Grammy Award winning New Zealand born bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu (he’s sung Leporello in Mozart’s Don Giovanni for OA in Sydney) has had to meet a new challenge – that of learning a libretto in Chinese. He talks about it in this blog.
(The Grammy Award was in 2010 for Best Opera Recording Billy Budd)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/mar/26/learning-to-sing-chinese-songs
Italian composer and conductor Ennio Morricone has won over 25 awards internationally, for his film scores. Amongst them, the haunting themes for Sergio Leone’s Westerns ( A Fistfull of Dollars, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, For few Dollars More), The Mission and Bugsy. Quentin Tarantino used some of Morricone’s music in Inglorious Basterdsand co-artists like…
The Danish String Quartet brings its highly acclaimed Prism project to a conclusion with Prism V its fifth and final volume on the ECM label.
The 55-year-old Dutch conductor and violinist Jaap van Zweden has been announced as the incoming conductor of the New York Philharmonic. He is currently Music Director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra and succeeds Alan Gilbert, whose appointment began in 2009 and ends with the 2016–17 season. Click here for more.
For The Idea of North, 2013 marks 20 years since they began to compose, arrange and perform music in a style that is quintessentially ‘TION’ and which has taken them not just around the nation but around the world. To mark this milestone, the ARIA award winning a capella quartet is undertaking a national tour…
For their latest album Songs Without Words, (ABC Classics) guitarist brothers Slava and Leonard have gathered a collection of songs with and without words in novel and beautiful arrangements, by their father Edward for two guitars. The arrangements own a special understanding of the music and the performers; the playing by the brothers contains its own…
A rare manuscript of Sergey Rachmaninov’s second symphony, signed by the composer and containing his handwritten notes, is to be auctioned at Sotheby’s in London in May, with an expected price of £1m-1.5m. According to Classical-music.com, the manuscript had been presumed lost since the 1917 revolution, when Rachmaninov fled St Petersburg with only a small suitcase of…