The Music Show

Saskia Rao-de Haas took her Dutch cello to India, learnt the complex raga system and stayed. She’s modified the instrument whose ‘voice’ sits curiously well in the world of Indian classical music. With her musical partner and husband Shubhendra Rao they’re in Australia performing ‘jugalbandi’, blending the music of northern and southern India. And they pay respects to their musical gurus Pandit Ravi Shankar and Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia.Mark Isaacs is impossible to pigeon-hole as one of Australia’s most talented musicians. Once he was a jazz pianist.  But things change.  He’s written three symphonies,  conducts, composes film music and he fiddles impressively with standards.  Mark sits down at the piano to preview his latest work Sonata.  And he gives us a bonus rumination on Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now which is part of a forthcoming concert re-imagining songs by Paul McCartney, Burt Bacharach, and others.

Screen composer Hildur Guðnadóttir is becoming a household name, having written the music to films such as The Joker, Tár and series Chernobyl. Most recently, she has crafted an eerie score to accompany the latest instalment in Kenneth Branagh's film series based on Agatha Christie's Poirot. In the soundtrack for the new film, A Haunting in Venice, Guðnadóttir incorporates plainchant-like themes and darkly jarring melodies. She brings us into the world of screen music and different ways in which she has worked with directors to bring these stories to life.Melbourne-based new music outfit Rubiks Collective join forces with choreographer and dancer Gerard van Dyck, visual artist Sal Cooper and composer Kate Neal for the premiere of A Book of Hours. We speak to co-Artistic Directors of Rubiks Collective Kaylie Melville and Tamara Kohler about the expanded forms of music they commission, as well as brushing their teeth; and Kate Neal looks at time through the music of Scarlatti, Rameau and Couperin. 

for the conductor, the rehearsal is the gig...Umberto Clerici’s CV lists principal cellist, chamber musician, educator, soloist and now conductor, as the newly appointed Chief Conductor of the Queensland Symphony OrchestraIt’s an unusual trajectory from orchestra to podium, a post usually inhabited by soloists, not former orchestral musicians. He says the physicality of the cello lends itself to conducting as well as playing at the bottom of the orchestra.  He also credits COVID to his break with the baton and tells us how he needs to balance being a ‘traffic controller with inspirer’.

We spend the hour with two of Australia's award-winning woodwind musicians.ABC Classic’s Young Performer of the Year Eliza Shephard, plays repertoire that's not for the faint-hearted. A talented flautist, she calls on singing, acting and an extraordinary technique to perform extremely ambitious music which ranges from Cage and Takemitsu to Hindson and Vine. Eliza plays live on The Music Show with percussionist Alexander Meagher and discusses her uncompromising concert programming and the enigmatic glissando head joint.Clarinets were once a mainstay of jazz but less so these days. Phillippa Murphy-Haste received a gong this week for her clarinet work and a nice swag of money to match, taking out the Freedman Jazz Fellowship. Equally ambitious in playing and programming as her colleague above, Phillippa writes for and performs in a multitude of bands and this week heads to Sweden to complete her large work-in-progress Kairos, as part of her Freedman prize.

The Cat Empire strikes back with a new line-up and sound. In 2021, The Cat Empire announced that they were disbanding after more than 20 years and played their final show with the original line up at Bluesfest in 2022.Fast forward a year and The Cat Empire's new crew has released Where the Angels Fall which takes us to a re-energised sound world where Cuba meets Mexico via Mauritius and the Seychelles. London-based Australian pianist Rob Hao drops in to chat about his project Schubert Overwritten which he is presenting in Melbourne and Sydney. Schubert is known for his lasting influence on the music that came after him, but also for his incomplete music - both of which come into question when new composers attempt to write endings to those works. 

Kurt Elling is probably best known as a purveyor of vocalese, having inherited the mantle from Jon Hendricks and Annie Ross. But Elling is scratching a whole new itch with his SuperBlue project. Electro- funk meets hip-hop beats. Is this jazz?  Find out when Mr Elling is in the house paying his respects to jazz greats that came before.Laura Murphy is the composer and lyricist for a new musical The Dismissal. It takes audiences back to that fateful day in November 1975 and a constitutional crisis that overshadowed the Whitlam years. This world premiere is seen through the eyes of that famous satirical character in these events, Norman Gunston.

An hour in the company of music writer James Gavin whose biographies include George Michael, Chet Baker and Peggy Lee. Gavin discusses ‘ravaged’ voices;  singers whose voices became utterly wrecked in old age like Billie Holiday and Alessandro Moreschi. Or in the case of Marianne Faithful where age wearied the voice in a new and haunting way. We hear high voices that never dropped like Jimmy Scott and Peter Pears and Joan Baez whose technique only improved with age. And not forgetting the drama that became the hallmark of Johnny Cash’s late singing.

Friends of the show Fanny Lumsden and Georgia Mooney join Andrew to play songs from their new albums live in The Music Show studio. One quarter of All Our Exes Live in Texas, Georgia Mooney, has released her long-awaited debut solo album called Full of Moon. Made in the times of travel restrictions with musicians in London, Brighton, Bonn, Los Angeles, New York and Sydney, the album is a collage of lush musical landscapes and melodies with a certain nostalgic touch. We catch up with Australian country singer-songwriter Fanny Lumsden, who was previously on the show with her album Fallow. Hey Dawn is Fanny's fourth studio album, threaded together by her memories of growing up in the Snowy Mountains. Fanny chats to Andrew about the new world of Hey Dawn, and the characters and muses that have inspired the songs on the album. 

Principal Horn of the Berlin Philharmonic, Stefan Dohr visits the studio to talk about working within that orchestra, Strauss’s second horn concerto, and Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings.Composer and dramaturg Meta Cohen says they approach their music like a dramaturg and their theatre like a musician. It’s a creative combination that’s led to their choral and vocal writing being a finalist in the 2023 Art Music Awards, as well as being the first non-male composer to be performed in a UK Orthodox Synagogue. They join Andy to talk about all that plus their ABC-commissioned song cycle a love is a love is a love.And pioneering electronic composer Beverly Glenn Copeland on his recently rediscovered classic album Keyboard Fantasies and his new album The Ones Ahead.

Irish singer-songwriter Hozier’s third studio album Unreal Unearth takes Dante’s Divine Comedy and its circles of hell as its inspiration. Drawing from blues, soul and Celtic traditional music, he’s known for taking his time releasing new music and this is no exception. He joins Andy to talk about singing in the Irish language, finding a limit to his capacity for solitude, and finding new heights to his exceptional voice.Franz Liszt certainly kept himself busy, as we learn from pianists Michael Kieran Harvey and Paavali Jumppanen. A child prodigy paraded around by his father, he came to create the recital format as we know it today. After whipping up what has been termed Lisztomania, Liszt took a step back from the spotlight at the age of 38, and instead committed himself to conducting, composing, teaching and womanising. Michael Kieran Harvey contemplates what Liszt might be doing if he were alive today through a program that includes pieces by Liszt, Harvey's own compositions and music that has come in between. He will be performing these programs along Jumppanen, Timothy Young, and pianists from the Australian National Academy of Music. Franz Liszt certainly kept himself busy, as we learn from pianists Michael Kieran Harvey and Paavali Jumppanen. A child prodigy paraded around by his father, he came to create the recital format that resulted in concert halls packed to the rafters, and what has now been termed Lisztomania. After taking a step back from the spotlight at the age of 38, he took on a variety of different roles - conducting, composing, teaching and womanising. In a two-concert series, Michael Kieran Harvey contemplates what Liszt might be doing if he were alive today through a program that includes pieces by Liszt, Harvey's own compositions and music that has come in between. He will be performing these programs along Jumppanen, Timothy Young, and pianists from the Australian National Academy of Music.