The Australian 2024

This album takes us to the Turkish town of Hasankeyf: once one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world, home of empires and civilisations, now deep underwater as part of a project to dam the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. How do you articulate the heartbreak of erasing 12,000 years of history and the drowning the homes of tens of thousands of people?

Australian organist Simon Nieminski performs a program in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the restoration of the 1877 Hill & Son pipe organ in the Barossa Regional Gallery in Tanunda, South Australia. The program has autobiographical ties to the artist, as the program includes works reflecting Mr. Nieminski’s Scottish, Polish, and Japanese roots, along with a salute to his current Australian experience.

Divine Art presents the enchanting compositions of Australian maestro John Carmichael in this extraordinary collection. Carmichael’s distinctive neo-Romantic style, an exquisite fusion of originality with echoes of Rachmaninov, offers a lush musical journey that will resonate with a broad audience, particularly those less inclined towards avant-garde new music.

Divine Art presents the enchanting compositions of Australian maestro John Carmichael in this extraordinary collection. Carmichael’s distinctive neo-Romantic style, an exquisite fusion of originality with echoes of Rachmaninov, offers a lush musical journey that will resonate with a broad audience, particularly those less inclined towards avant-garde new music.

Blue Beyond the Glass presents three bold composers writing for a world-class concert band and demonstrates the dynamism of the St. Olaf Band under the direction of longtime conductor Timothy Mahr, who retired in 2023. The album opens with Jodie Blackshaw’s Symphony No. 1 (“Leunig’s Prayer Book”), inspired by four prayers from Australian poet Michael Leunig; movement titles are derived from each prayer, celebrating the arrival of a new season. The album continues with To Gold in Broadest Blue, by St. Olaf alumna Jocelyn Hagen ’03, a dazzling tour de force inspired by the composer’s home state of North Dakota; Hagen’s music is grounded in possibility, tranquility, and peace.

When desire loses its direction - with no person or object to pin itself to - it has a strange tendency to turn us toward the past. We find ourselves surveying past infatuations and failed romances. Armed with the knowledge of hindsight, previous entanglements reconfigure and reveal themselves. Sometimes, we become privy to the true nature of our attraction, or learn the patterns that have played out across our romantic lives to which we have been blind. Nothing can be quite as bracing or mortifying.

Altiora Peto, Concerto for Trumpet and Strings was commissioned by Tony Lennon for the occasion of his 80th birthday. Altiora Peto was the Latin motto from the St. Louis Jesuit School Claremont (now John XXIII College) of which Tony is an alumnus. It means “I seek higher things” or simply “Aim high”. This performance and video recording were produced with the generous support of The Tony and Gwenyth Lennon Foundation. Recorded by Matthew Hiley in the Eugene Goossens Hall at the ABC Ultimo Centre in Sydney, Australia. Edited and mixed by Lee Buddle at Crank Recording, Perth, Western Australia.

This recording shines a light on Australian composition for the saxophone combined with piano and at times joined by cello, violin and percussion. Some works are adaptations of music originally for oboe made by the composers themselves (Edwards, Hindson, Broadstock), and all recordings are premieres of which two (Chan and Orlovich) were commissioned specifically for this project.

TED MULRY first came to the attention of the music industry when he sent a demo of some of his own compositions to Albert Productions in Sydney. The company persuaded him to become a recording artist and he soon rose to fame as a solo singer/songwriter with his own composition, the pop ballad “Julia”, which made the Australian charts in 1970.
He followed that with “Falling in Love Again”, a song by The Easybeats songwriting team Harry Vanda & George Young, which was a major hit in 1971.Mulry was a prolific songwriter, and a number of bands and artists, including John Farnham and Alison MacCallum, recorded his songs. Most notably, rock band Sherbet had a hit with his song, “You’re All Woman”.