Symphony Services International
Victoria’s subjects were as enthusiastic about Mendelssohn as the Queen herself. His concerts were packed, his organ recitals were attended by throngs of cheering, handkerchief-waving enthusiasts, and society women doted on him...
Musical officialdom was never happy in its dealings with Franck, and gave little recognition to his achievements as a composer. His fame was to be largely posthumous, and was greatly helped by the championship of his pupils...
When you get right down to it, what most endears Tchaikovsky to the public is tunes – melodies memorable in themselves, surviving even translation into pop songs, and often memorably associated with a particular instrument’s sound…
In the 20th century, with the widespread deepening of Mozart appreciation and understanding, Russia has hardly been in the lead. In fact, it seems to have been intellectuals critical of, or standing aside from, Russia’s cultural mainstream who made the most valuable contributions to Mozart understanding…
In 1998 the leading Estonian conductor, Neeme Järvi, directed the Melbourne Symphony in Rudolph Tobias’s oratorio Jonah’s Mission (1909), the first significant Estonian work in its genre. But what do we Australians really know of Estonia, and its music? For my first visit to the Baltic country, my guide was Arvo Volmer, the Estonian conductor...
In London in 1849 an advertisement appeared reading ‘M. Liszt will give Recitals of the Pianoforte.’ These first piano recitals employed innovations which audiences now take for granted...
Many Mozart worshippers cannot bear to be told that their hero was not the founder of a dynasty. But in art the highest success is to be the last of your race, not the first; to do what cannot be bettered...
Australia now has six fully-professional symphony orchestras, all of whom are Members of Symphony Services International, but their existence was not inevitable. In fact, there was uncertainty, there were changes of direction, and the eventual outcome owed much to the vision of some key people...
It must have been a thrill to Mozart, used to Salzburg standards, to hear his music played by the Mannheim orchestra under Cannabich, an excitement which can still be felt in his opera Idomeneo (1780)…
He was perhaps the most prolific composer of the 20th century. Some put the total of Villa-Lobos’s compositions above 2000. Others, more soberly, admit over 1000…
When Ravel’s String Quartet was first performed, in 1904, it was criticised for being too much like Debussy’s Quartet of 1893, and until they got more familiar with the music, some casual listeners must have found themselves wondering which ‘side’ of the disc containing both quartets they had put on. Getting to know music is partly about recognising distinctive styles...
Projects left unrealised, possibilities that came close to becoming reality - the wanderer down music’s path sometimes asks the question: ‘Why didn’t we go that way?’…
Birds, Messiaen pointed out, were the first to make music on this planet, and had ‘discovered’ all sorts of sophisticated musical devices. Part of the excitement of being with Messiaen on his visit to Australia was the near-certainty that he would write some of the birds he heard there into his next music…
Not an innovator though his formal solutions are very personal, Brahms’ critical faculty…led him to suppress almost everything in his work that isn’t marked by the highest qualities of workmanship and the unmistakable stamp of personal style…
Applause is, after all, a form of audience participation, and appreciation – perhaps the only one left to the audience at a symphony concert…
In the mid 1990s I spent several months filling in as artistic manager for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, based in Wellington...
Spain carries a qualitative difference from other parts of Europe. As a cultural export, its music, even more than the paintings of El Greco, Velasquez, Murillo or Goya, give a foreigner a whiff, a tantalising foretaste, of going there...
Nietzsche, musician as well as intellectual, encountered the major musical force of Wagner. Their falling out was the mutual jealousy of geniuses.