BIOGRAPHY Australian Brandenburg Orchestra
The Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, led by charismatic Artistic Director Paul Dyer, celebrates the music of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with excellence, flair and joy.
Comprising leading specialists in historically informed performance practice from all over Australia, the Brandenburg performs using editions based on original sources and instruments of the period, breathing fresh life and vitality into Baroque and Classical masterpieces – as though the music has just sprung from the composer’s pen. The Orchestra’s name pays tribute to the Brandenburg Concertos of JS Bach, whose musical genius was central to the Baroque era. The Brandenburg has collaborated with such acclaimed and dynamic virtuosi as Avi Avital, Dmitry Sinkovsky, Riccardo Minasi, Shunsuke Sato, Stefano Montanari, Xavier de Maistre, Andreas Scholl, Philippe Jaroussky, Kristian Bezuidenhout, and more. Through its annual subscription series in Sydney and Melbourne, the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra performs before a live audience in excess of 58,000 people and hundreds of thousands more through national broadcasts on ABC Classic FM. The Orchestra also has a regular commitment to performing in regional Australia. Since 2003, the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra has been a member of the Major Performing Arts Group, which comprises 28 flagship national arts organisations supported by the Australia Council for the Arts. The Orchestra began regular touring to Queensland in 2015. Since its beginning, the Brandenburg has been popular with both audiences and critics. In 1998 The Age proclaimed the Brandenburg “had reached the ranks of the world’s best period instrument orchestras”.
“...what stands out at concert after concert is the impression that this bunch of musicians is having a really good time. They look at each other and smile and laugh... there’s a warmth and sense of fun not often associated with classical performance.” The Brandenburg’s 20 recordings with ABC Classics include five ARIA Award winners for Best Classical Album (1998, 2001, 2005, 2009 and 2010). In 2015 the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra was the recipient of the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Group Award and in 2016 the Helpmann Award for Best Chamber Concert. Discover more at brandenburg.com.au In 2010 the UK’s Gramophone Magazine declared “the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra is Australia’s finest period-instrument ensemble. Under their inspiring musical director Paul Dyer, their vibrant concerts and recordings combine historical integrity with electrifying virtuosity and a passion for beauty”. The Australian proclaimed that “a concert with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra is like stepping back in time, as the sounds of period instruments resurrect Baroque and Classical works with reverence and authority”.
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
6 MONIQUE O’DEA PRINCIPAL BAROQUE VIOLA
AUSTRALIAN BRANDENBURG ORCHESTRA
SEASON 2021
7
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