Tuesday 14 October 2025 Australian Brandenburg Orchestra Rrawun Maymuru City Recital Hall Review by Paul Neeson (Arts Wednesday) How do you combine music that is 300 years old with a music tradition that is more than 30,000 years old? This is the challenge ABO Artistic Director, Paul Dyer set composer Nick Wales for their current […]
Monday 13 October 2025 City Recital Hall Review by Paul Neeson (Arts Wednesday) Musica Viva Australia has invited another world class chamber ensemble to our shores with UK based Trio Isimsiz, a piano trio with a perfection of tone, phrasing and emotional depth that can only come from 16 years of performing together and living […]
Thursday 4 September 2025 Sydney Opera House The Australian World Orchestra Review by Paul Neeson (Arts Wednesday) More words have been written about Gustav Mahler’s 4th and 5th Symphonies than the number of notes in both works combined. Given that they are scored for around 100 musicians and they both last around an hour, that […]
Read More… from Review: Australian World Orchestra – Mahlerfest
Saturday 23 August 2025 ACO on the Pier – The Neilson Walsh Bay Arts Precinct Review by Paul Neeson (Arts Wednesday) When I saw the program for the latest ACO Up Close recital at The Neilson, I was curious as to the connection between Valentin Silvestrov and Dmitri Shostakovich. Yes they were both Soviet era […]
Read More… from Review: ACO Up Close, Shostakovich & Silvestrov
Monday 18 August 2025 City Recital Hall Review by Paul Neeson (Arts Wednesday) Four strings. One mind. It’s easy to see why the Takács Quartet is considered one of the pre-eminent string quartets on the planet and a regular guest of Music Viva Australia. An appreciative crowd gathered on a wet winter night at the […]
Saturday 16 August 2025 Sydney Philharmonia Choirs and Ensemble White Bay Power Station Review by Paul Neeson (Arts Wednesday) What White Bay Power Station lacks in the elite acoustic of the City Recital Hall or the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House, it more than makes up for with its dramatic pre-WWI industrial infrastructure […]
Read More… from Review. Lost Birds at White Bay Power Station
Sydney Symphony Orchestra Friday 1 August, 2025 Sydney Opera House Review by Paul Neeson (Arts Wednesday) I’ve often thought for an orchestral musician, the absolute honour of opening a symphony concert with an exposed solo must be so exhilarating and at the same time so terrifying. The audiences’ expectations are greeted by you alone (no […]
Read More… from Review: Sydney Symphony Orchestra with Javier Perianes
Australian Chamber Orchestra Saturday 28 June, 2025 City Recital Hall Review by Paul Neeson (Arts Wednesday) After the sudden cancellation due to injury of scheduled guest director and violinist, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, the ACO scrambled to come up with an alternative program for the tour branded ACO Unleashed. What they devised was a program of familiar […]
Sydney Opera House VOX (Sydney Philharmonia Choirs) Fri 27 June 2025 Review by Paul Neeson (Arts Wednesday) Eric Whitacre is the master of suspension. Not in the horror movie kind of way, but more in his ability to create musical tension through harmony, sustain it until you think it will burst, and then resolve it […]
Read More… from Review: Eric Whitacre & VOX – Eternity in an Hour
Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House Saturday 21 June, 2025. Sydney Symphony Orchestra Review by Paul Neeson (Arts Wednesday) While the music was exceptionally good (as you would expect), being up close and personal with members of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra was a unique experience in this latest offering from the Utzon Music Series. And the […]
Australian Brandenburg Orchestra City Recital Hall Tuesday 17 June 2025 Review by Paul Neeson (Arts Wednesday) In “Baroque Unleashed”, the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra rises to a whole new level in a concert of standard Italian Baroque music from the great composers of the era. Without a guest international star or any colourful staging or lighting, […]
Sydney Opera House Sydney Symphony Orchestra Saturday 17 May 2025 Review by Paul Neeson (Arts Wednesday) Conductor, Elim Chan, is one of the most exciting guest conductors the Sydney Symphony has worked under in some time. While slight in stature, her enthusiasm is contagious and large, her focus acute; her physicality elicited a great depth […]