Modernist Classical
Unfold
The Kreutzer Quartet, long regarded as one of Europe’s most dynamic and inventive ensembles, turns here to four Australian string quartets from the 1960s and 1970s.
The Messiaen Nexus
This disc offers an extraordinary insight into the intellectual and creative talent of a fertile period at the Paris Conservatoire. Centred on Olivier Messiaen, the programme of violin and piano works traces his influence on students György Kurtág, George Benjamin and Pierre Boulez, and the mark of his teacher Paul Dukas.
Lennox Berkeley: Music for Violin and Piano and Solo Violin
Sir Lennox Berkeley was one of the most accomplished British composers of the twentieth century. His prolific output spanned opera, theatre and film scores, symphony, chamber and piano music, and a large body of choral work.
Kenneth Leighton: Music for Violin and Piano
Winner of Gramophone critic Peter Dickinson’s personal best for 2014, this recording presents the premiere of neglected masterpieces for violin and piano, opening a distinctive duo sound world.
The Ring of Bone
While the past decade has seen recordings of Elisabeth Lutyens’ chamber and choral works released to critical acclaim, her piano music has remained obscure. Pianist Arabella Teniswood-Harvey has carefully researched and here presents that neglected repertoire.
Bridges, Vol. 2
Monash University–based Chamber Mélange present an engaging collection of modern Czech and Romanian chamber works shaped by European folk music and neo-classicism.
Remixing Modernism
A unique experiment by Stephen Emmerson: this two-CD set presents the same 1908–1909 piano repertoire with contrasting styles of mixing and sound production, from traditional to modern.
Russian Rarities
Larry Sitsky’s two-disc survey of Russian piano rarities spans the late Romantic world of Anton Rubinstein and the suppressed early twentieth-century avant-garde that followed the Revolution.
Preludes and Sonata of Messiaen and Shostakovich
Michael Kieran Harvey, piano. Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) and Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) were two of the greatest composers of the twentieth century. Both were remarkable in that they discovered their own unique and distinctive creative voice when they were in their teens.
Catalogue d'oiseaux
Virtuoso pianist Michael Kieran Harvey’s dazzling pianistic pyrotechnics are on full display in this live performance recorded in Hobart in April 2005. Each of the thirteen pieces in Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux explores the calls and environment of a single bird species.
In C
Melbourne ensemble re-sound gives Terry Riley's minimalist landmark In C its first electroacoustic reading, folding chamber forces into beats, sequences and electric bass and guitar.
Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (piano four hands)
Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring was first composed in 1913 for piano four hands, eight years before the orchestral score was published. Ronald Farren-Price and Rosslyn Farren-Price give an intense, highly rhythmic performance of the Rite, set against Ravel's melodic Mother Goose Suite, also originally written for piano four hands.
Sequenza and Other Works by Ian Bonighton
Ian Bonighton’s death at 33 in 1975 cut short one of the most distinctive young voices in Australian composition. This remastered survey gathers his music for choir and organ with tape, percussion, string quartet, solo horn and piano.
Ernest Bloch: Viola and Piano
Violist Barbara Hornung and pianist Danaë Killian have long made the viola and piano works of Swiss-American composer Ernest Bloch (1880–1959) the heart of their duo, spanning Jewish-themed chamber music, solo viola and piano miniatures for children.
Arnold Schoenberg: Complete Works for Piano Solo
Australian pianist Danaë Killian presents Arnold Schoenberg’s complete published solo piano works, a repertoire she has studied and performed since her Basel recital of the cycle in 2001.
Binneas Quartet
Haydn’s String Quartet Op. 76 No. 1, Bartók’s String Quartet No. 6 and arrangements from Dvořák’s Cypresses form a warm, assured programme from Melbourne’s Binneas Quartet.
The life in between
Michael Kieran Harvey anchors this solo piano programme with Martin Friedel’s final work, …the life in between…, then sets it among virtuoso scores by Pertout, Crossman, Spiers, Selleck and McAlley.
The Other Side of Tony Gould
Tony Gould is best known as a jazz pianist and improviser. This recording turns to his classical side: original concert works written over two decades, with Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in a four-hand piano version.
Threnody
Michael Kieran Harvey’s landmark 1995 Astra recital of late twentieth-century Australian piano music returns in a 2024 Move re-master. Premiere recordings by Harvey, Vine, Campbell, McCaughey, Byrne, Humble and Anderson form one continuous programme.
The Sparrow and the Mead Hall
Composed and mostly performed by Michael Kieran Harvey, these 2021 works move from the rarefied extended techniques of Piano Sonata #7 and Liszt–Busoni bravura in the Four Ballades to bebop wit in Lawyers… and metal-edged satire in Death Cap Mushroom.
Light in dark
Light in dark gathers Tom Henry’s solo piano works across two decades. The newly recorded programme moves through jazz and pop colour, renaissance polyphony, and twentieth-century modernism.
Piano Sonata #6: 17 Graeme Lee Prints
Composed and performed by Michael Kieran Harvey in the 2020 pandemic, Piano Sonata #6 answers seventeen mixed-media prints Graeme Lee made that July. Music, image and Arjun von Caemmerer’s aphorisms remain sharply individual yet bound as one series.
Greta
Michael Kieran Harvey’s fifth piano sonata appears in a conventional piano reading and an electric keyboard interpretation. Subtitled Greta for climate activist Greta Thunberg, it is also tagged ‘Concerto in no need of an orchestra’.
Flute Perspectives, Vol. 2
Derek Jones (flute) and Cameron Roberts (piano) present a programme of Australian works by Anne Boyd, Stuart Greenbaum, Rohan Phillips, Mark Pollard and Richard Meale.
