Tabla de contenidos para August 2025 en 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. Harriet Cunningham Sydney-based writer Harriet Cunningham is a music and theatre critic for The Sydney Morning Herald. She manages content and brand at Musica Viva Australia. She was recently awarded a doctorate for her work on a history of Dartington International Summer School and has been known to play the violin. Rhys Ryan Rhys Ryan is an emerging dance artist from Naarm/ Melbourne working across performance, choreography and critical writing. He trained at…

University of Rochester Press, HB, 446pp $250 (PB $88.67 or eBook $67) ISBN 9781580469395 In the pantheon of Romantic musical discourse, few figures cast shadows as long and complex as Franz Liszt – a man whose very name has become synonymous with transcendental virtuosity. Yet beneath the glittering surface of popular mythology lies a more profound artistic truth, one that Liszt and Virtuosity, skilfully edited by Robert Doran, seeks to illuminate with scholarly precision and interpretive depth. This collection of 11 essays isn’t merely another homage to pianistic pyrotechnics but a sophisticated meditation on virtuosity itself. Structured across three sections, the volume traces an intellectual journey from performance practices through theoretical frameworks to the paradoxical realm of “anti-virtuosity” in Liszt’s later works. The scholarship draws upon multidisciplinary approaches – historical…

My mother is not a musician but she loves classical music, so when I was growing up in Tokyo she would tune the radio to NHK Classic FM. Every morning in our tiny ‘danchi’ apartment, I was woken by the theme tune, Pachelbel’s Canon, passing through the bamboo paper doors. My father was Principal Viola in the NHK Symphony Orchestra, but first trained as a court musician at the Imperial Palace as a Gagaku flautist and dancer. Gagaku music is taught privately and there are no written scores; the repertoire has to be memorised. All trainees also learned a European instrument, so my father had violin lessons and later took up viola to join a string quartet. When he wasn’t out performing and touring, he’d practise for hours at home,…

CLASSICAL MUSIC Australian Chamber Orchestra: Gershwin & Shostakovich Celebrating the indomitable voice of the individual, Ukrainian-born pianist Alexander Gavrylyuk makes his ACO debut performing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1, in which he is joined by trumpeter David Elton. Both composers affirm the right to self-expression – Gershwin through exuberant freedom, Shostakovich in defiance of Soviet oppression (read our interview on page 46). Richard Tognetti directs a program that includes the world premiere of Valentin Silvestrov’s A Moment of Memory, written while sheltering from the war in Ukraine. Jansson J. Antmann 1–18 August, venues in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane, aco.com.au Flinders Quartet: Musical Friends Exploring friendship, love and dialogue, this program features two brand-new commissions. The first, The Unspoken Eight, is the result…

Fifty years is a long time in the world of string quartets. Great ensembles emerge, split, regroup and rename as lives take different directions. The Takács Quartet is no exception. Only one of the four Hungarians who formed the ensemble at Budapest’s Franz Liszt Conservatorium in 1975 is still there, cellist András Fejér. The others – second violin Károly Schranz, violist Gábor Ormai and the eponymous violinist Gábor Takács-Nagy – have moved on, as have two further viola players, Geraldine Walther and the late Roger Tapping. And yet, the name Takács remains “a synonym for assured, collective excellence”, as The New York Times put it, while its performances remain recognisable for their sense of curiosity underpinned by communication. What is it about the Takács Quartet that makes it so unique?…

Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s appearance last year as a castaway on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs was meant to be a celebration of the now 26-year-old cellist’s journey from winner of the 2016 BBC Young Musician of the Year to leading soloist on the international circuit. That is until the host, Lauren Laverne, asked him whether he thought Rule, Britannia! ought to be dropped from the Last Night of the Proms. When he answered yes, he thought it should, the backlash on social media was as vile as it was unprecedented with people calling for him to be “tagged, flogged and deported” and demanding he “go back home” and “keep his mouth shut”. “It was shocking how extreme it was,” he tells me, chatting over Zoom from the flat in Peckham,…

In his 2016 drama, The King’s Choice, director Erik Poppe focused on the early days of Nazi Germany’s invasion of Norway in 1940. Now, Poppe turns his attention to the end of that occupation and the downfall of the leader of Norway’s pro-Nazi puppet government, Vidkun Quisling (powerfully portrayed by Gard B. Eidsvold), a man whose name became a worldwide synonym for ‘collaborator’ and ‘traitor’. Poppe and his three screenwriters (Anna Bache-Wiig, Siv Rajendram Eliassen and Ravn Lanesskog) pick up the story at the moment of liberation from five years of his authoritarian rule. Pacing the corridors of his villa, Quisling believes he is above justice and that he will be quietly pensioned off into obscurity. His wife Maria urges him not to bend or buckle. But the country Quisling…

