Tabla de contenidos para September 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. Paolo Hooke Paolo Hooke is a broadcaster, writer and self-avowed Shostakovich aficionado. He first came to know the composer's music as a teenager when he attended a concert of the Tenth Symphony at the Sydney Opera House. Now, some 30 years later, the enduring interest still burns brightly. Deborah Jones Deborah Jones is a writer and critic specialising in dance. A former long-serving Arts Editor of The Australian, she is currently the newspaper's…

As one of the world's most in-demand singers, Joyce DiDonato enjoys a packed schedule with appearances from the Metropolitan Opera to Covent Garden. Nevertheless, at 56, she is finding time to make her long-overdue Australian debut. This November, she will fly into Hobart for a concert with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, followed by performances with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. On the program is Berlioz's Les Nuits d'été, a song cycle by a composer with whom she's become increasingly identified over the past 20 or so years. As it happens, she informs me, a trip to Australia has been on the cards for quite a while, only held up by the need to coordinate calendars in two different hemispheres. “My wish list is simply to have an unforgettable encounter in every…

American percussion virtuoso Steven Schick was originally slated to undertake a residency at the Australian National Academy of Music in May 2020, but it didn't happen. “It was the worst part of the pandemic, so it could not have been timed better,” he quips. For decades, Schick has been an internationally renowned champion of contemporary music. Currently a Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, he's commissioned or premiered more than 150 new works during his career and has performed with groups including the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Bang on a Can and Ensemble Modern. Five years on, his residency is back on track. This month, he'll present three concerts and a masterclass at ANAM, as well as performing in Perth. Featured works include, among others, Messiaen's Couleurs…

½ This Brahmsian labour of love receives a posthumous publication. by Will Yeoman The Boydell Press, HB, 372pp, $230 or $60 eBook, ISBN 9781783277780 Completed on his 74th birthday and just months before his death in 2018, renowned musicologist Robert Pascall's posthumously published Brahms: Symphonist represents the culmination of nearly five decades spent in intimate dialogue with Johannes Brahms’ symphonic legacy. Pascall, whose physical resemblance to the composer was matched only by his intellectual affinity, brings to this final work the weight of his contributions to the Johannes Brahms Complete Edition – those meticulous G. Henle Verlag critical editions that have become the gold standard for Brahmsian scholarship. The historical positioning of Brahms’ symphonies within the broader symphonic tradition receives particularly nuanced treatment. Where contemporary scholarship often reduces the ‘War…

You are travelling, staying in a Spanish villa at the beachside. It is hot. You enjoy a third glass in the sun with pintxos at the café, gazing – but not really looking – toward the horizon. Some folks are singing. You stumble back, happy. Now, it is dark. You awake, forgetting where you are. You can't find a light switch. You grope, slightly panicked, around the room. Is that a lamp? An alarm clock? Is that a sculpture? A vase? What are all these things? Where is the loo?! Slowly your eyes and mind adjust. There is an El Greco print on the wall. Yes, that is a vase . . . an empty bottle. For me, and for others, this is composing. Not the staying in the villa,…

You and Caroline Dunphy are Co-Artistic Directors of Belloo Creative, which is producing Back to Bilo. Can you tell us a little about the company? Caroline and I started Belloo Creative in 2013 with a passion for making original, contemporary theatre that shines a light on true stories, like Back to Bilo. We make works of scale with intimacy and heart. We work collaboratively, partnering with local, national and international companies and finding new forms and ways of storytelling. When did you become involved with Back to Bilo? I joined Back to Bilo as a playwright in 2021 when Matt Scholten, who had the original idea of creating a verbatim play about the Home to Bilo campaign, invited me onto the project. He'd already conducted more than 30 preliminary interviews…

CLASSICAL MUSIC Australian World Orchestra: Mahler 4 & 5 Artistic Director Alexander Briger takes the podium for AWO's Mahlerfest – a rare opportunity to hear Mahler's radiant Fourth and monumental Fifth Symphonies back to back. Soprano Sarah Traubel sings the finale of the Fourth, Das himmlische Leben – a child's vision of heaven, first intended for Mahler's Third Symphony and originally composed as a setting for one of the folk poems in his Des Knaben Wunderhorn song cycle. The journey ends in the Fifth's Adagietto, Mahler's love letter to his future wife Alma. Jansson J. Antmann 3 September, Arts Centre Melbourne; 4 September, Sydney Opera House; australianworldorchestra.com.au Australian Chamber Orchestra: A Musical Awakening Directed by ACO Principal Cello Timo-Veikko Valve, this soul-stirring concert explores music's power to console, uplift and…

