Latest news

The BBC celebrates Brett Dean

A performance of Brett Dean’s Grawemeyer Award winning composition “The Lost Art of Letter Writing” in London, has been warmly received. Featured in a recent BBC Total Immersion day at the Barbican Centre, the four movement concerto for violin and orchestra was composed in 2006 and won the award in 2009. The concerto was premiered by the…
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Conductor avoids the currents

Brian Castles – Onion will conduct the upcoming productions of La Traviata on the harbour. He talks to Steve Meacham of the Sydney Morning Herald about keeping his head above the water – metaphorically speaking: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/opera/orchestral-manoeuvres-in-the-dark-pit-20120318-1vdo2.html
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Happy Birthday to the coathanger

  The Sydney Harbour Bridge turns 80 today! Eleven musicians from the brass section of the Sydney Symphony scaled the bridge to perform from the top. Guess what they played?! Check out these features: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/featurenews/view/1189848/1/.html http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/world/13205823/sydney-harbour-bridge-turns-80/
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Hot off the press….

The new look Australian String Quartet’s Sydney concert reviewed: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/spirits-high-as-new-lineup-gels-with-old-guard-20120316-1va8v.html The Guardian’s Tom Service asks if Stephen Sondheim might be our greatest composer: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/tomserviceblog/2012/mar/16/sondheim-sweeney-todd-music-theatre
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Latest reviews

serious singing from teddy tahu rhodes

“The poem has not been completed until set to music” – Goethe. If Art Song needs to be re-invented to survive and evolve, the new CD “Serious Songs”  from bass-baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes (ABC Classics 476-4383) points in the right direction. The CD takes its title from Brahms’ Four Serious Songs,originally composed for bass and piano,…

Arrebato fuses flameno, jazz and the world in their second CD “Absolucion”

The style is possibly as difficult to define as the English meaning of their name – “Arrebato”, variously translated as “fury”, “something that rises rapidly” or “a wave of emotion”.  It’s fair to say that any and all of these describe the music of this ensemble. Arrebato release their second CD “Absolucion” in June 2011….