From its beginnings as a competition founded by Barbara Cran and Barbara Robinson to allow secondary student musicians an opportunity to perform with an orchestra, the NSW Secondary Schools Concerto Competition is now celebrating its 50th year of young talent and a love of music.
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johann Sebastian Bach are two of the most grand, well-known composers of the 18th century but they also had frivolous, comic sides. In Double Trouble, Endangered Productions brings together two short operas to laugh at some of the unchanged tropes of humour and human nature.
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For the third instalment of the Selby & Friends program, the group performed in ascending order a piano trio, quartet, and quintet from a selection of composers. Beginning with something sweet and ending with a complex tang, the concert provided a variety of compositional flavours for savouring at home.
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Like many performers this year, the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra have postponed the rest of their 2020 season and adapted for online streaming in this COVID-19 world. In collaboration with the Melbourne Digital Concert Hall, ARCO presented Cavatina as a live streamed international event performing a program of pieces from the 18th and 19th centuries.
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With social distancing policies introduced to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in early March, hundreds of performances across the country were cancelled or postponed, creating a barren landscape for the Australian theatre, comedy, music, and dance scenes. The uncertainty has been devastating already but the changing circumstances have pushed some creatives into reimagining their art form. For the concert series Selby & Friends, a re-jig of the Let’s Get Personal program has taken advantage of the endless capabilities available in online recording and broadcasting.
Image by Oscar Smith
For the outgoing concert of their Chairman of the Board Prof. Richard Kefford AM, the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra performed a selection of works from exemplary Romantic composers Mozart and Beethoven as well as an Australian premiere of Franz Anton Eberl to demonstrate their unique historically informed performance philosophy.
To launch their 70th anniversary season, the Sydney Mozart Society invited Flinders Quartet and special guest clarinet player Lloyd Van’t Hoff to perform a piece from Mozart and one from each of his composer contemporaries Schubert and Beethoven.
Centred around an Antonin Dvořák “String Quintet” inspired by his time in the United States, Acacia Quartet combine three pieces from Romantic, classical, and contemporary eras for an easy-listening but wide-ranging spring concert.
In their 2019 return to the Independent Theatre, Acacia Quartet offered of program of tonal variety in the concert Testament. Balancing classic string composers against untested contemporary pieces made for an afternoon of pleasant playing and peppery moments.
Image by Nick Gilbert
Bringing together two of the most well-known composers of the Romantic era, the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra showcased their exceptional talent for another program. When coordinating this concert program, Rachael Beesley and Nicole van Bruggen wanted to recreate an 18th Century concert, mixing styles and genres to keep the performances dynamic.
Night Writes 