This September, 50 years after the death of Dmitri Shostakovich on 9 August, 1975, Australian audiences will have the chance to experience two of his towering symphonic works. Over the course of nine days, three of our orchestras will present two of his greatest compositions – his Symphonies Nos. 5 and 10. The Adelaide and Queensland Symphony Orchestras will perform the Tenth with their respective Chief Conductors Mark Wigglesworth and Umberto Clerici, while the Sydney Symphony Orchestra will play the Fifth led by Principal Guest Conductor Sir Donald Runnicles. Shostakovich has a unique ability to create dramatic musical scenes. His epic symphonies have a visual, cinematic quality and are characterised by a thrilling intensity and extreme emotional range, sending audiences on a white-knuckle journey through a terror-stricken age of tyranny.…

½ Co-written, directed and starring Daniel Auteuil, this courtroom drama unfolds sedately until its chilling coda. by Jason Blake After an excellent turn playing a deeply compromised prosector in Joachim Lafosse's A Silence earlier this year, veteran French star Daniel Auteuil is back in lawyerly garb in another true crime courtroom drama. In The Thread (Un Fil) – a reference to a crucial piece of evidence – Auteuil plays Jean Monier, a figure based on real-life criminal lawyer Jean-Yves Moyart, who became well known in France as ‘Maître Mô’ from his blog, which spotlit what he saw as the failings and inequities in the country's legal system. Moyart died in 2021, aged 53. The Thread recounts a case from the latter part of his career – an example of domestic…

RADIO *All times local Wattle Day What could be more Australian than wattle? This musical celebration of the lovely flowering tree includes When the Yellow Wattle Was in Bloom by Frederick Augustus Packer and Ross Edwards’ Blackwattle Caprices. 1 September, 9am, 4MBS Classic FM, 4mbs.com.au Rare Rubinstein A pianist and teacher of Tchaikovsky, Russian composer Anton Rubinstein wrote 20 operas including The Demon. In the West, his music is hard to come by, so this is a welcome opportunity to enjoy his second Piano Concerto. 2 September, 1am, 3MBS, 3mbs.org.au Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know That's how Lady Caroline Lamb hypocritically described Lord Byron – she was no angel herself. Plenty of opera's baddies also fit that description: Nero, Iago, Salome, Purcell's witches and Erkel's Queen Gertrude among them. 4…

It all started at the age of 10 in elementary school. I had the choice of playing trumpet or percussion, and I naively chose percussion because of my asthma. Ironically, I think that the trumpet would have actually improved my asthma, but hindsight is always 20/20, as they say. In middle school, a band teacher recommended that I audition for a local youth orchestra called the Empire State Youth Orchestra, and I [was accepted]. I immediately fell in love with orchestral music and the sound world that percussion can add to any ensemble. The sheer variety of percussion instruments that I was exposed to, even in those early years, was captivating. [After graduating with a Bachelor of Music from the New England Conservatory], I joined WASO in 2016. At first,…

I've been a big supporter of the Australian Children's Music Foundation and an Ambassador for about 10 years or so, and then Don [Spencer, the ACMF founder] asked me to join the Board. I feel as passionate as Don about music and music education, and what it does for children in a world where we are going for the easy option of social media, which feeds you something you already like. I think there's something that happens when you listen to music or go to a concert or see a musical; there's this connection between the performers and the audience. You can't get that from just sitting and looking at your phone, and I don't ever want that to be lost. Also, it's not just the feeling you get. There…

Alice Topp has only one subject really but it's the big one. It's us. It's how we feel in love and loss. How we connect with one another or fail to do so. It's our imperfections and the need to embrace them. It's the ebb and flow of energy between bodies. It's courage, resilience and all sorts of other qualities and experiences. “I'm always interested in what makes us human,” Topp said recently. A piece she made for West Australian Ballet for its 2023 Quarry season was called Open Heart Story and was literally about the precious organ beating in our chests. Last year, there was Square Pegs for Oklahoma's Tulsa Ballet, which ended with a section titled The Jumper. The title confused its American audience (for ‘jumper’ read ‘sweater’)…

Our September Recording of the Month is the latest in an ongoing survey of Tchaikovsky's orchestral works – the symphonies excepted – by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under conductor Alpesh Chauhan (Chandos CHSA5352). This third instalment bears all the hallmarks of its predecessors – savvy programming, idiomatic conducting and Chandos's stellar sonic engineering. Chauhan keeps it fresh by mixing the warhorses with more esoteric fare, leading off here with the Second Orchestral Suite, a 40-minute tour de force that is surprisingly rare on disc. He follows it up with bonnes bouches from Eugene Onegin, rarities – including a dance from The Enchantress and a student overture, The Storm – and finishing off with the good old Marche Slave. The Suite lacks neither ambition nor melodic inspiration, journeying in five…