Tall Poppies

The poets Matthew McDonald and Alice Miller join Breandáin O'Shea to talk about  poetry and ponder music's curious relationship with the spoken word.

This is the second of two podcasts featuring the life and music of Alma Moodie. Moodie was born in rural Australia, but moved to Europe early last century and eventually became a student of the legendary Carl Flesch, who referred to her as his favourite student.  The violinist collaborated with renowned composers, among them Stravinsky, Pfitzner and Reger, and cultivated friendships with aristocracy, philanthropists and artists including German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Alma Moodie's influence and fame were far reaching, well beyond her untimely death in 1943.Guests include the Australian musicologist and historian Kay Dreyfus, who published “Bluebeard's Bride”, a biography of Alma Moodie in 2013. More recently Kay edited “The Fractured Self”,  a book featuring 270 letters from the Moodie collection.  Also joining me are musicians Diana Weekes, who translated Moodie's letters, and violinist Goetz Richter, Associate Professor at the University of Sydney's Conservatorium of Music.  We will also meet historian Michael Haas, author of “Forbidden Music,” a study of the Jewish composers and musicians banned by the Third Reich.

This is part I of two podcasts featuring the life and music of Alma Moodie.She was born in 1898  in rural Australia, and moved to Europe early last century. She became a student of the legendary Carl Flesch, who referred to her as his favourite student.  The violinist collaborated with renowned composers, among them Stravinsky, Pfitzner and Reger, and cultivated friendships with aristocracy, philanthropists and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Alma Moodie's influence and fame were far reaching, well beyond her untimely death in 1943.In this podcast we meet the Australian musicologist and historian Kay Dreyfus, who published “Bluebeard's Bride”, a biography of Alma Moodie in 2013. More recently Kay edited “The Fractured Self”,  a book featuring 270 letters from the Moodie collection. Also joining me are musicians Diana Weekes, who translated Moodie's letters, and violinist Goetz Richter, Associate Professor at the University of Sydney's Conservatorium of Music. Goetz has researched and performed many of the pieces associated with Moodie during her lifetime. Two of his recordings of Moodie inspired works also featured in the podcast. 

On this episode of Tall Poppies, The Podcast Breandáin meets the composer Liza Lim. She is Professor of Composition at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, where she also runs the Composing Women Program.Liza has created compositions for many of the world's leading orchestras including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC Symphony, and the SuedwestRundfunk Orchestra and her music has been featured at many notable festivals.She was born in Perth, but spent much of her childhood in Brunei. Liza attended boarding school in Melbourne, and then completed her tertiary studies in Australia. Among her numerous accolades are the Don Banks Award for Music and the 2021 Hans and Gertrud Zender Foundation's Composition Prize 'Happy New Ears'. For 2021/22 Liza Lim is a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin or Institute of Advanced Study.

In this edition, Matthew tells Breandáin about his journey from Canberra to becoming a principal player with one the world’s most prestigious music ensembles. He reflects on the effects the current pandemic has had on musicians and shares a hilarious story about taking a swim at Sydney’s Bondi Beach on his way to perform a Mahler Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Away from the challenges the world is facing during this pandemic, we are also living through another one of the greatest of scientific endeavours – that is - the attempt to understand the most complex object in the universe, the brain. Researchers are devoting massive amounts of time and energy to exploring what brains do and new technology is enabling them to both describe and manipulate that activity. It came as a surprise to discover that here in Germany, one of the country’s leading neuroscientists is Sydney-born Matthew Larkum, who heads the Larkum Laboratory at Humboldt University, Berlin. He joins Breandáin O’Shea on this episode of Tall Poppies: The Podcast.

Stanley Dodds grew up in Adelaide and has been a violinist with the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra since the early 90s. He is also a conductor and frequently directs ensembles of the Berlin Philharmonic and in 2014 was appointed Principal Conductor of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. He is dedicated to working with youth and amateur orchestras and is in charge of the Berlin Philharmonic Schools Orchestra Concert and Youth Composition Workshop. Stan Dodds is also a member of the Berlin Philharmonic executive board.

Gail Jones one of Australia's most celebrated writers who has a special place in her heart for Berlin. At home, her work has received several major accolades including the 2019 Australian Prime Minister's prize for literature, while abroad Gail's fiction has been translated into fifteen languages and long-listed for esteemed prizes, such as the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize.

