Taryn Fiebig / Scott Davie

 

ON ETERNAL LOVE

 

David Greco / Van Diemen's Band BACH Bass Cantatas

 

BASS CANTATAS

 

David Greco / Erin Helyard SCHUBERT Die Schöne Müllerin

DIE SCHÖNE MÜLLEERIN

Emma Black THE ART OF THE OBOE - THE CLASSICAL AGE

THE ART OF THE OBOE - THE CLASSICAL AGE

Jayson Gillham ROMANTIC BACH

"The thing about Bach," says Jayson, "is that it works so well on whatever instrument combination you put it on. It's something to do with the way Bach thinks, and the way he writes the music – the content is more important than the timbre of the instrument that it's played on. And so it's really effective on all instruments – particularly the piano."

This new album features 11 of Bach's works transcribed and arranged by great pianists and pianist-composers. Rachmaninov adds contrapuntal grandeur to the Violin Partita in E major, while Myra Hess is much more intimate in her arrangement of 'Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring'. From Busoni to Grainger, each adds a new layer of meaning to Bach's work, and Gillham in turn allows himself more artistic freedom than one might in interpreting a contemporary score. "In many ways," he says, "the act of performing Bach's original keyboard music on the modern piano is itself transcription." The resulting album is a true Bach recital, exploring the interconnection between works and asserting the composer's ability to speak across the ages.

Nicole Car HEROINES

Stunning young Australian soprano Nicole Car is one of the brightest stars in international opera. In September 2018 she will make her debut at New York's Metropolitan Opera opposite Vittorio Grigolo and Michael Fabiano, and November sees her debut at Bayerische Staatsoper.

This follows hard on the heels of a Helpmann Award-winning performance as Violetta in Opera Australia's production of Verdi's La traviata earlier in the year. Nicole's star status was confirmed by the huge success of her debut solo album, The Kiss, which reached #1 on the charts and was nominated for Best Classical Album at the 2016 ARIA Awards.

In April 2018, Nicole joined the ACO, one of Australia's most daring and exciting ensembles, for a series of unique live performances featuring arias sung by some of music's most iconic female characters – including Mozart's Dido and Verdi's Desdemona. The album also showcases the artistry of the orchestra, featuring Mozart's Symphony No. 27  as well as a gorgeous performance of Beethoven's Romance for Violin and Orchestra No . 2 from Satu Vänskä, the ACO's Principal Violin.

Heroines is a brilliant recording of these extraordinary concerts, capturing one of the world's most beautiful voices blending perfectly with one of the world's great orchestras.

"Here we present Nicole Car, a singer at the top of her game, to portray these heroines: courageous Queen Dido, wrathful Deidamia, the doomed Desdemona. These are characters who face the very depths of human expression – joy and hope, grief and despair – with resilience and strength. Do not underestimate these women; they are resolute in their conviction, and their voices demand to be heard" (Richard Tognetti)

David Greco / Erin Helyard SCHUBERT Winterreise

David Greco and Erin Helyard present the first Australian recording of Schubert's masterpiece on period instruments

Schubert's Winterreiseis one of the greatest song cycles ever written. Completed shortly before his death at just 33, Schubert's masterpiece follows a young man spurned by his beloved who then wanders through a frozen landscape in ever-increasing states of existential angst, terror, and paranoia.

Recorded countless times before now, Erin Helyard and David Greco present a different Winterreise than any you have heard before. This is how the work might have sounded to Schubert, informed by scholarship around 19th century performance techniques, and the different vocal traditions and pianos that existed then.

But this is far from a dry, academic exercise. David and Erin strip away the stuffy, canonised aura of this famous work, presenting a Winterreise sung by a young man in the full fervour of love and an all-consuming passion. This is a Winterreise that captures every moment of Schubert's terror and mortality, a vital and utterly engrossing performance that takes you inside a work you've listened to many times before –but never truly heard.

Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo / Brad Cohen / Emma Matthews IN MONTE CARLO

Bel Canto Emma Matthews is the brightest star out of Australia, the most anticipated since Dame Joan Sutherland. A co-production between ABC Classics and Universal Music in Australia, this CD combines jewels from French and Italian operatic repertoire, as well as music by Bernstein and 2 Australian composers Richard Mills and Calvin Bowman.

