Behind the scenes

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New Musicians on the Stage

In preparations for the 20th October Melbourne International Jazz Festival performance at the Alexander Theatre, the award-winning Monash Art Ensemble (MAE) are tuning their strings to showcase spectacular pieces of Australian music. Audiences will hear the premiere of a new work by Freedman-fellow nominated saxophonist Cheryl Durongpisitkul, and a piece by ARIA-Winning artist Andrea Keller. […]

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‘We play music, music doesn’t play us’: a message to future musicians

With almost 50 years worth of experience and involvement in art-music, Paul Grabowsky AO is one of the most significant musicians in the Australian musicscape. When he is not playing the piano, conducting, or producing music, he is a professor at Monash University preparing the next generation of talented musicians to contribute towards the everchanging […]

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The Best Of The Sound Gallery Sessions

During 2020 MLIVE presented a series of online shows called the Sound Gallery Sessions, here is a selection of highlights. Thando Rita Satch Melbourne Amplified Strings Allara and Brent Watkins (Culture Evolves) Allysha Joy Deborah Conway and Willy Zygier Mama Alto Gordon Koang Yasmin Rowe Kylie Auldist Hoang Pham Lior and Paul Grabowsky Flinders Quartet […]

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Artist Spotlight with Lisa Maza

The Season, featuring Lisa Maza, by ILBIJERRI Theatre Company opened at the Alexander Theatre in August 2018. ILBIJERRI is the longest established First Nations theatre company in Australia, creates, presents and tours powerful and engaging theatre by First Nations artists that gives voice to their cultures.

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Artist Spotlight with Anne Holck Ekenes

Lullaby and I Wish Her Well, by Norwegian Dance company Panta Rei Danseteater featured as part of the MLIVE program in 2019. Anne Holck Ekenes is the Artistic Director.

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Artist Spotlight with Kyle Page

Dust, created by Kyle Page and Amber Haines’ dance company Dancenorth featured as part of the MLIVE program in March 2019.

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Artist Spotlight with Allysha Joy

Allysha Joy featured as part of the Sound Gallery Sessions live streaming series in April this year.

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Artist Spotlight with Montaigne

Home Is Where The Art Is interview series.  With festival cancellations, venue closures and live gigs on hold for the foreseeable future, the Coronavirus pandemic has had a devastating impact on the performing arts industry. With physical distancing in place, artists are using technology in new and creative ways to connect with audiences from home. We check in with some friends […]

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Artist Spotlight with Thando

Home Is Where The Art Is interview series.  With festival cancellations, venue closures and live gigs on hold for the foreseeable future, the Coronavirus pandemic has had a devastating impact on the performing arts industry. With physical distancing in place, artists are using technology in new and creative ways to connect with audiences from home. We check in with some friends […]

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Artist Spotlight with Carolyn Hanna

Home Is Where The Art Is interview series.  With festival cancellations, venue closures and live gigs on hold for the foreseeable future, the Coronavirus pandemic has had a devastating impact on the performing arts industry. With physical distancing in place, artists are using technology in new and creative ways to connect with audiences from home. We check in with some friends […]

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Artist Spotlight with Vika Bull

Home Is Where The Art Is interview series.  With festival cancellations, venue closures and live gigs on hold for the foreseeable future, the Coronavirus pandemic has had a devastating impact on the performing arts industry. With physical distancing in place, artists are using technology in new and creative ways to connect with audiences from home. We check in with some […]

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Eric Whitacre on composing work honouring the sacredness of life and death

Known for his celestial and tender compositions contemplating everything from the human condition to the natural world, Los Angeles-based choral and orchestral composer Eric Whitacre takes a metaphysical and humanistic approach to his work. We spoke to Whitacre about the development of The Sacred Veil, seeking solace in music and the Hubble Space Telescope’s Deep […]

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Tomoe Kawabata on the French-influenced compositional school in Japan

Japan and France have long been involved in a cultural love affair. From as early as the second half of the nineteenth century the two countries have exchanged artistic aesthetics and ideologies. Similar to Van Gogh’s adoration of the colourful palettes seen in Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, Melbourne-based pianist Tomoe Kawabata is attracted to the […]

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Change the way you see and hear the piano with Eve Egoyan

Born and raised among the emerald and russet-coloured natural surrounds British Columbia is known for, Canadian sound artist Eve Egoyan spent her childhood exploring the crenellated coastline or at her neighbour’s piano. While there was a brief moment after high school where she didn’t know what the arc of her life would be, Egoyan studied […]

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Art as an agent for change with Mama Alto, N’fa Jones and Tamara Murphy

In a post-truth era of anthropogenic climate change, controversial presidents and an international refugee crisis, it’s no wonder that artists are responding to the state of the world through their work. Be it a theatre production, painting, film or protest song, politically charged art has the ability to present us with alternative versions of ourselves […]

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Dancer Jack Ziesing on using movement and gesture as a communication tool

Emanating poise and rigour, Jack Ziesing feels most comfortable using movement and gesture to communicate the matters close to his heart. A company dancer for Dancenorth, and a performer in Dust, Ziesing has toured nationally and internationally with companies including the Queensland Ballet, BeijingDance/LDTX and Singapore Dance Theatre, and was first drawn to dance as […]

