As the world celebrates the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, SoundsLikeSydney remembers the legendary cellist Msitislav Rostropovich who arrived at the crumbling landmark and performed the cello suites of J S Bach through the night in an expression of spontaneous joy and freedom.
Watch 20-year-old pianist Benjamin Grosvenor talks about his new CD Rhapsody in Blue – his debut concerto recording which features music from the French Romantics through to the swing of jazz.
This excellent mini-documentary talks about the pacifist principles which propelled Britten’s War Requiem. at 5’30” you can see Britten conducting Peter Pears in the tenor solo Futility (‘Move him, move him’). And….. you can read our story about the electrifying 20th century master piece that is Britten’s War Requiem.
Brilliant, entertaining and lucid – baritone Thomas Hampson talks to BBC’s Hardtalk about understanding classical music.
Ukrainian bass-baritone Andrei Bondarenko in his Cardiff Singer of the World final in 2011. He won the competition’s Song Prize. You can hear him in Sydney this weekend with the Sydney Symphony, singing the role of Yeletsky in a concert version of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Queen of Spades’
Mozart’s fantastical singspiel The Magic Flute premiered on September 30th 1791 at the Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna. According to Operabase, The Magic Flute was the 4th most often performed opera in the 5 seasons to the end of 2013, with 464 performances. This production is from the 2012 Salzburg festival, conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt with Concentus Musicus Wien…
“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,…