Emma made her Covent Garden debut in March/April 2010 in the title role of Cunning Little Vixen at the Royal Opera House, conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras and her European concert debut with Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony and also her debut with conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy as soloist in Mahler’s 4.

This release highlights Romantic opera heroines the Doll Song from Tales of Hoffmann, the Bell Song from Lakme, as well as fearless and thrilling coloratura moments in Proch’s Theme and Variations and Bernstein’s Glitter and Be Gay. There are two world premiere recordings on the disc both from Australian composers - The Nightingale’s Song at the close of Richard Mills opera The Love of the Nightingale and Calvin Bowman’s song Now touch the air softly. (Presto Classical)

Genevieve Lacey LINE DRAWINGS

Jacob’s been a friend for decades. Almost as long as I’ve been playing the recorder, I’ve been playing Jacob’s music. Perhaps because I first met and loved him when I was little, his voice feels like my instrument’s mother tongue. Jacob’s simple melodies were so sweet for my young fingers. In adolescence, his music expressed things I couldn’t, yet meant with all my being. Jacob was there in my learning-my-craft years, his music urging me through the long, solitary practice tunnel. Nowadays I’m discovering expressive sides of him I didn’t recognise earlier ... He died centuries ago, but he’s shaped me.’

Australian recorder virtuoso Genevieve Lacey returns to the music of Dutch composer Jacob van Eyck in a new album on ABC Classics.

Born blind at the end of the sixteenth century, Van Eyck came to be hailed as ‘the Orpheus of Utrecht’ in his lifetime and is now regarded as one of the most significant musicians of his generation. As well as being an expert organist, he spearheaded technical and musical developments in bell-ringing, and was appointed as Director of the Carillons of Utrecht in 1628. He is best remembered, however, for his collection of works for solo soprano recorder ‘Der Fluyten Lust-hof’ (The Flute’s Pleasure Garden) – a collection of over 140 melodies and variations, with themes sourced from popular folk songs, psalms and memorable tunes of the time. Van Eyck was famously given a pay rise to wander through Janskerkhof public gardens in the evenings, to entertain passers-by on ‘his little flute’ (as the recorder was then called). Line Drawings compiles some of Genevieve Lacey’s favourite works from this collection.

The album cover and booklet feature stunning drawings by Brook Andrew, inspired by Van Eyck’s music.

Acacia Quartet ELENA KATS-CHERNIN Blue Silence

Blue Silence is the first ever recording of the complete works for string quartet by Elena Kats-Chernin. Elena Kats-Chernin is possibly Australia's most popular composer. In a recent public poll of music from the past 100 years conducted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, her Eliza Aria was one of the highest-ranking Australian compositions. Eliza Aria is included on this new release. In the UK, it is particularly well-known as the theme music for Lloyds TSB's television campaign For The Journey that began in 2007 and continues today. As you can hear on this album, Elena's tuneful music combines lightheartedness with melancholy, blended with elements of cabaret, tango, ragtime, klezmer and Bach.
Acacia Quartet met Elena at a concert in 2011 and a great rapport was struck up. Acacia decided to learn all of Elena's quartet music (so far about 90 minutes, and counting), rehearse it extensively with her and perform it in concerts, then recording it under her supervision. Blue Silence was nominated for an APRA-AMCOS Art Music Award in 2013.

Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra ELENA KATS-CHERNIN Wild Swans

Elena Kats-Chernin was born in Tashkent, but moved to Australia in her teens and settled there after studying and working for over a decade in Germany. She has a knack for creating skillfully composed works with an immediate appeal to a broad range of audiences. She typically draws on a variety of musical traditions for her inspiration, and the suite from her ballet Wild Swans is a case in point. The fairytale of 11 brothers turned into swans whose sister saves them elicits an eclectic score of great delicacy, transparency, and inventiveness. The composer uses a solo soprano voice instrumentally in a wordless vocalise in many of the movements, to a lovely effect. Several movements of the score recall Philip Glass' music, from around the time of La Belle et la bête, and some parts have a Prokofievian sound, but Kats-Chernin's light and delicate touch is always evident. Jane Sheldon has a pure, supple voice that's ideal for the music. Ian Munro is the soloist in Kats-Chernin's lyrical Piano Concerto No. 2, a work with the same kind of stylistic diversity as the ballet suite. Mythic, a large-scale orchestral piece, has a dark, meditative character that sets it apart from the other works on the disc, and overall, it's less distinctive than the others. Ola Rudner conducts the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra in a polished reading of the scores. Kats-Chernin is rightfully becoming more recognized in the West, and this collection of three of her large scores makes a compelling introduction to her work. (Stephen Eddins)

