Indholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2026 i Limelight

Yvonne Frindle A lapsed flautist, who likes to dance in three-quarter time, Yvonne Frindle is a musician, scholar, programmer, concertgoer and avid dancer, all of which informs her work as a harmonious wordsmith. Specialising in editing concert program books, she has been published by the major Australian concert presenters, visiting orchestras and ballet companies. Paul Ballam-Cross Paul Ballam-Cross recently became a dad and has been introducing his daughter to as much music as possible (bossa nova being a recent favourite, but also lots of music from this month's article Child's Play). He plays classical guitar and lead guitar in a surf band. Deborah Jones Deborah Jones is a writer and critic specialising in dance. A former long-serving Arts Editor of The Australian, she is currently the newspaper's national dance critic.…

ORCHESTRAS & SYMPHONIC CHOIRS by Yvonne Frindle In November, the Macquarie Dictionary announced its word of the year for 2025: AI slop. Whether we like it or not, AI-generated content has infiltrated work, education, leisure and culture. But meaningless ‘AI slop’ is the most insidious. So, it's no surprise to see Australian orchestras resisting the trend and reminding audiences they offer something that even the most ingeniously crafted prompt could never deliver – authentic, original music-making. The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra sums it up: “Forever Live … music made by real people, in real time.” The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra spells it out, reminding us that “algorithms are corralling us into narrow streams” and promising that “in this scrambled, screen-glazed, data-numbed world, we're here to help you really, humanly feel something. To…

It's easy to overlook the world of children's music, to think of it as nothing more than one-dimensional little pieces designed to be just one step on from exercises and drills before young learners finally graduate to real music. But music for children can and should be just as complete as music for adults, just shorter and with less notes. After all, children are chock-full of feelings and emotions – wonder, fear, excitement, sadness and so on, and so a well-written piece should give them the space to explore those same emotions. Consider, too, just how many composers have taken children's music very seriously. After all, works for children require the composer to distil their compositional style down to the purest elements possible. For instance, as the title suggests, Igor…

Our January Recording of the Month pairs Rachmaninov with Elgar while marking the Harmonia Mundi debut of Vasily Petrenko, one of the most interesting conductors around (Harmonia Mundi HMM902788). In an excellent sleeve note, the conductor explains the choice of a double bill of two composers who became national treasures, though both ended up out of step with the rising generation. Petrenko has chosen less well-known but representative works, both written in 1913. The Bells, a setting of Edgar Allan Poe, reflects Rachmaninov's nostalgia for the sounds of the Russian Orthodox Church. Elgar's Falstaff highlights the composer's love of Shakespeare, who like him hailed from the Midlands. The Rachmaninov receives an incandescent performance here, one full of fire and drama, conducted with a natural flexibility that brings out the music's…

ABC Classic Turns 50 The celebrations begin on 24 January – the day of the 50th birthday – and continue all year. So what does ABC Classic have in store? ABC Classic hit the airwaves for the first time on 24 January, 1976. A half-century later, the celebrations will begin on the actual birthday, with an all-day lineup of music, memories and tributes, and then continue throughout the year. Limelight began life at the same time. Published under the auspices of ABC Enterprises, it was originally called ABC Radio 24 Hours, or simply 24 Hours. At that time, the magazine existed primarily to provide program details for ABC radio and television, with accompanying stories. (There's a copy of 24 Hours in the photograph of Margaret Throsby and Clive James.) A…

We are in the process of putting in a new kitchen and our builder was (and still is) a fine percussionist. He turned to carpentry as a different and better-paid form of creativity. He plays jazz and that informs his building. Measurements are taken and plans are drawn up, but as I said to my wife, “I think we are going to have a jazz kitchen and not a classical kitchen.” Your classical renovation is all tightly controlled to the last millimetre. Cupboards are made and installed, while the whole process begins with a bright allegro demolizione followed by an adagio carpenteria and finally a rondo alla cucina to the end. A jazz kitchen is pretty much made up as you go. Would I prefer Beethoven or Miles Davis to…

Should you happen to be out and about in Melbourne, the chance of bumping into Jaime Martín is not as unlikely as you might imagine. When the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's Chief Conductor and Artistic Advisor is away from the family home in Teddington, a leafy Thameside suburb on the outer fringes of London, he enjoys nothing more than stocking his kitchen at Melbourne's local markets or joining the Sunday morning guided tours at one of his favourite haunts, the National Gallery of Victoria. Meeting his audience, he explains, is something he actively enjoys, but then he's always been a people person. The first time I interviewed Martín was in 2021. I'd requested 10 minutes over Zoom to grab a couple of soundbites for a news story about his appointment at…

This year marks the centenary of the first performance of Puccini's Turandot. Not only did it represent the swansong of one of the world's most famous opera composers, but it was the last opera to establish a firm place in the global repertoire. A hundred years on, Turandot gives us a lot to think about in terms of what opera is and how it might speak to the contemporary world. Opera Australia celebrates the anniversary with a monumental new production at the Sydney Opera House from Ann Yee. The Chinese-American director and choreographer was fresh from co-directing Dvořák's Rusalka – another opera with a fairytale theme – for London's Royal Opera when Jo Davies, OA's then-Artistic Director, suggested she take a look at Turandot. Yee pitched her vision for the…

