Category: James Gaffigan

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra presents, DANCING WITH THE DEVIL, Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody, in the Concert Hall, at the Sydney Opera House, 12 August – 14 & 15 August, 2015. This concert given by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (SSO), conducted by James Gaffigan, had the title: DANCING WITH THE DEVIL. The first offer was the Ballet music from Act III of Verdi’s MACBETH (c.1864). The witches of the opera conjure the imagery of the Devil and the sound composed for the French version of the opera was for the dance around the cauldron of spells. Almost twenty years after the original premiere…

Sydney Symphony Orchestra presents, JAZZ INSPIRATIONS: Thibaudet plays Gershwin in the Convert Hall at the Sydney Opera House. Wanting some music in my life, again, and reading publicity around the pianist, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and enamoured with the composers Dmitri Shotsakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, and curious about the classic symphonic work of George Gershwin, who I know mostly as a popular song maker of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties of the last century – I went to this concert at the Sydney Opera House. I have a conscious appreciation of my being a kind of Russophile, (dangerously imperilled by present history –…