Tamara-Anna Cislowska ELENA KATS-CHERNIN Unsent Love Letters - Meditations on Erik Satie

After the death of Erik Satie, dozens of unsent love letters were found in his Paris apartment. Now composer Elena Kats-Chernin and pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska send those letters off, in 26 meditative and passionate piano miniatures inspired by Satie’s extraordinary life and music.

The album is a musical memoir from one composer to another, from the Uzbekistan-born Australian to the French composer whose eccentricities are legendary and music timeless. “Satie’s life was a fascinating, fervoursome affair,” says pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska, “from the first strike of love and then lifelong estrangement with artist and muse Suzanne Valadon, to the unexpected celebrity and conflict of his last ten years. After he died, friends gaining access to his apartment, for the first time in almost three decades, found conditions both perplexing and romantically fastidious in their own way: two grand pianos one atop the other, one chair, one table, seven velvet suits and the love letters – many, many unsent love letters.”

The album reflects on idiosyncrasies and anecdotes from Satie’s life, with music that ranges from seductive orientalism to hypnotic melodies reminiscent of the ground-breaking, transcendent beauty of Satie’s own piano pieces: ‘imaginary building’ reflects on his sketches of imaginary buildings (which he even advertised in the newspaper for rent and purchase); ‘very shiny’, one of his characteristically opaque performance directions; ‘postcard to a critic’, after Satie’s explosive response to a negative review (leading to a spell in gaol). The buoyant rhythms and rhapsodic harmonic style that have brought Kats-Chernin a reputation as one of the best-loved composers of her generation provide the perfect lens to reflect on a musical great of the previous century.

"If Elena Kats-Chernin had married Erik Alfred Leslie Satie, their musical children would have sounded like the 26 little piano pieces on this beguiling album... Deceptively simple and unadorned, they trickle off the nimble fingers of Tamara-Anna Cislowska... This is the kind of music that could exist at various levels ... all the way to late-night cabaret acts in Spiegeltents, best accompanied by exotic libations... it is hard to argue with its sincerity, wit and charm." (The Australian, April 2017)

Nicole Car / Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra / Andrea Molino THE KISS

This is a timely release from ABC Classics. The Australian soprano Nicole Car made her Royal Opera debut last autumn, as a touching Micaëla before starring as Tatyana. Both roles feature on this cannily programmed disc – a mixture of well-loved classics and a few specialities. Essentially a calling card, it demonstrates Car’s ability in rarer Russian and Czech repertoire, the extract from Smetana’s The Kiss lending the disc its title.

She begins the disc boldly, with Marguerite’s Jewel Song – just the sort of repertoire one associates with her compatriot Dame Joan Sutherland, but Car’s is a lighter instrument. She possesses a lovely lyric soprano, not a glamorous sound, but full of dewy freshness, nowhere more so than in Mimì’s aria, where the voice has a rosy bloom. Her Mimì is very much the ‘girl next door’ and she ends with a charming final line. Micaëla has a similar innocence. Her Thaïs shows promise, although the raw final note on the optional high D on ‘éternellement’ should have been retaken.

While the role of Leonora in Il trovatore would seem on the heavy side for Car at present, she is aided in ‘Tacea la notte placida’ by conductor Andrea Molino, who takes the aria quite swiftly. The cabaletta sparkles. Car discovers darker colours in Amelia’s ‘Come in quest’ora bruna’ from Simon Boccanegra, although it’s a bit of a trudge, the seabirds wheeling rather deliberately along Genoa’s coastline.

Tatyana’s Letter Scene is packed with emotion and meaning in something approaching a signature role. Among the rarities, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Servilia is a delight, although it’s a shame the aria from Tchaikovsky’s The Oprichnik is relegated to the download version of the album only. (Gramophone)