Album Review: Midsummer Dreams – Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra

The next instalment in the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra’s discography, Midsummer Dreams, is released this March. It is another brilliant live recording, this time from a concert tour of nineteenth century music that took place in July 2023. This recording of the live performance was from The Concourse, Chatswood as part of that tour.

The choice and juxtaposition of this album’s works highlight Mendelssohn and Beethoven’s championing their new approaches within the forms and styles of the old. They refreshed and extended musical practices with new colours, sheens and expression. In turn they catapulted their art form forwards into a vibrant place full of new sound opportunities.

Paul Nolan, Sydney Arts Guide
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A Passion for Bach

Colonial Australians may have struggled with JS Bach’s St Matthew Passion, but the composer’s music quickly found a following Down Under. He is now acknowledged as a genius, of course, but was there something about his rebellious nature, reflected in his music, that appealed to audiences here? A cosmological connection perhaps? Steve Dow talks to musicians and musicologists about why Australians can’t get enough of Bach. (Including ARCO’s performance with Sydney Philharmonia Choirs of the Bach/Mendelsson ‘St Matthew Passion’ on 17 April in the Sydney Opera House).

Steve Dow, Limelight
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Sydney Philharmonia Choirs Easter Concert with ARCO

Join Sydney Philharmonia Choirs for the ultimate Easter musical experience – a rare performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s 1841 interpretation of Bach’s revered St Matthew Passion, performed in historically informed style on 19th-century period instruments and conducted by renowned choral conductor Sydney Philharmonia Choirs’ Associate Music Director, Elizabeth Scott.

This remarkable concert will be presented for one night only in the magnificent surrounds of the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall on Thursday April 17. It’s an exceptional opportunity to experience the music as Mendelssohn himself had envisioned it, alive with the Romantic-era’s expanded volume, colours and textures.

AussieTheatre.com
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ABC Radio - National Afternoons: Interview with Rachael Beesley

Hear host Bridgitte Duclos chat to co-artistic director Rachael Beesley about her work playing and conducting, what makes music Romantic and ARCO’s performances at the Peninsula Summer Music Festival in Flinders, Victoria from 4-5 January.

Bridgitte Duclos, ABC Radio - National Afternoons
Listen to interview. [47:15 - 59:45]

Season Preview 2025: Small to Medium Ensembles

In a packed year, there are old works, new works and collaborations aplenty – in fact, just about everything but the kitchen sink (and maybe even that too if you keep an eye out). Here are some of the chamber music highlights to look out for.

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The Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra begins the year at the Peninsula Summer Music Festival in early January playing quartets from Grieg and Schubert alongside Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben, as well as music by Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn. In April, it presents Mendelssohn’s revival of Bach’s St Matthew Passion with Penelope Mills, Emily Edmonds, Andrew Goodwin, Teddy Tahu Rhodes and Andrew O’Connor as soloists. Its Young Mannheim Symphonists program – Australia’s only national youth orchestra for historical performance – also performs in Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide with a set of symphonies, including Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony.

Paul Ballam-Cross, Limelight
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Season Preview 2025: Orchestras and Choirs

2025 marks the first collaboration between the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra and Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, bringing historically informed performance expertise to Mendelssohn’s version of Bach’s St Matthew Passion.

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Sydney Philharmonia Choirs draws me in with a work that I know only from recordings. You could argue that Mendelssohn’s version of Bach’s St Matthew Passion…offers a fascinating insight into the reception history of Bach’s music. Furthermore, the collaboration with the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra promises the kind of performance that will allow you to hear familiar music with fresh ears.

Yvonne Frindle, Limelight
Read full article or PDF here.

Casey Radio interview about Peninsula Summer Music Festival

Hear violinist and co-artistic director Rachael Beesley chat to host Leigh Drew on Casey Radio, Melbourne, about the beautiful chamber music and instruments ARCO is bringing to the Peninsula Summer Music Festival.

Hear full interview. (click 20 Dec Showbiz and scroll forward to 1:05:45)

Illuminate - Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra

The Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra (is) another vital brick in the ever-increasing wall of Australian musical brilliance…The orchestra’s latest offering (at the moment available only as a digital download), features three of the late 19th, early 20th century’s greatest composers, Max Bruch, Benjamin Britten and Pyotr Tchaikovsky…played by the ARCO with all the attention to detail that the orchestra is famous for.

Modifications of tempo and rhythm, coupled with various expressive devices of the time, were used by Britten to bring certain accents to his songs, all based on the poems of the French writer Arthur Rimbaud and Rachael Beesley has faithfully followed these. This is a real treat for Britten lovers.

Michael Morton-Evans, 2MBS-FM Fine Music
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Interview with Jacqueline Porter on 3MBS-FM Daybreak

Hear soprano soloist Jacqueline Porter chat with 3MBS-FM’s Adrian McEnery and Michael Leighton-Jones about our concert in the Peninsula Summer Music Festival and our recent album ‘Illuminate.’

Adrian McEnery and Michael Leighton-Jones, 3MBS-FM radio

Listen here (click on 13 Dec and scroll to 2:32:20)

CD Review: The Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra, 'Illuminate'

The Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra has rapidly been making a prominent and excellent name for itself with superb performances of chamber music and as a full orchestra, conducted by Rachael Beesley from the violin. This recording showcases the orchestra with strings only and in a new and intriguing light expanding their repertoire into the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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They put these techniques into stunning play in ‘Illuminate’, with the result being an album of fresh creativity and deep emotional colour…a recording of great beauty, with all elements tightly controlled whilst allowing the artistry of the whole to speak. I believe this will quickly become a favourite recording for those that take the time to listen to it and explore the rhetorical interplay and ideas.

