Nearly 100 years ago, the end of the Roaring 20s, when the glittering world of debauchery was crumbling, the sheen of a post-war Europe fading, collaborators Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht wrote into the dingy, decrepit spaces of fallen empires, imagining the immorality that thrived in these shadows.
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After an awful two years, the first program for the new year from the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra is a return to the music and the universal search for meaning and hope of artists and their audiences. While the rain is back in Sydney, Northern Serenades paints meadow landscapes of fresh blooms and gentle night breezes.
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For the first concert of the Song Company’s 2022 season themed Higher Ground, the program attempted to recreate the intimacy of a music room or a listening party with the focus on the act of listening. Brahms – Ein Deutsches Requiem encouraged listening not only for the audience of the performers but also between the performers themselves.
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The Marais Project has been celebrating little-known European music for over 20 years with a repertoire of folk and contemporary music incorporating the unique instrument the viola da gamba. In The Fantastical Life of Daniel Solander, the Marais Project turned their attention to the first Swedish man to step on Australian shores with the likes of Captain James Cook.
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Australia as we currently know it was built on the backs of wave after wave of immigrants; people who came to this newly colonised land for opportunities that often took the form of hard and thankless work. In A Migrant’s Son, performer Michaela Burger immortalises her immigrant family’s experience through songs that span countries, decades, and generations.
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Johann Sebastian Bach’s Obbligato Sonatas are an exploration of the various styles of Baroque music and the emotional resonances of genres from joyful to melancholic. In this concert series, a trio of performers reawakened five of the six sonatas for an easy-listening afternoon.
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For a program inspired to evoke, the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra paired two Romantic European composers Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Adolf Berwald for a performance of three of their early 19th century pieces. Rather than evoking drama or great action, these quieter and more reserved compositions are about great emotions, sombre moments, and pretty rhythms.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has been an incredibly challenging experience and, for a lot of young people especially, the crisis also compounded other fears about employment, climate change, and the general confusion of figuring out who you are. In Not Today, Ally Morgan explores her mid-20s with a new original song cycle.
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Endangered Productions is a new Sydney-based music theatre company dedicated to bringing together artists of all experiences and abilities to perform overlooked theatre pieces. After a sell-out run in 2020, their program from the far north Nordic Noir returns with its Norwegian stories both old and new.
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The classroom is a powerful space for its connections to knowledge, growth, and freedom. In Dances of Passion, the Song Company uses the classroom as an arena for youthful innocence, or ignorance, and the students’ engagement with critical lessons on life and love in three composers’ works.
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Night Writes 