Paul Cooke Archives - 2MBS Fine Music Sydney

CD Review: Icelandic Symphony Orchestra – Icelandic Works for the Stage

CD Reviews Classical Paul Cooke

Rumon Gamba is a champion of new and out-of-the-way music and with the release of Icelandic Works for the Stage he has brought to our attention a couple of composers well worth becoming acquainted with. Páll Ísólfsson (1893-1974) studied in Leipzig with Max Reger before returning to Reykjavik, where he became the first director of its Music School and served as the organist at its cathedral.

CD Review: Felicity Wilcox – Threading The Light

CD Reviews Classical Paul Cooke

Felicity Wilcox’s major composition, the chamber opera Threading the light, was completed and recorded in 2012 as part of her PhD in composition. It has now been released, spurred on by its recent world premiere performance by The Cooperative at Pitt Street Uniting Church. Its title, and those of its four movements (Light, Water, Blood and Fire), reference the importance of ritual in transcending worldly concerns.

CD Review – Estonian Premieres

CD Reviews Fine Music Magazine Paul Cooke

One of Europe’s most vibrant musical cultures is that of Estonia, one of the Baltic states that gained independence after the breakup of the USSR.

CD Review – Fable

CD Reviews Fine Music Magazine Paul Cooke

Jacinta Dennett is an Australian harpist, and this album gathers a number of compositions for solo harp by Australian women composers. They range chronologically from Peggy Glanville-Hicks’ Sonata for harp, written in 1950-51 for the Spanish harpist Nicanor Zabaleta and still performed by him more than 30 years later, to a work commissioned by Dennett, Alicia Grant’s Three pieces for harp, a depiction of a coastal environment.

CD Review – Christopher Gordon: Chamber music

CD Reviews Fine Music Magazine Paul Cooke

Christopher Gordon is an English-born Australian composer. He has been commissioned by ensembles such as the SSO, the ACO and the Omega Ensemble; has provided ballet and dance works for Graeme Murphy; and has composed music for numerous films, including Mao’s last dancer and Ladies in black.

CD Review – J. S. Bach Piano Transcriptions from

CD Reviews Paul Cooke

Nadia Koudasheva is a young Russian-born Australian pianist, musicologist and teacher. She studied at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, where she completed a Bachelor of Music (Performance), followed by a Doctor of Musical Arts. She has researched, and here performs, piano transcriptions of Bach’s music by Russian and Soviet musicians, the earliest of whom is Ivan Cherlitsky, whose first set of Bach transcriptions was published in 1844-45.

CD Review – Self Centre

CD Reviews Paul Cooke

Sarah Elise Thompson is a young Sydney-based composer who studied at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music with Gerard Brophy. She has received commissions from a wide range of artists, including The Song Company, Australian Youth Orchestra, Ensemble Offspring, PLEXUS and Deborah Cheetham, some of whom return the favour and appear on this album.

CD Review – Stars

CD Reviews Paul Cooke

AVÉ is a recently formed, Queensland-focused a cappella vocal quartet, whose members are Katie Noonan, Fiona Campbell, Andrew Goodwin, and Andrew O’Connor.

CD Review – Misra Chappu

CD Reviews Paul Cooke

I first came across Lisa Young — singer, composer and educator — listening to her self-released 1984 record, Fire and the Spark, and being transfixed by the beauty and power of her voice.

CD Review – Miss Lucy Havens requests

CD Reviews Paul Cooke

This album, subtitled ‘Music-making in the homes of early Australian settlers’, is a testament to the importance of women in the cultural and scientific life of colonial New South Wales.