Tony Lee: “The competition aimed to give anybody who applied a chance to perform a full recital.”

Tony Lee, a student of piano at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, has taken out the first prize in the under 24 category of a major international piano competition in Paris.

The 13th Scriabin International Piano Competition was held earlier this month at the Paris-based Russian Conservatory of Scriabin.

The competition came after a week-long festival of master classes presented by world-renowned Russian pianist Mikhail Voskresensky, Lee explains.

“It is not your standard multi stage ‘knockout tournament’. The competition aimed to give anybody who applied a chance to perform a full recital – with every competitor required to present a virtuoso etude and a major work by the prodigious Russian composer Alexander Scriabin,” Lee said.

Lee began playing the piano at just five years old, encouraged by his flautist father and violinist mother. At the age of just 15 he successfully applied to the Central Music School of the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, a high school that offers intensive music education. He lived and studied in the country without his family, learning Russian in daily hour long language classes.

He returned to Sydney to study at the Conservatorium of Music, where he is enrolled in a Bachelor of Music (Performance) and studies under Dr Paul Rickard-Ford, the chair of the piano unit.

Tony’s international experience, as well as his extensive experience in national competitions, has helped shape him “into the mature young musician he is,” says Dr Rickard-Ford. “He has distinguished himself in many ways since his return to his home town, Sydney. He has consistently topped his year since he began his studies and won a string of important local prizes and scholarships.”

In 2011 he won the Piano Unit’s Concerto Competition, which led to him performing Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the SCM Symphony Orchestra that year. Last year he was a national finalist in the ABC Young Performers’ Award, where he performed Tchaikovsky’s 1st Piano Concerto with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra in Hobart. In 2012 he won third prize at the 8th Adilia Alieva International Piano Competition in France.

In the weeks leading up to competitions and performances, Lee says he can rehearse for up to “six to seven hours a day”. He hopes to continue building his career as a concert pianist, but the physical rigours of such a path and a life constantly on the move mean that he also hopes to one day pursue teaching: “Most musicians love teaching”, he says.

Perhaps then he will also have more time to pursue his other interests – going to the theatre, visiting galleries and museums, and reading. Meanwhile, demand for his talents from audiences around the world look like keeping him busy for some time.

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The Sydney Conservatorium of Music has announced an exciting new collaboration with Australia’s pre-eminent string quartet, the Goldner String Quartet. The partnership involves masterclasses, two concerts and the appointment of cellist Julian Smiles as a lecturer with the Conservatorium.

The Goldner String Quartet has performed to critical acclaim at major halls and festivals around the world since its formation in 1995. Today all four founding members are still playing with the quartet – Dene Olding (violin), Dimity Hall (violin), Irina Morozova (viola) and Julian Smiles (cello). All four have held principal positions with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Australian Chamber Orchestra.

In 2013 the Quartet will perform two Sydney concerts at the Conservatorium’s historic Verbrugghen Hall. The first of these performances, on Wednesday 29 May, features Szymanowski’s String Quartet No. 1, followed by the 4th string quartet of Shostakovich, and ending with Dvořák’s String Quartet No. 12 ‘American’.

Throughout the year the Quartet will also conduct two chamber music masterclasses. Student groups will perform for the quartet, which will provide feedback on their performance. Additionally, selected composition students will write five-minute works that the quartet will rehearse and workshop with the student composers, before a final performance for students.

In a further strengthening of the ties between the quartet and the Conservatorium, after an exhaustive international search the Conservatorium has appointed Julian Smiles to the faculty as a lecturer in cello. The appointment will take effect from 1 July this year.

Karl Kramer, Dean of the Conservatorium said: “Links with the profession are an integral part of developing the excellence and artistry of aspiring musicians and composers. I could not be more pleased that in partnering with the Goldner String Quartet, our students will have the opportunity to work with artists of this calibre.”

Event details

What: Goldner String Quartet performance

• Szymanowski: String Quartet No. 1 in C major, Op. 37
• Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 4 in D major, Op. 83
• Dvořák: String Quartet No. 12 in F major, Op. 96 ‘American’

When: 7.30pm Wednesday 29 May

Where: Verbrugghen Hall, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Macquarie Street, Sydney

Cost: $33/$44/$55 (additional fees may apply)

Book now online

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Soloist, researcher and pedagogue, Claude Delangle, one of the greatest contemporary saxophonists, stands out as the master of the French saxophone. Privileged interpreter for classic works, he enriches the repertoire and encourages creation by collaborating with the most renowned composers, including L. Berio, P. Boulez, Toru Takemitsu, A. Piazzolla, and promoting the youngest. He appears as soloist with the most prestigious orchestras. His recordings for BIS reveal new musical horizons from the repertoire created by the brilliant Adolphe Sax to the avant-garde works or the popular repertoire. Claude Delangle was appointed professor in 1988 at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, where he has created the most prestigious saxophone class in the world. He is currently in charge of a collection at the Henri-Lemoine-Paris publications, where he works for the publishing of new repertoires and pedagogical works. He is the sound designer of the famous Henri Selmer-Paris saxophones.

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Claire Jordan’s winning entry will be performed by the Sydney Conservatorium of Music next year.

Claire Jordan, a composer and University of Sydney PhD candidate, is the winner of the David Harold Tribe Symphony Award for 2012.

The competition was open to all emerging and established composers nation-wide and attracted more than 40 submissions. Entrants were required to put forward an anonymous, original, 20 minute composition for a symphonic orchestra in three or more movements.

The adjudicating panel, comprising of Dr Karl Kramer, Associate Professor Peter McCallum, Dr Joanna Drimatis and Senior Lecturer Daryl Pratt, felt Ms Jordan’s composition The Origin of Time stood out because of the skilful and sophisticated development of unfolding textures and harmonies. Mr Pratt commented: “The Origin of Time has a rhythmic layering, which is particularly effective in the way it takes the listener on a beautifully constructed kaleidoscopic journey in sound.”

Ms Jordan will receive $12,000 and her composition will be performed for the first time by the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in semester two next year.

Ms Jordan, who is currently working on her PhD at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, said: “It is very difficult to get orchestral music performed if you are not a recognised composer and so this award presents an amazing opportunity for people like me. It is exciting to think that I will get to see my work come to life.”

The David Harold Tribe Symphony Award forms part of a comprehensive awards program that supports a diverse range of cultural pursuits at the University of Sydney. The program offers up five prizes worth $12,000 each in the areas of fiction, poetry, philosophy, sculpture and symphony. These categories rotate each year to inspire ingenuity in artistic fields that are often overlooked when it comes to charitable support.

“While there are variety of high profile awards for music, painting and poetry, very few offer generous prize money with no entry fee. I want to foster excellence in artistic endeavours and support creative individuals who wouldn’t normally receive cash prizes for their efforts,” said Mr Tribe.

“I am excited to see talented people such as Claire receive recognition for their exceptional abilities in expressing their passions,” said Mr Tribe.

“Claire Jordan did well to take out the top prize against a number of highly regarded Australian composers,” said Dr Karl Kramer. “Claire is an inspiring composer and we look forward to seeing where her passion for music will take her in the future.”

Contact: Kath Kenny

Phone: 0478 303 173, 02 9351 1584

Email: kath.kenny@sydney.edu.au

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Jeremy Rose’s PhD thesis will try to unearth what he thinks is a particularly Australian character reflected in the local jazz scene. [Image: Karen Steains]

“The name comes from the musical term ‘vamp’, which is a repeating bass pattern or short set of chords,” says Rose, a founder and composer with the Vampires, who is currently studying for a PhD at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (SCM).

“A lot of the early Vampires compositions used vamps, and at the same time we were looking for a non-traditional name for a jazz group – something other than ‘The Jeremy Rose Quartet’.”

When he’s not studying for his doctorate Rose runs his own record label, composes and performs for one of his numerous other musical projects, and blogs on his eponymous website about his trips to Greece to play Balkan brass music, or to the Dominican Republic for a stint of volunteer work.

Now the 28-year-old will be soon be updating followers about trips performing around Australia, after he received two grants for national tours from the Federal Government’s Contemporary Music Touring Program. One grant will support a regional Australia tour by the Vampires, and another will put petrol in the tank for another one of his projects, the Afrobeat, reggae, jazz eight-piece ensemble The Strides.

“This is an amazing opportunity to connect with regional audiences and to take original music on the road,” says Rose, who received the 2009 Bell Award for Young Australian Jazz Artist of the Year.

When he takes to the road next year with the Vampires he will be accompanied by SCM graduates Nick Garbett (trumpet), Alex Boneham (double bass) and Alex Masso (drums).

In February 2013 he will also need to find time for a residency at the Campbelltown Arts Centre, where The Strides will spend an intensive week collaborating and writing music for a new album after receiving another grant, this time from the Australia Council. The residency will include a public concert, as well as workshops with local high schools in the region, one of Sydney’s most disadvantaged.

The renowned composer Matthew Hindson, Rose’s doctorate supervisor, is full of praise for his talent, and the very catholic way he keeps building musical knowledge and skills. “He is very cross-genre musically and very cross-cultural in his approach, moving between different disciplines and styles ably. That is what music is about today.”

While he is constantly thinking globally, Rose’s PhD thesis will try to unearth what he thinks is a particularly Australian character reflected in the local jazz scene. “I’m trying to show the Australian identity is clearly evident not merely in the way the music sounds, but the way we create music,” says Rose.

Pragmatism, mateship and eclecticism – drawing from musical styles outside the jazz paradigm, including from non-western countries such as India, the Caribbean and the Pacific as well as Europe – are all qualities he sees in the way jazz music is practised here.

