Music

In a deftly pitched introduction to the evening’s program of Mozart, Bach, Handel, and Brahms, Angela Hewitt mentioned in passing that her first visit to Adelaide had been back in 1991. A packed and responsive Elder Hall audience was quick throughout the evening to show their support and enthusiasm for the artist, her choice of works, and her individual performances. 

Sometimes an orchestral program proves to be meaningful in ways that were never intended when it was first devised. Such was the case last Thursday and Saturday, when the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra gave its first local outing since the onset of public and internal turmoil last month sparked by the orchestra’s management’s cancellation of a planned concerto performance on 15 August by Australian pianist Jayson Gillham.

On 4 September 2024, the classical world of music, and especially its Austro-Germanic heartland, will celebrate the bicentenary of Anton Bruckner’s birth. Australia’s homage to this symphonic Titan is relatively modest, though these months do include performances of his Ninth (Brisbane, QSO, Johannes Fritzsch), and Fourth (Melbourne and Geelong, MSO, Daniel Carter; Hobart, TSO, Eivind Aadland), along with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s four performances of the Eighth Symphony, under Simone Young. Her global reputation increasingly rides on dynamic interpretations of large later-Romantic works, by Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, as well as Bruckner.

I recall the first time I saw pianist Paul Grabowsky play. The occasion was the launch of his debut album Six by Three, recorded with his then trio of bassist Gary Costello and drummer Allan Browne. The recital took place on a Sunday afternoon, in 1989, if memory serves, in a downstairs gallery in Flinders Lane.

Since its first iteration in 2005, the annual Woodend Winter Arts Festival has grown to become one of the more successful regional arts events in Victoria. The picturesque town of Woodend is less than an hour away from Melbourne, and now also has a significant and growing population of tree-changers and retirees.

Monday evening saw a curious pairing of repertoire and performers at the Melbourne Recital Centre. Part One was a program of English consort music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries played by the local viol ensemble Consortium, while Part Two featured Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations.