Table of contents for September 2024 in Limelight

Clive Paget Clive Paget is a former Limelight Editor, now Editor-at-Large, and a tour leader for Limelight Arts Travel. Based in London after three years in New York, he writes for The Guardian, BBC Music Magazine, Gramophone, Musical America and Opera News. Before moving to Australia, he directed and developed new musical theatre for London's National Theatre. Jansson J. Antmann A Prague-trained scenographer, Jansson J. Antmann designed Andrew Lloyd Webber's Tell Me on a Sunday in Sydney and Prague. A regular guest on ABC Radio and Editor of LaVie in Europe, he was the publicist at Darlinghurst Theatre Company until 2022 and acting Deputy Editor at Limelight, where he is a regular contributor. Jo Litson Jo Litson has been Editor of Limelight since January 2018, having joined the publication as…

There are some voices that, once heard, are never forgotten. Back in the 1990s, a good friend and I used to enjoy a guessing game. Whenever I was invited for dinner, I would be sat down and told to close my eyes as a CD was slipped surreptitiously into the player. “OK, what, or who is this?” would be the inevitable question. On this occasion, I sat up straight. The music was familiar – it was Ombra mai fù, the tyrant Xerxes’ unexpectedly lyrical apostrophe to a tree from Handel's opera – but the voice was not. I was used to hearing it sung by mezzo-sopranos like Janet Baker or Anne Sofie von Otter, but here there was barely a trace of vibrato. I knew a handful of male altos,…

Composer Jack Symonds and librettist Louis Garrick's Gilgamesh is the first opera in English based on The Epic of Gilgamesh. First translated in 1872, it tells the tale of Uta-Napishti, King of Shuruppak, survivor of the great flood and custodian of the secret of eternal life. Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, rejects the advances of Ishtar, Goddess of Love, and sets off to find Uta-Napishti after killing the Bull of Heaven with the help of Enkidu, a half-man sent by the gods to distract him from deflowering newlywed brides. Filled with supernatural creatures and fornicating demigods (one coital episode lasts for six days and seven nights), the epic has been set to music several times. Kodallı's opera and Martinů's oratorio are arguably the best-known, while John Craton's version is the first…

Boydell Press, HB, 730pp, $145 or $48 (Ebook), ISBN: 9781783277957 or 9781805432449 (Ebook) There was a time, say 40 years ago, that his contribution to Anglican choral music was all that seemed long-lasting about Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. By the time he published his first biography of the composer in 2002, Jeremy Dibble, a doyen of writers on late-19th, early-20th-century English music, was delighted to report that the tide was turning. Recordings of the seven symphonies, the concertos and performances of many of Stanford's operas had seen the composer emerging at last from under layers of Edwardian varnish. Twenty-two years on, and in this the centenary year of the composer's passing, Stanford's star has risen higher, and the general assessment of the range and quality of his work is even…

On 18 July, Peter Eyers dropped the 500th episode of his STAGES podcast, which he dubs “a conversation with creatives”. To mark the milestone, he finally agreed to sit behind the microphone as the subject of the podcast, rather than in his usual role as the interviewing host, with Mark Humphries firing the questions. A graduate of the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts and a former actor, Eyers is presently the Head of Drama at an independent school in Sydney. He began producing and hosting STAGES in April 2018. His first guest was the legendary Toni Lamond, a leading lady in her day of vaudeville, cabaret and musical theatre in the UK and US, as well as at home in Australia. Asked what got him started, Eyers says, “I…

My choice of instrument was completely arbitrary. When I was young, my parents took me to a music school where they would test you to see what instrument you'd be suitable for. The one thing they said was, “You shouldn't play the flute!” That'll fuel any kid, and I thought, “I've got to do that.” Flutes were cheap and accessible. You could even get them two a penny where I lived in the middle of Africa. Growing up in Zimbabwe, I absorbed African music by osmosis. You couldn't help but be aware of it. I remember the people unloading trucks and working in the fields would always be singing in harmony. The rhythm is extraordinary, but it's a natural part of their working day. Rather than feeling that music is…

Growing up, there was music around all the time. I can remember Beethoven's and Brahms’ Symphonies being played on Sundays whilst the roast dinner was being got ready. My Dad has always been passionate about choral singing from a high-end amateur point of view. When I was around five years old, he took me to the local church choir for the first time, and from then on [I was involved in] choral singing. We moved around a lot because my Dad was in the army, so wherever we went we sang in the local church choir. Dad and my three older brothers formed a close harmony group. I'll be honest, despite my love for them all, I've never been a fan of barbershop music, but they were entertaining! My oldest…

