Music

At last, ‘The Sydney’ is back. Not since 2016 has the city given a live welcome to one of its most distinctive artistic events: the Sydney International Piano Competition. After frustrating years of virtual activity, planning insecurity, and structural rethinking, Piano-Plus (Piano+) has emerged as the umbrella body for presenting a wide range of competition, festival, touring, and educational activities.

How might Australian history be characterised in song? Described as 150 years of alternative Australian voices, Robyn Archer’s An Australian Songbook is a very personal song selection that convincingly shows how song is the lifeblood of a healthy society, and a mirror to it.

As much as it is a continual delight to hear the Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) giving unfailingly wonderful performances in its national touring programs, one is often left yearning to know more about this ensemble’s inner workings and how it creates its magic. For in its artistic director, Richard Tognetti, one might say there is indeed something of the magician, evident both in his own uniquely arresting violin playing and in the way he elicits quite startling results from his fellow musicians.

It is hard to believe that an organisation founded forty years ago could still be flourishing today under the helm of its original founder. When current creative director Martin Jackson, in 1982, conceived the idea of a co-operative aimed at fostering the development of jazz and improvised music in Melbourne, I doubt he could have foreseen where it might lead. But here we are, four decades on, part of a full house at the Melbourne Recital Centre, here to celebrate the numerous achievements of the Melbourne Jazz Co-operative (MJC).

After a welcome return to something approaching a pre-Covid normal season of training camps and concerts, the Australian Youth Orchestra has finished the year with a grand public concert at the Melbourne Town Hall.

When Alessandro Manzoni died on 22 May 1873, it was an event of major significance in Italy. The poet, novelist, and philosopher – an early proponent of Italian unification – was a hero of the Risorgimento. His novel I promessi sposi (1827), with its appeal to Italian patriotism, was (and remains) one of the most famous Italian novels.