Australian Haydn Ensemble, Skye McIntosh & Erin Helyard – The Mozart Album (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:25:00 minutes | 1,45 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ABC Classic
The Australian Haydn Ensemble stands at the forefront of Australia’s historically informed orchestras. Comprised of world-class musicians on period instruments, AHE is deeply dedicated to historical research and authentic interpretation, preserving the legacy of Classical masters while captivating audiences with their artistry and passion. Here they turn their brilliance to the music of Mozart: his beloved Piano Concerto in C Major (known as the ‘Elvira Madigan’ after it was immortalised on the 1967 movie), his sparkling Third Violin Concerto, and the magnificent ‘Prague’ Symphony.
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Stephanie Mccallum, Erin Helyard – Aristea Mellos: Preludes and Duets (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 57:20 minutes | 499 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © ABC Classic
Aristea Mellos is a Greek-Australian composer and pianist whose compositional voice has been described as ‘unnerving and awe-inspiring’ (Limelight). In this new album, she celebrates the miracle of the piano: its mechanical precision, its poetic resonance and its capacity for song.
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David Greco & Erin Helyard – Schubert: Winterreise (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:36 minutes | 1,02 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ABC Classics
David Greco and Erin Helyard present the first Australian recording of Schubert’s masterpiece on period instruments.
Schubert’s Winterreise is one of the greatest song cycles ever written. Completed shortly before his death at just 33, Schubert’s masterpiece follows a young man spurned by his beloved who then wanders through a frozen landscape in ever-increasing states of existential angst, terror, and paranoia.
Erin Helyard and David Greco present a Winterreise that’s different from any you have heard before. This is how the work might have sounded to Schubert, a recording informed by scholarship around 19th-century performance techniques, and the different vocal traditions and pianos that existed then.
But far from a dry, academic exercise, David and Erin strip away the stuffy, canonised aura of this famous work, presenting a Winterreise sung by a young man in the full fervour of love and an all-consuming passion. This is a performancethat captures every moment of Schubert’s terror and mortality, a vital and utterly engrossing performance that takes you inside a work you’ve listened to many times before – but never truly heard.
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Melissa Farrow, Erin Helyard – A Viennese Bouquet (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:16:35 minutes | 1,26 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ABC Classic
Exquisite eloquence from Australia’s foremost Baroque and Classical flute virtuoso, Melissa Farrow. Well known to Australian audiences as a featured artist with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, Australian Haydn Ensemble and Pinchgut Opera, this is her first solo album: a deep dive into the elegant musical salons of early 19th-century Vienna. Sublime melodies, joyous virtuosity, and delicate nuances of colour: Farrow plays the nine-key instrument prized by composers of the day, where each note has multiple possible fingerings, each with its own subtle shades of timbre. Capable of expressing a vast range of emotions, the instrument was, as the great German Romantic Jean Paul described it, ‘a divining rod, plumbing the depths of the soul.’
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Elizabeth Holowell & Erin Helyard – The Grand Duo: Schubert Complete Sonatas (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:15:46 minutes | 1,20 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Centaur Records, Inc.
This album includes the complete Franz Schubert Sonatas for Violin and Piano, performed on period instruments. Elizabeth Holowell is an eminent teacher of violin and viola, chamber music and string orchestra, with extensive experience at universities and music colleges in Australasia and Britain. Her graduates are found in many major international orchestras. She was herself a student of Robert Pikler who was, in turn, taught by Hubay and by Thibaud. Elizabeth was a core member of the Australian Chamber Orchestra and has played in the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra, the William Hennessy String Quartet, and the Newcastle University Piano Trio. Erin Helyard has been acclaimed as an inspiring conductor, a virtuosic and expressive performer of the harpsichord and fortepiano, and as a lucid scholar who is passionate about promoting discourse between musicology and performance. Erin graduated in harpsichord performance from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music with first-class honours and the University Medal. He completed his Masters in fortepiano performance and a PhD in musicology with Tom Beghin at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Montreal. He was named the Westfield Concert Scholar (Cornell University) on fortepiano for 2009-2010 and from 2003 to 2012 Erin was a central member of the award-winning Ensemble Caprice (Montreal). As Artistic Director and co-founder of the celebrated Pinchgut Opera and the Orchestra of the Antipodes (Sydney) he has forged new standards of excellence in historically-informed performance in Australia.
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Stephanie McCallum & Erin Helyard – Four Hands for France: Music for Piano Duet (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:12:48 minutes | 1,07 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Toccata Next
Playing four-hands piano was both vital in the dissemination of music in the nineteenth century and also a popular domestic activity. The French composers recorded here span the Romantic century, from the salon charm of Chaminade and Massenet and the virtuosity of Alkan’s wild dance to the innocence of the family music-room in pieces by Chausson, Godard and Ropartz. The original 1853 Parisian Erard piano on which this recording was made combines warmth with bell-like clarity due to its straight stringing, allowing it to produce a surprising variety of appealing, expressive textures.
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Mika Putterman & Erin Helyard – Kuhlau: Grandes Sonates, Op. 71 & 83 (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:05:38 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Groupe Analekta, Inc
Although it was Kuhlau’s works for flute that won him a place in history, the German-Danish composer was always a pianist first and foremost; and in his lifetime he was very famous for about half-a-dozen operas, an ample repertoire for solo piano, and his rather more Beethovian concertos. We know a good number of pieces for flute (of around 130 numbered works, around 30 are flute-piano duets!) like Sonatas for piano with flute accompaniment, clearly a means of not scaring off amateur flautists from buying his scores… In reality, in these sonatas, the two instruments are given music of equal difficulty. In them, we find everything that once delighted musicians playing in the nook of their parlours: airs, variations, fantasias, rondeaux, all in an air of solid and delicately ornamented virtuosity. The reader will not miss, in these two sonatas published in 1826, the powerful influence of Ludwig van; or indeed the more unique influence of Weber, whose Trio for flute, piano and cello gave a little fillip to Kuhlau. Erin Helyard plays fortepiano; and Mika Putterma plays a flute typical of the German romantic period.
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Erin Helyard, Stephanie McCallum – Le Prophete: Works for Four Hands (2016)
DSF Stereo DSD64/2.82 MHz | Time – 02:15:58 minutes | 2,68 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download – Source: nativeDSDmusic | Booklet, Front Cover | © trptk
The only way to listen to the latest symphony or opera in the nineteenth century was to either seek out a live performance or perform it at home with a piano partner, quatre mains. Thus, an enormous amount of four-hand literature abounds from the 1820s to the 1930s. Works in transcription largely dominate this repertoire: operas, symphonies, and chamber works were adapted en masse for four hands by skilled and not so skilled musicians alike. But there were also works freshly composed in the medium, and four-handed playing could be heard in the home (its natural environment) but also on the relatively new environment of the concert stage
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