Elena Kats-Chernin
Elena Kats-Chernin AO (born 1957) is an Australian composer whose piano rags, chamber miniatures, ballet and stage scores have become central to contemporary Australian repertoire.
Born in Tashkent and trained in Moscow before settling in Australia, she has written widely for piano, chamber groups, orchestra, ballet and opera. Her piano writing ranges from the diary-like rags collected on Blue Rags (TP186) to the quiet dinner-table pieces she plays herself on Slow Food (TP196), and the larger character works championed by Lisa Moore on Purple Black and Blues (TP147).
Chamber scores such as Chamber of Horrors, Wild Rice, Still Life and Charleston Noir appear across the catalogue, including the single-composer survey Chamber of Horrors (TP181). Short pieces for harp, cello, viola, flute and guitar, marimba, clarinet quartet and two violins show the same melodic directness and rhythmic bite that mark the better-known stage works, among them the ballet Wild Swans and its much-played Eliza Aria.
Compositions by Elena Kats-Chernin appear on
Rhythms of Change
In 2020 Claire Edwardes, often called the wonder woman of percussion, launched Rhythms of Change, a commissioning project for solo percussion that confronts the under-representation of women in classical programming and builds a lasting new repertoire.
d'aujourd'hui
Crossing ragtime, tango, modern classical and folk idioms, this violin and guitar programme runs from Piazzolla’s 1986 Histoire du Tango to Tim Hansen’s 2007 rescoring of Earwig for Zoë Black and Daniel McKay.
Fable
This solo harp collection spans sixty-six years of original Australian composition. Jacinta Dennett performs works by Australian women composers, showing the instrument’s distinctive colour, range and expressive force.
Rhythms of Green and Gold
John Martin’s solo piano recital gathers nineteen short works by ten Australian composers, from ragtime and blues to waltz and jazz-tinged lyricism.
Lady Sings the Viol
The concept behind Lady Sings the Viol was a CD of “covers”: five singers, alone and together, take songs from 1300 to the present, from Piaf and Schubert to John Paul Jones and Elena Kats-Chernin.
Character Interludes
Virginia Taylor and Timothy Kain present a Southern Hemisphere program for flute and guitar, pairing Argentine and Bolivian guitarist-composers with Australian works by Phillip Houghton and Elena Kats-Chernin.
Second door on the left
What happens when you mix four dynamic performers with imaginative and unique compositional voices? Second Door on the Left explores the clarinet’s range, from fragments of ancient melody to twenty-first-century fusion.