Carmen, Figaro and Bohème playing on successive nights is a good excuse to head to Sydney for some opera. Besides, I have a personal connection with Figaro: back in 1971, before the Opera House opened, I was an extra in the marriage scenes of Opera...
Once upon a time passengers on commercial airlines were offered a choice of magazines. You were asked to leave them on the plane but in May 1983 on a Pan Am flight from Bombay to London when I was unable to finish an article, What...
Friday afternoon’s lecture at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music has stayed with me more than most. Professors David McAlpine and Chi Lo from Macquarie University - both leading researchers into hearing loss and auditory neuroscience - spoke about music and the listening brain. It...
At a morning concert during the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, The Death of Juliet - Prokofiev’s final scene from Romeo and Juliet, arranged for viola and piano by Vadim Borisovsky - was performed with great poise by Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt and Joseph Havlat....
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...
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...