Not many opera singers could match the achievements of the Australian soprano, Joan Sutherland. Her brilliant career stretched over four decades and the legendary singer was celebrated in opera houses and concert halls around the world. Yet, despite her worldwide fame and the many international honours she received during her lifetime, Joan Sutherland remained unaffected by it all.Breandáin met Dame Joan in 2000, during the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition in Belgium, and recorded this interview.

In this podcast, the extraordinary jazz trombonist Shannon Barnett joins Breandáin to talk about her phenomenal career in music, the challenges she continues to face as a female musician and about the inspiration she finds through teaching the next generation of musicians.

Adam Elliot’s films have been featured at hundreds of festivals and have received numerous awards, including an Academy Award for his film, “Harvie Krumpet”. Adam calls his films “Clayographies,” and by that, he means clay-animated biographies.Their themes are bittersweet and often venture into domains that many filmmakers might normally shy away from. While being hilarious and poignant, they explore friendship, autism, taxidermy, obesity, kleptomania, religious differences and mental illness.This podcast features one of Breandáin’s interviews with Academy Award-winner Adam Elliot from 2009.

Tall Poppies Postcard with Poet Robert Gray Over the next few weeks, “Tall Poppies: The Podcast,” will feature a series of 10 minute excerpts from archived interviews with renowned Australians. We are calling these, Tall Poppies Postcards.The first features the Australian poet, Robert Gray, an outstanding landscape poet and alongside Les Murray, has been one of the most significant Australian poets of the last decades. Indeed, the late Les Murray said of Robert Gray, “ He has a remarkable eye, and the verbal felicity, which must accompany such an eye.”Robert has also edited various poetry anthologies and the journals of the painter, John Olsen.Robert has been awarded many of the most-respected Australian literary prizes, including the New South Wales Premier’s Poetry Award, the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry and the Patrick White Award. Many of his poems have been translated into German.

In this episode Breandáin O'Shea meets the Sydney-born painter Heather Betts, who has been living in Berlin, since 1984. She is a graduate of Sydney’s Fine Arts Institute, she also studied viola at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Heather moved to Berlin with her husband musician, Brett Dean. Heather has had over forty solo exhibitions, as well as numerous group exhibitions. The influence of her viola studies is omnipresent, as music is a leitmotif of much of her work. Heather talked about those early days in Berlin, when the German capital was still divided by the Berlin Wall. And about a special friendship she shared with Rosie, a prima ballerina from East Berlin that led eventually to her assisting Rosie and her family to escape the Communist regime.

Soprano Siobhan Stagg studied at Melbourne University and later at the Wales International Academy of Voice in Cardiff. Her many accolades include first prize at the 2014 International Mozart Competition. She is a member of the ensemble at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and frequently been a guest at many other opera houses, including London’s Royal Opera House, the Dutch National Opera, and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. On the concert platform, Siobhan has appeared as a soloist at events the likes of the Salzburg Mozartwoche and the BBC Proms, as well as with prestigious ensembles the calibre of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

Cathy Milliken has been an artist many young Australian musicians have looked up to when they have travelled abroad to continue their studies in Europe. A renowned oboist, composer and music educator, Cathy has held key positions with two of the world’s leading music ensembles, Ensemble Modern and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Breandáin caught up with Cathy in Berlin, where she talked about her illustrious musical career, working alongside many of the world’s leading musicians, composing and creating participatory compositional projects around the world. And about how it all started back in the Queensland Youth Orchestra.

Breandáin caught up with the renowned Melburnian, Peter Singer, in Berlin at the presentation of the 3rd annual “Peter Singer Award,” an accolade given to those working on strategies to relieve the suffering of animals.Much of Peter Singer’s career has been devoted to social and political causes, most notably animal rights, but also famine and poverty relief, environmentalism and reproductive rights.But perhaps he is best known for his 1975 book, Animal Liberation, A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. Its publication greatly contributed to the growth of the animal rights movement by calling attention to the routine torture and abuse of countless animals in factory farms and in the course of scientific research. At the same time, it generated significant new interest among ethical philosophers in the moral treatment of non-human animals.

