• Rautavaara;
• The Alim Qasimov Ensemble;
• Dalmatica: Chants of the Adriatic; and
• Lubomyr Melnyk.

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra played three of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s works. The first Cantus arcticus – Concerto for birds and orchestra uses recordings of bird song as an instrument to very great effect. I bought box sets of Rautavaara’s 12 Concertos and Choral Works later.

The Alim Qasimov Ensemble features Alim and his daughter Fargana as vocalists and Rafael Asgarov, Rauf Islamov, Javidan Nabiyev, and Zaki Valiyev playing a range of traditional instruments. The music is, the programme told me, something of a fusion of the classical mugham and more popular ashiq musical traditions of Azerbaijan. However it comes about the concert was great (and the Spiritual Music of Azerbaijan album is great too).

Dalmatica: Chants of the Adriatic is a collaboration between two groups: Dialogos, a group of four female singers, and Kantaduri, a group of six Croatian cantors. The programme explores Dalmatian liturgical musical traditions from the middle ages which use both Latin and church Slavonic. This was a really, really good concert and I will be surprised if Ispovidajte se Gospodinu, jer je dobar (track one on the Dalmatica CD or listen to the Youtube video embedded above) is not amongst my 5 favourite tracks for 2017.

The last Sydney Festival concert I went to was Ukrainian-Canadian Lubomyr Melnyk playing something of an introduction to his piano music, particularly his technique of “continuous music”. He spoke quite a bit between pieces – and said some things I found quite strange – but the music was amazing.

If the 3% of the programme I saw is any indication the 2017 Sydney Festival was excellent and I’m already looking forward to 2018!

I started off looking for a good recording of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, my favourite Andrew Loyd Webber musical. A few track from the musical, and another also by Linzi Hateley (who sings the part of the narrator in the London Palladium cast), I moved on to that other staple of the musical genre (or, at least, my taste in musicals): Gilbert & Sullivan. After a few track from a number of renditions of The Pirates of Penzance (The Mastersingers track The Pirates of Penzance is particularly good, I’ll have to look at more of their music), I moved on to classical music proper.

I only wound up buying a couple of tracks from the album Enchantment by Charlotte Church (of whom I’ll have to buy more) and Ode II Joy (From Symphony No. 9) by OperaBabes (whom I’m also going to have to get more of).

For some reason, I’ve also been interested in Russian music lately — probably as an outgrowth of the interest in choral works — so I also bought Kalinka from the Alexandrov Red Army Choir.

If anyone has any suggestions of good music in similar vein to the above mentioned track and artists, please leave a comment so that I can chase them up!

Next on the “to be acquired” list is Alien Ant Farm’s Anthology album.

Update: Apparently not as Ill Niño have a new album. I’ll have to get Anthology later (when I can find it in a record shop, as there hasn’t been a copy in any of the places I’ve looked).