Peter Hagen, ClassikON
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Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra reveals 2025 season

The Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra (ARCO) has announced its 2025 program with a promise to enthral audiences with a lineup of concerts and tours celebrating historically informed performance (HIP).

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ARCO will continue to break new ground in 2025, this time with a monumental performance of Mendelssohn’s 19th-century arrangement of Bach’s St Matthew Passion.

Presented on 17 April in the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall in collaboration with the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, this Australian premiere of a historically informed rendition features rare period instruments and an exceptional line-up of soloists and singers including Teddy Tahu Rhodes, Penelope Mills and Andrew Goodwin.

Jason Blake, Limelight
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Sydney Philharmonia Choirs announce 2025 season

Sydney Philharmonia Choirs is thrilled to announce its 2025 Concert Season, a jubilant celebration of the joy of music making and the unifying power of the human voice. This vibrant and adventurous program draws on works from a rich array of luminaries – past and present – highlighting music that questions the world that we live in; and honours and underscores the common threads that bind.

[…]

Lovers of Bach can look forward to a very rare treat at Easter with the Australian premiere performance of Romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn’s 1841 interpretation of the St Matthew Passion. Associate Music Director Elizabeth Scott conducts the Choirs and a brilliant cast of soloists, including acclaimed baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes as Christus.

And in a first-ever artistic collaboration, the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra will play on actual Romantic-era instruments, led from the violin by co-artistic director Rachel Beesley. Hear this work just as Mendelssohn himself would have heard it.

AussieTheatre.com
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Peninsula Summer Music Festival returns this January

Music lovers will descend on the Mornington Peninsula in January for a week of exquisite chamber and ensemble musical performances at the annual Peninsula Summer Music Festival.

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The 2025 Festival begins on Saturday 4 January with three of Australia’s brightest emerging musicians to perform showcase works for violin, viola and double bass. Helena Kozdra (violin), Neil Wang (viola), and Jude Hill (double bass) make up the Young Mannheim Symphonists – a prestigious program from the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra (ARCO) that supports young musicians as they begin their careers in historically informed performance. Accompanied by acclaimed pianist Donald Nicolson, the talented trio will perform works from Wanhal, Mozart, Glinka and Dittersdorf at St John’s Anglican Church in Flinders.

Australian Arts Review.
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Review: Illuminate

Recorded live at Sydney’s City Recital Hall (Angel Place), Illuminate shines a light on three works by Bruch, Britten, and Tchaikovsky with period string instruments, in what is known as historically informed performance practice. With this recording, the orchestra expands its repertoire into the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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(In the Britten) the brilliance of vocal technique and tone by Australian soprano, Jacqueline Porter conveys qualities of floating, dreamlike qualities to the romantic and calm moments, contrasting at times, with melancholic and highly intense lyrics. (In the Tchaikovsky) the orchestral richness, colour and drama is heightened.

Barry Walmsley, The Source (NSW MTA)
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ARCO's Album Release: 'Illuminate'

Following the scintillating CD and digital format release of Heavenly Mozart recorded in the studio, Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra return to immortalise an important concert recorded live.
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Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra’s signature clarity and exciting momentum is a joy to listen to as they catapult across the divide from the late nineteenth century Romanticism and into early modernism. The vocalist presents the complex late Romantic texts by Rimbaud with wide range of nuance in fluid modern accent above the same pointed, precise gestures on the period string accompaniment.

Paul Nolan, Sydney Arts Guide
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'Illuminate' Review

The Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra continues to do what it does best, which just happens to be the title of its latest recorded release. Illuminate sheds new light on three works, two of them for Romantic string orchestra and the third a mid-20th-century setting of French surrealist poetry. 

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The graceful portamenti are a particular pleasure, since, like all ARCO performances, attention has been paid to period practice…The Tchaikovsky – played by full string orchestra rather than in the more commonly heard version for sextet – has an attractive butter-smooth lilt…(and in the Britten, soprano Jacqueline Porter sings} in radiant counterpoint with ARCO’s gossamer strings.

Clive Paget, Limelight
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Could this be how it sounded in Mozart's time?

Neal Peres Da Costa is one of Australia’s leading classical keyboard players. You will find him in our concert halls sitting at a harpsichord or organ or historical piano — a fortepiano from Mozart’s day or a later nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century model.
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“HIP is not about recovering the past, which can’t be done,” Peres Da Costa explains, “but about expanding musical choices and keeping classical music alive, spontaneous and fresh. I absolutely love that.”
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Peres Da Costa’s recent recording of Mozart’s A major piano concerto, K. 488, with the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra puts his research into practice. In addition to flexibility of tempo and much ornamentation, the pianist improvises a connecting interlude between the first and second movements carrying the music from the A major or the first to the F sharp minor of the second.

Andrew Ford, Inside Story
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YMS 2024 NSW State Academy

Hear ARCO co-artistic director Nicole van Bruggen chat with 2MBS Fine Music Breakfast presenter Stephen Gard about this week’s Academy, what participants are learning about HIP, and the dynamic concert at 3:30pm on Saturday 4 October in Verbrugghen Hall, Sydney Conservatorium.

Stephen Gard, 2MBS Fine Music
Hear the interview

The Sunrise - Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra

The Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra (ARCO) has launched into its second decade of presenting historically informed performances (HIP) with The Sunrise, a Queensland tour beginning at the fabulous Old Museum in Brisbane ahead of concerts in Caloundra, Noosa, Maryborough and Bundaberg.

Light and bubbly, it had the sunbeam firmly fixed on van Bruggen’s (historical) clarinet…The caresses between the strings became so tender and light that they could have been playing with feathers….

All in all, the dawn of The Sunrise concert tour was an enjoyable evening of sparkling entertainment from the best HIPsters under the Southern Cross.

Gemma Regan, Limelight.
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