanni’s arias (and duets), but I don’t believe Tchaikovsky thought or intended his music to be as beautiful as Mozart’s.
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Music

Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Sydney Symphony’s Tchaikovsky Mini Festival Opens with Manfred and Rachmaninoff’s Fourth Piano Concerto, Scott Davie, Piano

November 23, 2012Andrew Miller

Rachmaninoff’s 4th Piano Concerto didn’t deserve to be cut. It seems to have received, in any version, the homeric epithet “Rachmaninoff’s least popular” since it wasn’t popular at the première (1927) and wasn’t much more loved after the revisions (1928 and 1941), but this is perhaps as much due to the immense and perennial popularity of the 2nd and 3rd as any intrinsic quality of the 4th, and the unpopular label seems now to be beginning to give the original version a little bit of underdog cred. The original longer version was only published in 2000, and this performance, according to the Sydney Symphony, is the first of this version in Australia. It is a fascinating case of audience expectations based on a composer’s perceived style and the composer worrying too much about pleasing them. Luckily the original was not lost. Even so it is not very long, though it does have a leisurely, operatic quality to its pacing, almost a Mahlerian pace, but with its drama turned in, more psychological and untidy than the other concerti, and so it is not as exciting as the other concerti. It does not have too solid a form holding it together, it doesn’t tell a ‘story’ with beginning middle and end as the others do more obviously. It is not linear, or at least it is taller than it is long with all those enormous, thick, rich chords which defy a simple analysis and the long runs of impossibly fast notes which are not exactly melodic — maybe more harmonic as they ring in that resonant Steinway piano — but the melodies in the piece with the exception of the opening one are more like fragments of leitmotif without staging to help explain them. The opening theme returns here and there but it seems odd in its return, almost an interruption of the of the pensive, contemplative revery of the music, almost like the sudden landing of an eagle, or an angel, or a strange golden shaft of light. But the 20th century romantic music doesn’t need a strict form since Rachmaninoff’s concept is not architectural or plastic. The wonderful thing about music is that you don’t have to worry whether it will stand up.
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Music
Claude Debussy.

Originality and Humanity: Anthony Marwood, Violin, Aleksandar Madžar, Piano, Play Beethoven, Debussy and Schubert

November 8, 2012Andrew Miller

Huntley Dent has written on these pages “two musical instruments rise above all others in their humanity — the violin, because it comes closest to imitating the singing voice, and the piano, because it comes closest to conveying human nature.” So in the simple pairing of the two, a pair of thoughtful and sensitive musicians can ‘say’ more while ‘speaking’ less than many symphonies. Such are Anthony Marwood and Aleksandar Madžar, who play with such humanity to a listener, with originality and directness, with much thought and care. They play with emotional directness even while bravely and generously plumbing the emotional complexity and ambiguity of the difficult music they have chosen.

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