A fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy? The eponymous Norman Jewison musical from the 1970s, based on a series of stories by Shalom Aleichem may be high schlock to most contemporary audience members, but it retains its status as a modern classic, for a whole rash of reasons, […]
It’s curiously challenging to attempt to pinpoint quite what makes Rocco de Villiers’s work so utterly entertaining and sublimely successful. Not unlike Nataniël, but still holding firmly to his own brand, his is an approach that is light-hearted yet earnest, filled with puffs of effervescent notes yet competent, […]
Have you ever looked at an orchestra and pondered the back story behind the more monstrous and dramatic of its components? Or even the not-so-monstrous, but instruments which might be completely bizarre to the average Joe. And I’m not talking about the ordinary violin or sedate flute. What […]
Witnessing concert pianist Melvyn Tan perform — either with the Buskaid Soweto String orchestra or alone on stage for the Johannesburg Musical Society — as he did on the weekend, is the kind of experience that will makesyou believe there is a God, after all. Tan has a magical […]
If you’ve been at any of this year’s Johannesburg International Mozart Festival, you may have had your proverbial envelope of expectations stretched wide. Arguably, the festival’s pièce de résistance is still to come – on February 8, when this year’s festival’s composer-in-residence Peter Klatzow debuts a work Johannesburg […]
The room you enter is crushingly ordinary. As the lights are dimmed and the instruments are fired up, magic erupts. Listening to the Image, an event which forced you to listen to a visual artwork with more than just your ears, not only presented four splinteringly fine new […]
Speaking of the power of music, internationally feted pianist Renée Reznek brings a brand new work to South Africa next week, which she commissioned herself. Entitled Hade Tata, the piece for solo piano is composed by Neo Muyunga and celebrates Nelson Mandela. Reznek performs at this, the seventh annual […]
Possibly one of the most potent symbols of our identity as a unique culture is our National Anthem. Lee Hirsch in 2002 constructing the important film Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony gave beautiful documentary insight into how music and history cleave together in South Africa, and […]
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