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)
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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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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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 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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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
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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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As ARCO launched their tour ‘The Sunrise’ in August 2024 from Brisbane to Bundaberg, clarinettist Nicole van Bruggen sat down to chat with Kaitlyn Sawrey at ABC Sunshine Coast for their Drive afternoon show. Nicole talked about Mozart’s basset clarinet, her own rare replica of that instrument, and how it features in ARCO’s brand-new commissioned work ‘Wavelength’ by Brisbane composer Nicole Murphy, premiering on the tour in Brisbane, Caloundra, Noosa, Maryborough and Bundaberg.
Kaitlyn Sawrey, ABC Sunshine Coast
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The Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra (ARCO) has a new release ‘Illuminate’ featuring music by Bruch, Britten and Tchaikovsky. This Historically Informed Performance expands the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra’s repertoire into the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Performed by the musicians of the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra conducted by Rachael Beesley, with soprano Jacqueline Porter, and recorded live at Sydney’s City Recital Hall, the album has music by three iconic Romantic and early Modernist composers, seen in a sparkling new light.
Shamistha De Soysa, Sounds Like Sydney.
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A clarinet melody, rising like the sun from shimmering strings. Five of Australia’s most brilliant musicians. Works beloved and new from an age of discovery, emotion and light.
The Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra is touring Queensland this winter with a concert of intimate, luminous chamber music.
Angela Norval, Bundaberg Today
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Fraser Coast music lovers will have the opportunity to meet and watch some of Australia’s best classical musicians perform in Maryborough next month.
Mayor George Seymour said the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra’s ‘The Sunrise’ concert would be held at St. Stephen’s Uniting Church in Maryborough on Tuesday 1 September from 6pm to 7:15pm.
Maryborough Sun.
From the first punchy Beethoven chords to the joyful finale of Schubert’s Symphony No.9, ‘The Great’, the final concert of the Young Mannheim Symphonists 2024 National Academy on Saturday 13 July proved a triumph for both the young musicians and the ensemble guiding them – the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra (ARCO).
Rosemary Ponnekanti, Burwood Bulletin
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Haydn’s ‘Sunrise’ quartet has a special place in clarinettist Nicole van Bruggen’s heart.
In Vincenzo Gambaro’s arrangement for clarinet and three strings, it was one of the works that marked the very first professional recording that she made with fellow Australian musician Rachael Beesley, when they performed in the Kwartet André after graduation from the Royal Conservatorium in The Hague.
Now, 29 years after they first started performing together, the two – now co-Artistic Directors of the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra (ARCO) – are about to perform ‘Sunrise’ again, this time on a tour of South East Queensland venues from 29 August – 5 September.
Maddy Briggs, Limelight
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From the first punchy Beethoven chords to the joyful finale of Schubert’s Symphony No.9, ‘The Great’, the final concert of the Young Mannheim Symphonists 2024 National Academy on Saturday 13 July, proved a triumph for both the young musicians and the ensemble guiding them: the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra (ARCO).
“I’ve had the time of my life this week,” said one participant. “I feel very, very lucky I got to be here. Such a wonderful and valuable experience!”
Guest reviewer, ClassikON
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Rachael Beesley, conductor and co-director of the Young Mannheim Symphonists 2024 National Academy, spoke with 3MBS-FM host Nick Tolhurst about this unique music education program offered by the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra. This year the National Academy is in Melbourne for the first time, running 8-13 July with a final concert at 2pm Saturday 13 July.
Hear Rachael talk about how this YMS iNational Academy s the biggest ever, with 52 young musicians from around the country, and how it inspires both them and their audiences.
Nick Tolhurst, 3MBS-FM radio
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Listen to the program.
