It was an impressively polished performance from a world-class ensemble, and it attracted a large and very appreciative audience.

A Melbourne Symphony Orchestra concert with an all-Australian program is a rare thing, but then the Melbourne International Arts Festival specialises in promoting rare, unusual and interesting art.

It was a dazzling performance by an ensemble of musicians who are clearly committed to the music they play, and who obviously gain great enjoyment from it.

The three young musicians who make up Golden Fur are not afraid of experimentation, and in the field of new music they can’t afford to be.

Eva Yerbabuena’s flamenco is the real thing: pure, fierce dance with only music as adornment.

Violinist Natsuko Yoshimoto was the star of the show on Friday night at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Jean Sibelius’s Violin Concerto.

Unclassifiable, Wunderschön straddles cabaret, theatre, and classical music in its re-imagining of 21 Lieder by nineteenth-century composers Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert.

Barely Contained makes you laugh, think, gasp, grab on to the edge of your seat, let out a sigh of relief, and then laugh again.

While the image of Brahms as a turbulent and highly sensitive ‘Great Romantic’ is easily understood, Arnold Schoenberg is perhaps not the first composer to come to mind when we think of Romanticism in music.

Performing new and experimental music, particularly in an ensemble that is traditionally associated with Western ‘high art’ and classical music, is a risky business.