Category Archive: Classical Music
ABC Classic Shall Not be Shot
The ABC (Australian Bolshevik Corporation) uses a lot of the nation’s money to fund its anti-Australian, anti-conservative, anti-rational stances. TVC, if charged with the nation’s finances, would probably cut its funding by about 80%, assuming we couldn’t just break it up and sell it off. What would stay? Well, Sean Micallef’s Mad as Hell, Tom Gleeson’s Hard Quiz, Behind the News, Parliament and we suppose the news could stay, but only if it were the news written and read by James Dibble. And further, ABC Radio could stay. ABC Radio, despite its manifest Marxist destiny and predilections, is consistently better…
Continue Reading →Beethoven – Hits
(Capri Theatre, Adelaide, 23 February 2021) Beethoven was a real grind: loads of chamber pieces, choral works, incidental music and variations, songs, 17 sets for string quartets. At the Capri Cinema on Tuesday night TVC enjoyed 7 short pieces by a young but accomplished string quartet* (2 violins, 1 viola, 1 cello) of his works, in a theatre lit only by numerous candles (see main image). The event is part of a series of such offerings around the country, and well worth attending, as they are accessible, enjoyable, and inexpensive. ‘Beethoven’s Best Works performed by a String Quartet’ included: Quartet…
Continue Reading →Wagner in Russia
13 February 2021: The Wake for Wagner The Richard Wagner Society of South Australia hosted Konstantin Shamray, an expert pianist and musicologist, for a stimulating and enjoyable lecture on Russian Wagnerism (see main image, Konstantin in conversation with Society President Geoffrey Seidel). Wagner gave six concerts in St Petersburg in 1863, conducting excerpts from Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, Die Walküre and Siegfried. His ‘rock star’ presence ensured a wild commercial success, but as Mr. Shamray explained, critical reaction was mixed, particularly among the Russian composers, whose initial adulation morphed into a local set against “disgusting chromaticism,” a surfeit…
Continue Reading →Requiem
Adelaide Festival Theatre, Friday 28 February 2020 (Directed and designed by Romeo Castellucci) Mozart thought he was being poisoned by instalments, so that his death would adjoin completion of the Requiem in D minor (K.626). In other words, he was commissioned by the Next World to write his own funerary music. He was obviously paranoid by then, but the ‘anonymous’ commissioning of the work (by an agent of Count Walsegg, who knocked on Wolfgang’s door), and his own serious illnesses, may have informed the beauty and brilliance of the piece: a hotchpotch to be sure, and an incomplete one, but…
Continue Reading →Sturm und Drang vs Screaming Jets
Richard Wagner Society of South Australia, Wake for Wagner, 23 February 2020 A slightly delayed soiree was held for the Master’s Death in Venice (13 February 1883) where we were entertained by helden-baritone Ian Vayne, veteran of many operas here and overseas (his repertoire is set out below). He spoke of previous productions (including the unnerving experience of German directorial flourishes which forced him at one stage to wear alarmingly raised boots as the Dutchman, high as stilts but far less steady) and how the local ones only got off the ground due to determined and smart folks like Bill…
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