In this edition of Tall Poppies, Paul Kildea talks about his latest book, "Chopin's Piano, A Journey Through Romanticism," and rising to the challenge of finding the right words to describe music. He also recalls the time in his life when the adjective – Australian - was not a positive one and shares his insatiable passion for Australia.“I have always tried to work out a way of coming up with a single image or analogy or a metaphor, that makes it really clear to a non-specialist, the phenomenon of hearing that piece of music”The conductor and author, Paul Kildea, hails from Canberra. He studied piano and musicology at the University of Melbourne before completing his doctorate at Oxford. Since his Opera Australia début in 1997, he has conducted many of today’s great artists in opera houses and concert halls throughout Europe and Australia.In 1999 he was appointed Head of Music at the Aldeburgh Festival and, in 2003, was named Artistic Director of one of London’s most prestigious concert venues, Wigmore Hall.Paul has also written extensively on music and culture in the twentieth century. His first three books feature the music and work of the composer, Benjamin Britten. The third, a biography, “Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century”, was published in 2013, the composer’s centenary year. The Financial Times considered it, ‘unquestionably the music book of the year’.Paul’s latest book, “Chopin’s Piano, A Journey through Romanticism,” has just been published. It tells the captivating story of Frédéric Chopin and the fate of his Majorcan pianino, the instrument he used while residing on Majorca, where he wrote a number of his renowned “24 Preludes”. It traces musical Romanticism from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Among its protagonists are Chopin and the French novelist, George Sand, while the unexpected heroine of this book is the great keyboard player, Wanda Landowska, who rescued Chopin’s pianino in 1913.At the heart of this book’s 24 chapters, are Chopin’s 24 Preludes. It traces the instruments on which they were played, the pianists who interpreted them, and the traditions they came to represent.But it all begins and ends with the Majorcan pianino, which became a much-coveted cultural artefact during the Second World War. When the Nazis saw it as a symbol of the man and music, they were determined to appropriate it as their own.

The Tall Poppies podcast this week features dancer and choreographer, Rhys Martin, who hails from Newcastle, New South Wales. A graduate of Sydney University, Rhys initially studied literature and fine arts. He began his career in the theatre with Sydney’s pioneering underground company, “One Extra Dance.” In this Tall Poppies’ episode, Rhys recalls his encounters in the 1970s with many of the leading figures of the Australian dance scene before travelling to work in Britain and, subsequently, Germany. Rhys Martin is currently Professor of Dance and Choreography at Berlin’s University of the Arts, where he has established the new "Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin” (HZT) and leads an MA course entitled “Solo/Dance/Authorship”.http://tall-poppies.com/podcast/dance/9-rhys-martin-dancer-and-choreographer/

In this episode, Kat Frankie tells Breandáin about how an idea becomes a wide-ranging musical composition and how she enjoys the creative process a little more than performing. We also sample a little of Kat's latest album, "Bad Behaviour". Find out more at http://tall-poppies.com/

In this episode of Tall Poppies Kat Frankie tells Breandáin about how her ideas becomes wide-ranging musical compositions and how she enjoys the creative process a little more than performing. We also get the chance to sample some of the music from her latest album Bad Behaviour. Find out more at: http://tall-poppies.com/

In two decades, the musician Brett Dean has risen from being an orchestral violist who once wrote music on the side, to one of the world’s most celebrated composers.In fact, Brett Dean’s music is championed internationally by orchestras and leading conductors, including Simon Rattle, Andris Nelsons, Simone Young and Daniel Harding.

In two decades, the musician Brett Dean has risen from being an orchestral violist who once wrote music on the side, to one of the world’s most celebrated composers.

