Latest news with #WalshBay
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Piano virtuoso Alexander Gavrylyuk: ‘It is unfortunate to see music as a competition. It is a uniting force'
Youthful and rebellious is how Alexander Gavrylyuk describes Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No 1, the work with which he will mark his debut appearance with the Australian Chamber Orchestra on Friday. 'It's a work where he fights to be heard,' says the Australian-based virtuoso, speaking from a waterside cafe a stone's throw away from the ACO's Walsh Bay home. 'One gets a feeling that it's been written by someone cornered who is trying to remain an individual in resistance to the system.' And yet, bleak it is not. There is much humour to be found in the notoriously neurotic yet brilliant composer's early work, Gavrylyuk says: 'Laughter through clenched teeth, so to speak.' Like Shostakovich, Gavrylyuk quietly rejected the strictures of a regimented Soviet-era approach to artistry, but at a much earlier age. Coming to Australia as a teenager only seven years after the iron curtain fell, the sense of light, space and personal freedom he instantly experienced on arriving in Sydney was exhilarating. The Ukraine he had left behind was 'still very closed, still very Soviet' in most ways, he says; a country where gifted children were drilled with military precision and concert pianists were 'produced like in a factory'. 'It was a place where you did not express yourself,' he recalls. 'You followed the path that was given to you by the hierarchy, and that in itself is completely opposite to what music is all about – the freedom of expression, the freedom of creation.' Practising for up to 10 hours a day, Gavrylyuk gave his first concert performance at the age of nine. His fondest childhood memories are those of spending rare breaks away from the keyboard, such as visiting the countryside with his grandmother. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Gavrylyuk was only 13 when he arrived in Australia as part of a teenage troupe of gifted young pianists offered full scholarships by the privately run Australian Institute of Music. The teenager and his four young Ukrainian peers dazzled audiences at school with their precocious virtuosity. At 15, Gavrylyuk returned to his homeland to collect first prize and the gold medal at the Vladimir Horowitz competition. By the age of 21 he had achieved a trifecta, having won the Hamamatsu and Arthur Rubinstein international piano competitions. Back then, winning was everything, and competitions were considered a stress-riddled rite of passage. Much like its athletes, musically gifted prodigies were held up to the capitalist world as symbols of Soviet superiority. But in many cases, Gavrylyuk says, the system churned out 'broken individuals'. '[Competitions] open doors, they can be really helpful. But it is unfortunate to see music as a competitive activity,' he says. 'Music is a uniting force … if one sees it as a festival, rather than a competition, then that is wonderful.' In any Gavrylyuk performance, there remains plenty of old Russian school-style keyboard pyrotechnics – but as the Times' Anna Picard wrote in her review of his BBC Proms performance of Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No 3 in 2017, there is much more to him than just technical brilliance: 'It is emotionally gripping, structurally thoughtful, and deeply musical,' she wrote of the performance. As Classical Source music critic Peter Reed put it, Gavrylyuk's 'presence harks back to the old, formal Russian style of pianism – white tie and tails, impeccable stage manners, and plenty of old-fashioned performance histrionics – eyes gazing heavenwards, rapt expressions, the pianist as artwork – with playing that brings together grandeur, nobility, dazzling virtuosity and a sublime sense of style'. Here's a taste of Gavrylyuk playing 'the Rach 3' – a famously difficult piece which was popularised after the release of the film Shine. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Gavrylyuk considers the ACO's decision to pair Shostakovich with the joyful ode to jazz-era New York, Rhapsody in Blue – George Gershwin's self-described homage to the 'musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot' – a masterstroke in programming. 'On one side you have this darker perspective from the Soviet era … and then you have this wonderful exuberance, the swagger … the lack of constraints, lack of regulation, lack of anything really,' he says. Despite his global career and 13 years living in Germany and the Netherlands, Gavrylyuk, his wife and their two daughters have called Sydney home since making the decision to 'wait the storm out' during the pandemic. 'But we got too attracted to Sydney. We loved it here too much, and the girls started schooling here, so we're staying.' Now approaching middle age, Gavrylyuk continues to set himself new challenges, including widening his focus beyond the Russian repertoire. 'I'm so fortunate to have a huge repertoire but I am passionate about diversifying,' he says. 'There's always a stigma attached to a name like mine to play Russian composers' works … well, maybe I shouldn't use such a strong term. But it's definitely something that comes with having my background.' Alexander Gavrylyuk's ACO debut Gershwin and Shostakovich is touring Australia 1-18 August; see here for dates.
