Paul Cooke Archives - 2MBS Fine Music Sydney

CD Review – Bird Spirit Dreaming

CD Reviews Classical Fine Music Magazine Paul Cooke

HD Duo is soprano saxophonist Michael Duke and pianist David Howie, who met at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Bird Spirit Dreaming was recorded there and offers a wide range of music with half of the album devoted to music composed just over 20 years ago.

Review – West Side Story

Paul Cooke Reviews

Any Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour production is going to be buoyed by the backdrop of the Harbour Bridge, the Opera House and of course the shimmering shining waters of the Harbour itself at dusk. The question is whether the show will live up to the setting.

CD Review: The Bowerbird Collective – Life on Land’s Edge

CD Reviews Contemporary Music Paul Cooke

I had the good fortune to attend a live multimedia presentation of Life on Land’s Edge at the Newcastle Music Festival earlier this year – but while the visual component was impressive, the musical content was well able to stand alone.

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 – Rhythms of Change

CD Reviews Jazz Paul Cooke

A couple of the pieces reflect upon COVID-19, with Receptor, by Peggy Polias, echoing the spikes and spirals of the virus itself, and Mirroring, by Alice Chance, examining the gap between the real and the virtual forced upon us by various lockdowns. Ella Macens’ Falling Embers, for vibraphone and crotales (small, tuned metal disks), meditates on recent bushfires, illustrating in shimmering detail the ‘final glow before life burns out’.

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.