There have been many highlights in Simone Young's career. Alongside conducting most of the world’s great orchestras including the London and New York Philharmonic Orchestras, the City of Birmingham Symphony, and the BBC Symphony at the BBC Proms, she was also the first woman to conduct at the Vienna State Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic, two orchestras she regularly returns to conduct today.  In 1983, at just 22, Simone Young had already joined the staff of Opera Australia. She studied at Sydney’s Conservatorium of Music prior to taking up her position with AO where she worked as a répétiteur, the title given to the person responsible for coaching singers and playing the piano for music and production rehearsals.  By 1986, the young Sydneyite was conducting at the Sydney Opera House and appointed a resident conductor with Opera Australia. Among her mentors were Australian musician luminaries, the likes of conductors Charles Mackerras, Richard Bonynge and Stuart Challender.  In the late 1980s, Simone and her husband moved to Germany, where she took up a position assisting James Conlon, the conductor at the Cologne Opera.  This led to further engagements, including working alongside the legendary Daniel Barenboim at the Berlin State Opera and the Bayreuth Festival. In 1998 she was appointed principal conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra in Norway.But Australia was never far from her sights. In 2000, Simone was given what she terms one of the greatest honours of her career, when she conducted the national anthem at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. Not long afterwards, she returned to take up the position of Music Director with Opera Australia, but despite these three years being an artistically rewarding period, they were turbulent years in her career. “It became obvious that I was not going to have the support that had been indicated at the start of my time that would be there,” she confided. “Then it became obvious that our ways were going to part, but the way it all happened was completely unnecessary. Deeply destructive for the company, very hurtful for me personally at the time but, once again, I focused all my energies on just doing the work,”In 2005 Simone returned to Europe to direct one of the Germany’s major opera houses, the Hamburg State Opera, and as chief conductor of the city’s philharmonic orchestra, positions she held until 2015.Among her recordings are the symphonies of Anton Bruckner, Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle and the complete Brahms symphonies.Simone has also been a great mentor for a number of Australian conductors and singers. She says, “I think it is incredibly important for young conductors to see just how tough the working side of this job is. If you don’t want to work hard, don’t choose this profession.”It was, indeed, in the midst of a heavy performance and rehearsal schedule in Berlin that Simone Young joined the Tall Poppies podcast. In this episode, she recalls how her musical education in Australia and her father’s good advice prepared her for an international conducting career. Simone also confides how she plans to tackle the latest position she has added to her illustrious list of honours – that of being the Australian Nana to her two grandchildren.  

There have been many highlights in Simone Young's career. Alongside conducting most of the world’s great orchestras including the London and New York Philharmonic Orchestras, the City of Birmingham Symphony, and the BBC Symphony at the BBC Proms, she was also the first woman to conduct at the Vienna State Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic, two orchestras she regularly returns to conduct today. In 1983, at just 22, Simone Young had already joined the staff of Opera Australia. She studied at Sydney’s Conservatorium of Music prior to taking up her position with AO where she worked as a répétiteur. By 1986, the young Sydneyite was conducting at the Sydney Opera House and appointed a resident conductor with Opera Australia. Simone moved to Germany, where she took up a position assisting James Conlon, the conductor at the Cologne Opera. This led to further engagements, including working alongside the legendary Daniel Barenboim at the Berlin State Opera and the Bayreuth Festival. In 1998 she was appointed principal conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra in Norway. But Australia was never far from her sights. In 2000, Simone was given what she terms one of the greatest honours of her career, when she conducted the national anthem at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. Not long afterwards, she returned to take up the position of Music Director with Opera Australia, but despite these three years being an artistically rewarding period, they were turbulent years in her career. In 2005 Simone returned to Europe to direct one of the Germany’s major opera houses, the Hamburg State Opera, and as chief conductor of the city’s philharmonic orchestra, positions she held until 2015. Simone has also been a great mentor for a number of Australian conductors and singers. She says, “I think it is incredibly important for young conductors to see just how tough the working side of this job is. If you don’t want to work hard, don’t choose this profession.”It was, indeed, in the midst of a heavy performance and rehearsal schedule in Berlin that Simone Young joined the Tall Poppies podcast. In this episode, she recalls how her musical education in Australia and her father’s good advice prepared her for an international conducting career. Simone also confides how she plans to tackle the latest position she has added to her illustrious list of honours – that of being the Australian Nana to her two grandchildren.

There are not many stage directors in the world who, in the space of six months, have directed Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” and the musical, “Fiddler on the Roof.” But that is exactly how Barrie Kosky spent the second half of 2017. What’s more, this is a typical schedule for the energetic Melburnian.

There are not many stage directors in the world who, in the space of six months, have directed Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” and the musical, “Fiddler on the Roof.” But that is exactly how Barrie Kosky spent the second half of 2017. What’s more, this is a typical schedule for the energetic Melburnian.