In 2019, Lost and Found Opera staged the world premiere of Luke Styles and Peter Goldsworthy's chamber opera Ned Kelly at Perth Festival. The following year, the company went into self-imposed hibernation. Six years on, Lost and Found is being relaunched at the same festival where it last saw the light of day, with a production of Philip Glass's 2014 ‘pocket’ opera The Trial. Staged in an empty office space in Forrest Chase – one of Perth's central shopping complexes – the site-specific production promises to deliver everything that Lost and Found was set up to achieve. The company was established in 2012 by Thomas de Mallet Burgess and Chris van Tuinen with a mission to present unusual operas in found spaces that would enhance the work's resonance and help…

The harp is one of those instruments you form an immediate connection with. Its sound is instantly recognisable and easy to be swept up in – beautiful bell-like tones, rich resonance and sparkling clarity. Over the past 10 years, I've found myself returning to the instrument as a composer again and again, and it's no coincidence that this creative path aligns with me meeting my now wife, harpist Emily Granger. I had written a couple of works for harp before meeting Emily – highly experimental pieces where my lack of understanding of the instrument shone through. As a young student, I remember getting absolutely roasted by a harpist for writing their part as if they were a pianist. I thought it sounded OK, but it was an important lesson. Thankfully,…

When did you begin playing the fiddle? I grew up in East Clare, in a rural farming community where traditional music was part of everyday life. My father was a fiddle player, and music was something that happened naturally in kitchens, at dances and small local gatherings. It was part of the social fabric. I started playing the fiddle when I was seven, learning by ear. Those early experiences shaped how I play music. What is it about traditional Irish music that you relate to so passionately? It's a grounded, earthy music vernacular that is also capable of expressing something universal and timeless. It carries within it both joy and sorrow, the dance and the lament. When I play, I'm trying to connect with that emotional truth, and when audiences…

Newsworthy A round-up of our recent news reports In 2026, Limelight turns 50. We begin our half-centenary celebrations with the biggest issue we have published since launching our redesign in October 2020. Our combined January/February magazine is always a bumper holiday issue, with additional stories for our readers to enjoy over the summer holidays. This year, we have added even more pages in a bumper-bumper issue! The magazine began life in January 1976 (at the same time as ABC Classic), published by ABC Enterprises to promote its programs on radio and television. You will find more information about ABC Classic's 50th birthday programming in On Air & Online on page 80. Limelight parted ways with the ABC in 2006 and is now published by Limelight Arts Media Pty Ltd. Our…

In India, ageing master embroiderer Abdul is virtually enslaved and slowly going blind. In the epic play Lacrima, he is sewing thousands of pearls onto the 200-metre train of a silk and lace wedding dress for an unnamed British princess. Health dangers “are very, very common for the lacemakers and indeed for the embroiderers of pearls, there are risks from eye fatigue,” says French writer and director Caroline Guiela Nguyen of her play. Created for the Théâtre national de Strasbourg, Lacrima premiered at the Festival d'Avignon in the south of France in 2024 and has since toured to Paris, Montreal, New York and London. The three-hour work, which she is now bringing to the Sydney and Perth festivals, presents the stories of the often-overlooked voices behind France's famed haute couture…

Over the past decade or so, the American composer John Luther Adams – who styles himself ‘JLA’ to avoid confusion with other composers of the same name – is becoming recognised as one of the most original and distinctive voices of his generation. The first performance of his music in Australia was probably in June 2011, when his percussion piece Inuksuit was performed at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. In May 2019, Tim Munro led a spellbinding rendition of Ten Thousand Birds with ANAM musicians, transforming the South Melbourne Town Hall into an immersive aviary. In March 2022, the Australian premiere of Become Ocean was a highlight of the Perth Festival, performed by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra and West Australian Youth Orchestra, as it was when the…

“Without music,” Jane Austen wrote in Emma, “life would be a blank to me.” Although the speaker is Mrs Elton, a domineering and pretentious windbag – and to compound the crime, from new money – the quote might equally apply to the self-effacing Austen herself. Indeed, the importance of music, and in particular the social fillip a young woman might gain from mastery of the pianoforte, crops up in all of her novels. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet's playing attracts the attention of Mr Darcy. By contrast, her sister Mary may be diligent and accomplished, but her “pedantic air and conceited manner” at the keyboard imply mere skill is not enough. In Emma, Jane Fairfax's talent is thought sufficiently marketable to secure her a position as a governess, while…

Richard Linklater's behind-the-scenes biopic spins us back to the moment 65 years ago when Jean-Luc Godard reshaped the grammar of film with Breathless. Yet, for all its carefully constructed illusions of time travel – right down to cue marks flickering in the corner of the frame every 20 minutes – Nouvelle Vague feels less like an homage to the past and more a questioning of the present. In an era when studios fine-tune narratives by algorithm and green screens give us vistas of a generic nowhere, what would it take to reinvent cinema today? Shot in lustrous, high-contrast black and white that channels the look and improvisatory soul of Breathless, the film removes us to the Paris of 1959 and the same cafés, metro stations, streets and hotel rooms where…