Don’t judge this CD by its cover. No doubt the packaging went through a rigorous design process by expert minimalists, but somehow the portrait of virtuoso Israeli-Swedish flautist Sharon Bezaly, who recorded this disc of largely contemporary repertoire during her 2009 Australian tour with the ACO, still looks like a bad Polaroid, with the shadows left in and a random font or two slapped on as an afterthought. BIS certainly can’t have been relying on the familiarity or commercial appeal of the composer names to compensate. Ultimately, this CD featuring the most famous golden flute since James Galway’s and music by José Serebrier, Adina Izarra, Carl Vine and Ginastera, has just two things going for it – the quality of the South American/Australian music and the excellence of the performances. As she’s demonstrated on many previous recordings for BIS, Bezaly is an incredible flautist – fearless and truly an “attacking” player when it comes to the technically challenging bits – so she’s always exciting to listen to. And some of the repertoire here, largely unknown though it is, is terrific. Serebrier was once a long-serving conductor on the ABC orchestral network and he remains a prodigious recording artist, but… Continue…

No one is ever going to accuse British-born, Perth-educated soprano Lisa Harper-Brown of chasing commercial success. Consisting of Australian art songs for soprano and piano, her The Poet Sings recital disc will no doubt send cash-registers into rigor mortis. Harper-Brown is a terrific singer – a touch stentorian and single-gestured perhaps – but in there Viking horns and all, giving these neglected, indeed virtually unknown, remnants of Australia’s British Empire history every opportunity to stake a belated claim to greatness. Have we been too neglectful of these treasures? Probably not on this evidence, but the disc’s seven Roy Agnew songs are moving. Geoffrey Allen’s Two Chinese Songs, Op 1 are worthy of historical study, as they were composed 20 years before it became fashionable for any Australian besides Grainger to look to the north for musical inspiration, while Raymond Hanson’s five songs – led by a lovely setting of Tagore – demonstrate not just his giftsas a composer, but their free-flowing piano parts also show his experience as an accompanist. Using Shakespearean texts, Paul Paviour wrote the seven songs that give the CD its title, doing valiant (if not always successful) battle against better-known musical settings of them. This defiantly…

If there’s anyone in the modern era who can channel the spirit of Robert Schumann’s wife, muse and principal performer Clara Wieck, then it’s Angela Hewitt. The Canadian pianist is no “personality-player” loading idiosyncrasies into music that in the wrong hands can sometimes seem obscure, self-indulgent or even a tad disturbing. As she demonstrated in her previous recordings of Schumann’s solo piano music, Hewitt identifies deeply with the great German Romantic’s lyricism, and loses herself, and the listener, in its beauty, getting inside the music as if she were Clara herself (for whom it was written), and expanding it outwards. But the difference in this new Schumann release is that in Hannu Lintu and the Deutsche Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, she’s now found collaborators who are willing to be similarly open to the music’s subtleties. Everyone will comment on the singularity of their reading of the famous A-Minor Concerto’s finale, played at a gentler tempo than usual and with a real lilt, in the spirit of the dance. But it’s in the Intermezzo middle movement that the supreme artistry is most evident, as Hewitt weaves a filigree around the orchestra, a kind of now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t interaction between piano line and the ensemble texture. You’d…

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