The Guardian
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Inflexible autocrat, unchecked power – Coriolanus is ‘never not timely'. So why is this Shakespeare play so rarely staged?
When Bell Shakespeare artistic director Peter Evans was handed the keys to the company's new home at Pier 2/3 in Sydney's Walsh Bay, he knew precisely with which play he wanted to christen the space. With its generously proportioned stage, and unusually intimate 250-seat audience accommodation, Coriolanus – one of Shakespeare's most political, and least-performed, tragedies – was his top pick. It didn't happen. The national theatre company instead opted for Shakespeare's crowd pleasers – Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth – to introduce audiences to its new harbourside performance space, the Neilson Nutshell. But three years on, Evans has finally got his way as Bell Shakespeare tackles Coriolanus for the first time in almost three decades. In the new production, Shakespeare's bruising exploration of politics, power and civic identity plays out in front of an audience split into two sides; where you sit will determine whose side the cast assumes you are on, patrician or plebeian. Palestinian Australian actor and Logie winner Hazem Shammas plays Coriolanus, a decorated general whose rigid elitism and disdain for the common people make him both hero and heretic. Shammas played Macbeth for Bell Shakespeare two years ago and Evans finds the juxtaposition of the two roles compelling: while Macbeth charts the psychological collapse of an ambitious man, Coriolanus is all rigidity and resolve – a man with no time for soliloquies or self-doubt. His inflexible convictions on the right of Rome's elite to continue wielding unchecked power fly in the face of the fledgling republic's ambitions for democracy, an experiment dependant on compromise. Sign up for our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Coriolanus cannot bend so he breaks, and in spectacular fashion; banished from Rome, the general switches sides and joins the enemy, his love for his city turned to vengeance in a binary act of political spite. The political thriller transforms into a revenge drama. 'Coriolanus is absolutely a character of conviction, and he has very clear and elitist views of the way Rome should work,' says Evans. 'And what makes him remarkable is how, to his own detriment, he steadfastly sticks to those convictions. 'I'm interested in how complicated that makes the audience feel when they're watching it – you disagree with him, but you can also see the appeal of his certainty.' With its precarious dance between autocracy and democracy, Evans resisted mapping the play, set in the fledgling democracy of the Roman Republic circa 490BCE, too neatly onto 'modern headlines'. And Coriolanus is, after all, the antithesis of a populist leader. Evans has staged the play in another distinctive time and place: post–cold war eastern Europe in the early 1990s, as it picks itself up from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. 'There was this hope that [eastern Europe] would become this great liberal democracy,' he says. 'And then, of course, through the '90s we get the rise of the oligarchs, and end up in what is another autocracy and a very specific kind of a leader, led by an elite.' Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Coriolanus remains one of Shakespeare's least performed plays; this is only the second time Bell Shakespeare has staged it since the company was established in 1990. 'Even though it has the most amazing domestic scenes – and Coriolanus's mother and wife are extraordinary characters – it's certainly more overtly political than many of the others,' Evans says. 'It shows us that while complete conviction can be compelling in a politician, if they are inflexible, then it will eventually lead to an autocratic rule.' Coriolanus may not have the marquee appeal of a Macbeth or Hamlet, but Evans contends that its relevance is perennially urgent. 'A play like this is never not timely. In the last five to 10 years, western democracy has come under question … and certainly, when I was growing up, that would have been unthinkable.' Coriolanus plays in Sydney's Neilson Nutshell until 20 July, then the Arts Centre Melbourne from 24 July to 10 August
