I seem to be in the midst of an intensive Australian phase here in England currently. The exhibition at the RA I’ve written about, but in parallel with that I’ve been doing some judging of young Aussie musicians, applicants for scholarships from the Australian Music Foundation.
What an amazing array of talent is out there. We started
this year with fifty-eight, whittling them down to ten for the finals at the
Wigmore Hall. We were looking not only for talent and capability, but also for
potential – something much harder to assess.
Young Australian musicians still come in droves to study and
launch their careers in Europe and America, as they have for over a century. If
Nellie Melba thought they had potential, she sent them off to study with her
own teacher in Paris, Madame Marchesi. Percy Grainger sent them to New York, to
the Juilliard School, to study with the then dean of the school, fellow-Aussie composer-pianist,
Ernest Hutcheson.
The winners this year were an extraordinary recorder player
who specialises in contemporary composers, Rhia Parker; two brilliant violinists,
Suyeon Kang and Sally Law; and a big-voiced tenor, Gerard Schneider. Past and
present scholarship winners then gave a brilliant recital at Christie’s
(heralding their auction of Australian art).
Although there has been a steady stream of Australian
sopranos, contraltos and basses ‒
from Melba to Sutherland and beyond ‒
good Aussie tenors have always been a rare breed, so it was good to be able to
help one in the early stages of his career.
Having said that, what a fine tenor Stuart Skelton is –
brilliant as Britten’s Peter Grimes (above) under Vladimir Jurowski in
Birmingham and London, and at the same time singing the taxing role of Florestan
in Fidelio for ENO at the Coliseum.
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