Robert Gibson

Robert Gibson reviews 'In Search of Hobart' by Peter Timms

February 2010, no. 318 • 07 October 2022

I first came to Hobart just over three years ago, to take up a job. Unencumbered and ready for an adventure, I thought nothing of agreeing to the post without ever having visited the Tasmanian capital (or Tasmania, for that matter). The job advertisement included the promise of an ‘idyllic lifestyle’, which sounded pretty good to me. ‘Idyllic’ was hardly the word that came to mind during ... (read more)

Robert Gibson reviews 'Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian opera' by Philip Gossett

March 2007, no. 289 • 01 March 2007

Divas and scholars is the work of a scholar who is no stranger to the world of divas. Philip Gossett is a music professor at the University of Chicago and is principally in the business of preparing scholarly editions of nineteenth-century operas by Italian composers. We might think of the academic institution and the opera house as antithetical spaces, but Gossett is frequently called upon to adv ... (read more)

Robert Gibson reviews 'The Rite of Spring: 75 Years of ABC music-making' by Martin Buzacott

October 2007, no. 295 • 01 October 2007

In the course of its seventy-five years, the ABC has maintained a variety of in-house live music ensembles, including symphony orchestras, radio choruses, dance bands, a show band, military band and string quartet. In its capacity as a concert agency, the national broadcaster has been responsible for touring an astonishing array of artists. Claudio Arrau, John Barbirolli, Thomas Beecham, Otto Klem ... (read more)

Robert Gibson reviews 'Talking With Margaret Throsby' by Margaret Throsby

February 2009, no. 308 • 01 February 2009

David Malouf, one of the subjects interviewed by Margaret Throsby in Talking with Margaret Throsby, recounts his childhood experiences as an eavesdropper. He reveals that by listening in on conversations between his mother and her women friends he learnt about a world that was otherwise off-limits to him. For devotees of Mornings with Margaret Throsby on ABC Classic FM, the experience might sound ... (read more)

The Magic Flute (Opera Australia)

ABR Arts • 22 September 2014

English Mozart scholar Edward J. Dent once dismissed the libretto of The Magic Flute as ‘one of the most absurd specimens of that form of literature in which absurdity is regarded as a matter of course’. Michael Gow’s generally marvellous translation and adaptation of Emanuel Schikaneder’s libretto for Mozart’s final opera (or penultimate opera, depending upon how pedantic you want to be ... (read more)

Robert Gibson reviews 'Richard Wagner: A life in music' by Martin Geck

February 2014, no. 358 • 17 January 2014

After four days in the theatre, and just as many resting up between instalments, Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen ends with a big tune. Like most of Wagner’s themes, this one has been given a name: the ‘Redemption through Love’ motif. The name was not the work of the composer but of one of his acolytes, Hans von Wolzogen, and in its original German it is ‘Liebeserlösung’ which ... (read more)

Robert Gibson reviews 'Verdi and/or Wagner: Two Men, Two Worlds, Two Centuries' by Peter Conrad and 'Great Wagner Conductors: A Listener’s Companion' by Jonathan Brown

June 2012, no. 342 • 23 May 2012

Two contrary and paramount composers Robert Gibson             Two households. Two household names. Verdi and Wagner. To the north of the Alps, Haus Wahnfried, the Wagner compound in the otherwise unremarkable Bavarian town of Bayreuth. To the south of the Alps, Sant’Agata, the Verdi farmhouse outside Busseto, a marshy and little-visited corner of Emilia-Rom ... (read more)

Robert Gibson reviews 'The Sound of Pictures: Listening to the Movies, From Hitchcock to High Fidelity' by Andrew Ford

February 2011, no. 328 • 01 February 2011

Claudia Gorbman, in her ground-breaking and much-admired book Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (1987), invites us to imagine an alternative cinematic universe, one in which music has never played a part. Imagine if this were the norm, and imagine, after years of being accustomed to films in which music was absent altogether, attending a film such as the 1940s weepie Mildred Pierce and hearin ... (read more)