The avoidable war
Kevin Rudd on China, the US and the forces of historyOctober 2011
Arts & Letters
Classical music masterpiece
James Ledger - ‘Chronicles’, 2009
It has been a good start to the twenty-first century for Australian composers and correspondingly hard to pick a single masterpiece. Anyway, how do you compare Ross Edwards’ Clarinet Concerto to Liza Lim’s Cy Twombly–inspired piano suite The Four Seasons? Or the public ritual of Peter Sculthorpe’s Requiem and the private whimsy of Richard Mills’s fourth string quartet, Glimpses from My Book of Dada? But James Ledger’s orchestral work Chronicles seems to do everything right. The beginning is slow, taking its time to establish tone and mood as it draws its listeners into an intensely personal expressive world. Once in that world, everything changes. It is as though we are being confronted by the sonic equivalent of distorting mirrors. The music becomes bolder, lurching between gestures that are by turns surprising, alluring, rhetorical, majestic and reassuring. Chronicles may last only 20 minutes, but partly because the pacing is so assured it seems like music on a grand scale. It is a piece of emotional extremes in which everything is in balance. By the end, even the surprises seem to have been inevitable. Chronicles was first performed in 2009 by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra under its principal conductor, Paul Daniel.
—Andrew Ford
In light of recent events
Who’s preferencing whom?
Ghost notes: Simon Tedeschi’s ‘Fugitive’
A virtuoso memoir of music and trauma, and his experiences as a child prodigy, from the acclaimed Australian pianist
Election special: Who should you vote for?
Undecided about who to vote for in the upcoming federal election? Take our quiz to find out your least-worst option!
The quip and the dead: Steve Toltz’s ‘Here Goes Nothing’
A bleakly satirical look at death and the afterlife from the wisecracking author of ‘A Fraction of the Whole’Ghost notes: Simon Tedeschi’s ‘Fugitive’
A virtuoso memoir of music and trauma, and his experiences as a child prodigy, from the acclaimed Australian pianist
One small step: ‘Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood’ and ‘Deep Water’
Richard Linklater’s rotoscoped film evokes the optimism of late-1960s America, while Patricia Highsmith’s thriller gets another disappointing adaptation
Art heist: The landmark conviction of an Aboriginal art centre’s manager
The jailing of Mornington Island Art’s chief executive for dishonest dealing has shone a light on ethics and colonialism in the Indigenous art world
Visual art (two-dimensional) masterpiece
Brian Blanchflower - ‘Canopy LI (Scelsi I–IV)’, 2001
Jazz masterpiece
Ten Part Invention - ‘Unidentified Spaces’, 2001
Visual art (three-dimensional) masterpiece
Hany Armanious & Mary Teague - ‘Lines of Communication’, 2010
Performance art masterpiece
Mike Parr - ‘Close the Concentration Camps’, 2002The avoidable war
Kevin Rudd on China, the US and the forces of historyElection special: Who should you vote for?
Undecided about who to vote for in the upcoming federal election? Take our quiz to find out your least-worst option!
Remembrance or forgetting?
The Australian War Memorial and the Great Australian Silence
Property damage
What will it take for Australia to fix the affordable housing crisis?