Raised in Sydney by a visual arts teacher mother and architect father, he learnt classical music from the age of six. “I was always surrounded by music and by many different musical styles from my parents’ record collections, from Indian classical music, to folk and jazz and classical music,” he recalls.

His interest in exploring diverse music styles extended to a recent trip to Greece to study the complex micro-tonal techniques developed by the innovative saxophone player, the Cologne-based New Zealander Hayden Chisholm. On the same trip he also visited Cuba, working with local composers and performing with local musicians in a jazz club.

The fruits of all of this researching, travelling, composing and performing can be heard on records released through his label Earshift records, and directly via videos posted on websites for The Vampires and The Strides. “Through technology such as the internet, and particularly social media, artists are able to connect with audiences in so many different ways and also establish long-term fan bases,” notes Rose.

To hear The Vampires or The Strides live during their regional tours, look out for 2013 tour dates on their websites.

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Dr Neal Peres Da Costa: “I realised there is a significant gulf between how we play classical and romantic music now and how it was played back then.”

A University of Sydney scholar has conducted groundbreaking research that could change the way pianists perform music by late-romantic composers such as Brahms, Chopin and Saint-Säens.

In a world first study, Dr Neal Peres Da Costa from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music has extensively researched early sound recordings of late-romantic piano playing, discovering an expressive style of playing at odds with the more “precise” and “clean” style to which modern audiences are accustomed.

The practices Peres Da Costa has uncovered in early acoustic and electrical recordings, as well as reproducing piano rolls, “demonstrates a freedom and expressivity that the majority of today’s musicians would consider peculiar or disturbingly eccentric”, he says.

“I realised there is a significant gulf between how we play classical and romantic music now and how it was played back then,” he muses in Off the Record, his first monograph published by Oxford University Press, to be launched this Tuesday 3 July.

His research focussed on recordings of works by composer/performers Johannes Brahms, Camille Saint-Säens, Carl Reinecke, Theodor Leschetitzky and other virtuosi pianists of this musically dynamic era.

“Either these supposed virtuosi of the period were disrespectful charlatans or there were many things missing in the musical notation. Like most, I had been willing to accept that earlier composers, even Bach and Mozart, may not always have notated what they expected. But with romantic composers, it was a given that everything they wanted was on the page. The score was the final word. What I had taken for granted was about to be turned on its head.”

Peres Da Costa, who recently presented his some of his findings at the International Brahms Conference in the United States, said the way the music was played in past eras is “confronting to the modern aesthetic, which is all about precision and accuracy and being clean and tidy.”

Peres Da Costa and his colleague at the Conservatorium,Robin Wilson, are members of an ensemble Ironwood which recently performed Brahms’ music in what they understand as an historically-appropriate manner at the Eastman School of Music in New York. Wilson says: “The recording era has caused musicians and audiences to become preoccupied with perfection and synchronicity. It has evened out much playing that used to be more flexible, more spontaneous.”

“The use of expressive devices today is also very different. For example, on the violin we are taught to shift lightly and inaudibly and use portamento – audible sliding – very discreetly. Continuous use of vibrato is also standard. Back then it was the opposite – they used portamento very prominently and vibrated very discreetly.”

Peres Da Costa notes: “When you hear these recordings for the first time, you think these musicians couldn’t play properly, and that they didn’t have any ‘taste’, yet that is imposing our modern aesthetic judgement. Today’s top piano players might consider this type of performance as amateurish: it is not neat and tidy, it is not exactly as written on the score.”

In Off the Record Peres Da Costa makes a passionate case for reintroducing the nearly extinct practices that infused these old performances with character and individuality: dislocation of melodies and accompaniments, arpeggiation of chords, rhythmic alteration and flexibility of tempo.

These new findings “will start to infiltrate performance”, he says.

Professor Colin Lawson, Director, Royal College of Music, London, has said of Peres Da Costa’s work: “No ambitious performer today can afford to ignore his passionate and convincing arguments.”

Dr Karl Kramer, Dean of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, will speak at the book’s launch. “The outstanding research undertaken by Dr Peres Da Costa is a significant milestone for Sydney Conservatorium, placing it with Stanford University and the University of Leeds at the forefront in reappraising the performing practises of the old masters,” he says.

About Neal Peres Da Costa

Dr Neal Peres Da Costa specialises in performance on historical keyboard instruments of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. He is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Early Music Unit at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Peres Da Costa was co-founder of Florilegium, an internationally renowned period instrument ensemble. He has also performed with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Sinfonia Australis, Orchestra of the Antipodes, Pinchgut Opera, and the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra.

He has had a long and successful chamber music career with his partner, cellist Daniel Yeadon, winning an Aria Award for Best Classical recording of Bach Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord with Richard Tognetti.

Contact: Steven Burns

Phone: 02 9351 1214

Email: steven.burns@sydney.edu.au

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