Wagner's Das Rheingold – Bayreuth Festival 7 September at 8pm In July, Simone Young made history (once again) when she became the first Australian and the first woman to conduct Wagner's Ring Cycle at the Bayreuth Festival, helming three cycles of the tetralogy between 28 July and 25 August. Young, who has been Chief Conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra since 2022, is a Wagner specialist and has conducted Ring Cycles at the Vienna State Opera and Berlin's Staatsoper Unter den Linden. She is currently conducting a four-year concert version of the Ring for the SSO. It began last year with Das Rheingold, the first opera in the cycle, in which the Nibelung Alberich steals the gold from the Rhinemaidens and fashions an all-powerful ring, setting the epic music drama…

Newsworthy A round-up of our recent news reports Two leading arts organisations have parted ways with their Artistic Directors. Both departures were effective immediately after the surprise announcements. On 31 July, Queensland Ballet posted a statement on its website announcing that Leanne Benjamin was to leave the company, just six months into her contract. Succeeding Li Cunxin, who had served for 11 years at the helm of the company, Benjamin's return to Queensland in the wake of an international dance career was widely celebrated. “Despite the best intentions from both parties, the current economic environment has posed challenges, making it difficult to realise Leanne's vision, and it has been mutually agreed for Leanne to depart Queensland Ballet as Artistic Director on 2 August, 2024,” read the statement. QB Executive Director…

When the explosive finale to Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 was heard for the first time in 1824 in Vienna, with words from Friedrich Schiller's German poem An die Freude (Ode to Joy), it is likely there was little awareness of either its words or music in China, where the powerful Qing dynasty ruled over vast territories. It was a song of avowed brotherhood and feverish celebration with a distinctly Northern European feel. Who would have guessed then that a boy born in a small village in Hunan Province in 1957, who hadn't heard any Western music before the age of 19, would take this quintessentially Teutonic piece and reinvent it as a choral concerto called Nine, filling it with his own unique cross-cultural, spiritual, musical and literary ideas? That boy…

RADIO *All times local By George George Enescu is hard to classify as he was equally as gifted as a composer, violinist, pianist and conductor. But he thought of himself as a composer first and foremost. Listen here to his Decet for winds, which has an easy-going Classicalera divertimento quality about it. 1 September, 10pm, 3MBS, 3mbs.org.au Missa Solemnis Canberra Choral Society, the National Capital Orchestra and choristers from The Llewellyn Choir perform this challenging work, which Beethoven described as his finest. Conducted by Louis Sharpe at Llewellyn Hall, the soloists are soprano Sarah Darnley-Stuart, alto Emma Mauch, tenor Ryan O'Donnell and bass Sitiveni Talei. 1 September, 8pm & 4 September, 2pm, ArtSound FM 92.7 and 90.3 Canberra, Artsound.fm Maestro: Simone Young Female conductors have never found it easy to break classical music's…

WORLD PREMIERE My new work for the Australian Chamber Orchestra's upcoming Tognetti. Mendelssohn. Bach. tour is titled Ritornello and is dedicated to the 20th-century Soviet film director Sergei Parajanov (1924–1990), whose centenary is celebrated this year. Parajanov's unique stylistic blend of avant-garde and surrealist aesthetics with folk art informed many of my approaches for this piece commissioned by the ACO. ‘Ritornello’ means ‘little return’ in Italian and refers to a specific musical form which began in the Renaissance and came to prominence during the Baroque era. In it, a central theme or refrain continually returns and is juxtaposed with contrasting musical episodes, sometimes in fragmented form or in different keys. The first movement of JS Bach's Violin Concerto in A minor, which is featured on the ACO program, perfectly exemplifies…

What do you think about UKARIA as the venue for a festival like this? For me, UKARIA really was love at first sight. I will never forget how, on my first morning there, I was woken up by magical sounds. At 5am, two Australian magpies obviously thought that I had slept quite enough and had come to my window to wake me up with their incredible music! The hall there is designed in a very special way, surrounded by absolutely breathtaking nature. Also, the circumstances for rehearsals are quite ideal. I have to say that I cannot think of a more inspiring place for a festival like this! What were your main aims when programming UKARIA 24? Planning these programs has been a tremendously inspiring process. There were some obvious…