[Continued from Part 2] Moscow Moscow, K0. Day 8. Having arranged to meet Ulrich for lunch the following day I set out for a police station to have my visa registered. Once I realised it was an ‘out of town’ station I had my guide call his...
The Australian Festival of Chamber Music 2025 is still unfolding, but last night’s performance of a scaled-down Mahler Symphony No. 10 was a bold musical statement. Scored for just 17 players and conducted by Michael Collins, this interpretation used Michelle Castelletti’s chamber arrangement, bringing Mahler’s vast...
At the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, the performance of Richard Strauss’s *Four Last Songs* was more than a musical highlight - it was a deeply moving meditation on beauty, loss, and memory. The connection to Stefan Zweig’s *The World of Yesterday* was inescapable. Both...
[Continued from Part 1]IrkutskWe pulled into Irkutsk’s beautiful railway station on the west bank of the Angara at around 7pm, K5185. A tour company guide was there to drive me to Vladimir and Valya’s fairy tale house just five minutes away across the river. What...
I went to a performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony at the Sydney Opera House in February. It was a memorable evening and Noa Beinart, the Tel-Aviv-born mezzo-contralto who sang the fourth movement solo was sublime. I couldn’t help thinking that eighteen months earlier a mob...
Khabarovsk In September 2003, as I was busily settling into the bosom of retirement in Australia, I was invited to a week’s deer stalking and fly fishing on the Athol Estate in the Scottish Highlands. It wouldn’t be just a week of shooting and fishing but...
[Continued from Part 1 ] Royal Dutch Three weeks later, as the Murex cruised down the Malacca Strait toward Singapore, its crew might have seen a flare on the Sumatran coast. Twelve years earlier, a Dutch tobacco farmer wandering around the area looking for suitable farmland stumbled...
Baku In the 1880s the Rothschilds and Nobels were losing their battle with John D Rockefeller for the kerosene market in Europe. Their unlikely saviour was a Jewish merchant from the East End of London. Marcus Samuel transformed the petroleum industry, persuaded the Royal Navy to...
Australia’s official plan to reach net zero by 2050 is built on the AEMO 'Renewables 2050' roadmap....
Canada breaks ground on rirst small modular reactor—meanwhile, Australia clutches its legislative pearls ...