It seems hardly a year since we last celebrated International Women’s Day, but 2MBS Fine Music Sydney is proud to present two programs on 8 March featuring a diverse range of female talent. Australian composers Mary Finsterer, Liza Lim, and Bree van Reyk, as well as musicians from Ensemble Offspring, feature in Music of the Night at 10:30pm, and you can hear chamber works from an earlier era by Florence Price and Margaret Sutherland in Celebrating International Women’s Day, at 2pm.
The cover feature this month marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of German composer Max Reger. Unappreciated for most of the 20th century outside German-speaking countries, he was routinely dismissed as a composer capable only of creating dense and muddy musical textures, however increasing exposure to his work in recent years has modified this view.
Our new Chairman Bob Gilchrist relates how many now admire his emotional depth, pathos, and wicked sense of humour.
Lastly, a first for Fine Music Magazine. One of our listeners, Dr Derek Chan, recently sent us a poem entitled Fugue for Thought, based (very loosely) on J.S.Bach’s The Art of Fugue. To my knowledge, Fine Music Magazine has never published poems before, but we thought the good doctor’s work contributed in a light-hearted way to the resolution of questions about the history, structure and appearance of J.S. Bach’s masterpiece.
David Ogilvie – Editor, Fine Music Magazine