Janowski’s a good guide if you go down to the woods today.

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One of Australia’s great singing actors on turning the music of the era into a cabaret show and a new CD

In the early 1780s, Baron von Swieten of Vienna held soirées every Sunday. He had been ambassador to the Prussian Court in Berlin, where he became enamoured with the music of Handel and Bach. Among the musicians in attendance was Mozart, who contributed string arrangements of Bach manuscripts.  Mozart worked from hand-written copies; Bach’s keyboard music was not published until the early 19th century. The fugues come from both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier, but new adagio introductions replace Bach’s original preludes, which were apparently unknown to the Viennese musicians. Scholars originally assumed the adagios were Mozart’s work, but it is now thought his arrangements were straightforward transcriptions of von Swieten’s manuscripts. He did however contribute music of his own in the style of Bach, notably an Allegro (unfinished) and Fugue in C Minor for two fortepianos.  The Akademie für Alte Musik, who had a hit at this year’s Sydney Festival, have put together a disc. Most are played by strings, but one is heard in a wind arrangement. Four out of nine have no Köchel number, indicating doubt about whether Mozart arranged the others. They are played on period instruments by a skilful and sensitive band. If the sound…

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This DVD, recorded at a concert in Singapore’s Esplanade Hall as part of the Orchestra’s 2010 Southeast Asian Australasian tour, brought back fond memories of the same program – Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances and Mahler’s First Symphony – of the Berlin Philharmonic’s appearance at the Sydney Opera House, in a what-are-we-going-to-do-with-the-rest-of-our-lives experience. The Rachmaninov work, his 
last orchestral score, has always 
been an enigma, part Slavic
 nostalgia and part darkly sinister 
glamour, with a dash of Hollywood
 glitz. Rattle’s tempo for the juddering introduction is the most dangerously slow I’ve ever heard. In Sydney, I was still so overwhelmed by the sensation of actually having heard them tuning (almost worth 
the ticket price in itself) just a few yards away, that I failed to notice just how slow 
it was, but what better way to experience simultaneously its unique fusion of heft
and finesse? The saxophone solo is just
 the first of countless wonderful moments throughout the spectral waltz and the
 driven finale, where almost any other orchestra would feel pushed to the point of disintegration, instead of simply heightening the tension with complete control and rock-solid ensemble. Herbert von Karajan, chief conductor of the Orchestra for more than 30 years, resisted……