PRTZL
This release of original compositions by Harvey centres on the monumental Piano Sonata No. 4, a homage to the anti-fascist Antonio Gramsci. That theme runs through solo and ensemble works whose moods range from nostalgically whimsical to furiously satirical.
Dancing to the Tremors of Time
A collection of music reflecting the art of Mona – eclectic, surreal and powerful. Michael Kieran Harvey performs new works for solo piano by seven Australian composers.
Luz Meridional (Southern Light)
A CD with bonus DVD. Luz Meridional was composed by Andrián Pertout for pianist Michael Kieran Harvey. Its twenty-four solo piano études each contain a quotation from an early Australian composer.
Aporia
Michael Kieran Harvey performs his third piano sonata in the company of four contemporary Australian works that show the range of Australia’s twenty-first-century musical languages.
Michael Bertram Fantaisie-Sonata
Larry Sitsky wrote that Michael Bertram ‘writes fierce but exciting piano music’. Michael Kieran Harvey matches that charge in a programme built around Bertram’s large-scale Fantaisie-Sonata, with shorter piano works completing the portrait.
Unfold: Sequence for solo cello
This thirteen-minute work by Don Banks was recorded alongside the Kreutzer Quartet’s Unfold album. Time limits kept the track off that CD, so it appears here as a separate release.
Inferno
Michael Kieran Harvey plays two solo piano works by Elliott Gyger. Harvey writes that they bookend Gyger’s extraordinary musical universe – which, like Messiaen, appeared fully-formed at a precocious age, and has deepened across a long career.
Psychosonata
Michael Kieran Harvey’s own works from 2007–2013, spanning serious intensity and cheerful pastiche. The half-hour piano sonata anchors shorter pieces with leading young Australian instrumentalists.
Astra 60
This recording captures a concert of Australian piano music celebrating Astra’s long support of Australian composers and performers. For sixty years the Astra Chamber Music Society has placed new Australian work beside international new-music currents, always with a distinctive cultural frame.
48 Fugues for Frank
A musical homage to the life and work of Frank Zappa, composed and performed by Michael Kieran Harvey, and complemented by Lingua Franka – concrete poetry by Arjun von Caemmerer.
Dimensions of Night
Michael Kieran Harvey performs Larry Sitsky's epic solo-piano cycle. Dimensions of Night draws on ancient legend, myth and spiritual history, with a series of chords underpinning the harmonic sequence across the whole work.
The School of Natural Philosophy
Michael Kieran Harvey plays new music for keyboard by Graham Hair, Douglas Knehans, Martin Friedel, Richard Meale and Hilda Paredes, linking science, landscape and modernist piano writing.
The Way of the Seeker
Written by Larry Sitsky in 2004 and played by Michael Kieran Harvey, The Way of the Seeker is a highly virtuosic solo piano work whose thematic material is drawn from fragments of oriental chant.
Rabid Bay
Michael Kieran Harvey is one of the foremost interpreters of contemporary piano music of his generation. This recording presents some of Australia's cutting-edge piano music – bold and experimental, but also increasingly lyrical.
Tensile Flame
Michael Kieran Harvey’s two-disc piano programme pairs Liszt’s B minor Sonata and its early twentieth-century echoes in Skryabin, Rachmaninov and Ravel with a second disc of Stravinsky, Carter, Graham Hair and Carl Vine’s 1990 Piano Sonata.
Tuba Recital
One of the world’s finest tuba players, and the first to give a tuba recital in Australia, Ian King presents a programme from Bach and Vivaldi through to Paul Hindemith’s remarkable Sonata for Tuba and Piano.
Exposé
This album spans nearly a quarter of a century of Peter Tahourdin’s chamber music, from 1971 to 1995. The works chart his compositional metamorphosis and draw on a wide range of influences and themes, from the structural procedures of Indian raga to texts from the Carmina Burana.
Bright Tracks
Winner of the 1998 ABC Classic FM Listeners’ Choice Award, this double CD gathers chamber music by Brenton Broadstock, one of Australia’s most established and respected composers.
Redror
Six chamber works by Australian composer Michael Whiticker, recorded by the Libra Contemporary Ensemble. The programme ranges from solo guitar to mixed ensemble and works with tape.
20th Century Piano Trios
Highly acclaimed Trio Melbourne presents 20th Century Piano Trios, a collection of rarely heard and newly recorded works that includes first recordings of pieces by Australian composers Peter Sculthorpe and Julian Yu.
Mistika
Composer and keyboardist Linda Ceff sets past and present inspirations beside her own contemporary works. Homages to Stravinsky, Messiaen and Skryabin sit with multi-tracked piano, synthesised colour, bells and Asian-inflected writing.
Contemporary Australian Piano
A valuable collection of Australian piano works by some of the country’s most respected and inventive composers, performed by pianist-composer Larry Sitsky.
Petra String Quartet plays Conyngham and Tibbits
Barry Conyngham's String Quartet No. 1 and George Tibbits' Second String Quartet, two Albert H. Maggs Award commissions, performed by the Petra String Quartet.
Victorian Time Machine
The Victorian Time Machine, directed by Richard David Hames, grew out of the Victorian College of the Arts as an instrumental and vocal ensemble for new music. This 1979 programme pairs Guillaume Dufay with works by Hames, Barry Conyngham and James Fulkerson.
My Heart
Naarm/Melbourne pianist Danaë Killian presents an expressionist programme of solo piano, spoken word and tarot, centred on her own My Prussian Blue Heart and works by mostly Australian composers.
Enfantines I
Katherine Day’s first solo album gathers piano works by Joachim, Krenek, Granados and Mozart chosen for young players. Her finely sculpted readings treat often-overlooked teaching repertoire with the care usually reserved for the concert canon.