How did you and Aura Go connect? Our first performance together was at the Musica Viva Festival 2019 in Sydney. We pretty quickly realised that we thought of music in a somewhat similar way. I guess that is the beauty of music festivals; the festival gods assign you to play a piece of music together. Perhaps you don't know each other, or even know the piece of music, but there you are, thrown in the deep end. During the festival, our conversations quickly morphed into, “What should we play next?” Why did you pair works by Webern with Beethoven's Cello Sonatas on your recent album, released by ABC Classic? Many years ago, while still living back home in Finland, I did a project with a friend which included the transformative…

Limelight 250 It’s our 250th issue and we couldn’t be prouder. We look back at our history and ask our publisher, Bruce Watson, as well as several long-time subscribers what Limelight means to them. I will never forget the day in February 2018 when our contracts were terminated on the spot, just days before the March issue went to print. Not only were we out of a job, but it looked as if Limelight would disappear. It was the second time the publication had been on the brink of extinction, having nearly folded in 2013, when UK-based Haymarket Media announced it was divesting itself of its Australian titles. Limelight survived then, thanks to Andrew Batt-Rawden, and it survived in 2018 when music-loving subscribers Robert Veel and Bruce Watson came to…

The idea for an Australian Music Centre began one Sunday morning in January 1973. It was a head-spinning time. Gough Whitlam had become Prime Minister only a few weeks earlier, and I was in Canberra visiting a composer friend. I was staying with Don Banks and his family at their temporary home. Don was packing up as he prepared to return home to London after his Creative Arts Fellowship at the Australian National University. The phone rang. Don took it in the living room, close enough for me to hear the outline of the conversation. “Yes, Mr Prime Minister . . . No sir, it’s perfectly OK . . . We’re just here packing up . . . What? You would like me to stay in Australia, Mr Prime Minister?…

Dane Lam, Artistic Director of State Opera South Australia, cannot hide his excitement about the upcoming Adelaide season of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. This landmark production by acclaimed film and opera director Shuang Zou is a collaboration between State Opera South Australia; the Beijing Music Festival, where it will be staged in 2026; and Opera Hong Kong, where it had its world premiere earlier this year. Lam will conduct it in Adelaide as he did in Hong Kong and says the audience loved it. “The whole run was completely sold out, and for a lot of people attending, it was their first opera. They didn’t have any preconceived notions about what The Magic Flute should be, but there were little bits of scaffolding from their own culture and daily experiences that…

RADIO *All times local Sweet Treat Guitarist/composer Tania Ravbar Costantino and mandolinist Ruth Roshan perform together under the name of Nougat. They position the ensemble on the border between classical and world music – and it is a joyous exploration. 1 August, 10am, 3MBS, 3mbs.org.au Cantatas for Jubilate Sunday The internationally recognised Canberra Bach Ensemble, directed by Andrew Koll, performs four Bach cantatas featuring soprano Greta Claringbould, alto Maartje Sevenster, tenor Timothy Reynolds and bass Andrew Fysh at St Christopher’s Cathedral, Manuka, Canberra. 3 August, 8pm & 6 August, 2pm, ArtSound FM 92.7 and 90.3 Canberra, Artsound.fm Prominent in Times Past Best known for his operas, Heinrich Marschner is now a footnote in music history, but in 19th-century Germany his name and music were prominent. The overture to The Falconer’s Bride…

The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever. —Jacques Cousteau When approached by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra to compose a new piece featuring its chorus, I was inspired by the idea of looking out from the Western shoreline into the vast beauty of the ocean. This commission was made possible by Catherine Dunn and members of the WASO Chorus, giving me the rare opportunity to compose a large-scale work with a truly epic choral part. Titled Mahāsāgar – the Hindi word for ‘ocean’ – the piece speaks both to the specific marine environment of the Indian Ocean and to broader, universal themes. Best described as a symphonic song cycle in five movements, the structure mirrors the rise and slanted fall of a…

My musical journey began with my Mum, who was a high school music teacher at Mackellar Girls in Sydney. I saw her productions, like Jonah-Man Jazz with Balgowlah Boys, and she took me to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s school concerts at the Town Hall in the late Sixties. We had a piano at home, but Mum said I wasn’t easy to teach. I can’t imagine why! Now I’m one of those terrible self-taught pianists who plays the first bits of Für Elise and the Moonlight Sonata for their own pleasure, and I struggle through the Billy Joel songs I later grew to love. When I was seven or eight, Mum gave me a half-size violin, and then a full-size violin my grandfather had given her. I played in the Strathfield…