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Distilling life’s complexities through set design with Liminal Spaces

Located in a wide and open street in Hobart, Tasmania, Liminal Studio is an interdisciplinary design house operating outside the traditional confines of architecture. Weaving together interior, furniture, object and production design with art curation and architecture, Liminal Studio is an ideas-focused practice aiming to push spatial relationships and to improve the environments we live […]

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Childbirth as a catalyst for creation with Dancenorth’s Amber Haines

Along with physical changes such as a tide of surging hormones and an inextricable hunger for liquorice, soft cheese or pickles, pregnancy often prompts us to alter our priorities and to contemplate the future lives of our children. What kind of world will our children be born into? What systems and structures will shape and […]

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Contemplating our world through contemporary dance with Dancenorth’s Kyle Page

For Dubbo-raised director, choreographer and dancer Kyle Page, the decision to pursue dance as a career seemed more like an instinctual progression than a formal affair strategised in the classroom or at the family kitchen table. Led by a curious mind and his penchant for unknown situations, Page’s approach to artistic direction and choreography is […]

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Pianist Timothy Young on living in Italy and the artists who inspire him

Growing up in a small and bucolic town in regional Victoria, pianist Timothy Young wanted to play the piano before most of us could throw a ball or tie our shoelaces. Initially drawn to the controlled freedom of jazz, Young soon discovered his unflinching love for classical music following his first listening of Mozart’s Sonatas. […]

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Kristian Chong: law graduate turned pianist

Known for his superlative and intelligent pianism, Kristian Chong didn’t always enjoy playing the piano. A law and commerce graduate, Chong began his classical music education at a young age, but like many, he found the motivation to practice difficult to maintain. After entering a small piano competition in his final year of law school, […]

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Evoking mood and emotion through light and shadow with Elegy’s lighting and set designer Rob Sowinski

Based in Naarm (Melbourne), Rob Sowinski’s lighting and set design practice is emotive, explorative and alluring. Often influenced by the colour and tone of a piece’s writing, Sowinski elegantly manipulates light and shadow on objects in space to rouse the mood of a scene and to accentuate the emotions of a character. The resident designer […]

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Reinventing the way we play and listen to the piano with Zubin Kanga

London and Sydney-based pianist and composer Zubin Kanga has made a name for himself with works that are innovative, perplexing and sophisticated. A specialist in contemporary piano music, his expressive and finely controlled oeuvre focuses on extending the possibilities of the pianist through the body and multimedia; challenging the ways we play and listen to the […]

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Rainbow Vomit: Break free of your technological bubble

MLIVE presents a dance spectacular Rainbow Vomit! Performed by the critically acclaimed contemporary dance company Dance North Australia, Rainbow Vomit is an immersive contemporary dance show created for young audiences, whilst maintaining appeal for kids of all ages. Artistic director, Amber Haines says the performance aims to “inspire kids to go home and play and […]

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Andrea Lam on the most valuable advice she received in music school

Born in Sydney, and now residing in the thumping cosmopolitan heart of New York City, pianist, recitalist and chamber musician Andrea Lam made her orchestral debut with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the tender age of thirteen. Introduced to the piano by her mother at an early age, Lam fell in with the piano not […]

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Modern day renaissance man: Stephen Hough

Named by The Economist as as one of the world’s top 20 polymaths, British pianist Stephen Hough’s artistic practice is not bound by form. An accomplished pianist, composer, poet, painter and writer, his catalogue of over 50 albums have garnered him international awards and he is a regular contributor to The Guardian and The Times. Best known for […]

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Maria Mercedes on the highs and lows of acting

One of Australia’s most adored screen and stage actors, Melbourne-based Maria Mercedes is drawn to characters she wouldn’t ordinarily know or understand. For her leading role in Taxithi – An Australian Odyssey, however, Maria felt the pull from somewhere familiar—the heartfelt immigration stories of her Greek family. Ahead of her upcoming performance in Taxithi – […]

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Living histories with Taxithi’s Helen Yotis Patterson

Born to Greek immigrants, Helen Yotis Patterson is a Melbourne-based writer and performer whose childhood was furnished with the honest and impassioned stories of her late grandmother’s life in Greece and experience of relocating to Australia. With a firm connection to her family’s past and an acute need to catalogue and share the untold immigration […]

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Creating compassion through music with Lior Attar

Since garnering national adoration in 2005 for his pure and heartfelt debut album Autumn Flow, Israeli Australian singer-songwriter Lior Attar (known as Lior) has been keeping busy. In 2013 the artist collaborated with composer Nigel Westlake to write a song cycle centred on the humanitarian concept of compassion as explored through a compilation of ancient […]

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New music for electronics and piano with Gabriella Smart

Inspired by the historical narratives of seven colonial pianos that still exist in various locations across Australia today, Gabriella Smart’s ‘Of Broken Trees and Elephant Ivories’ is comprised of commissioned works by twelve Australian and German composers; offering a rich and complex perspective of Australia’s colonial history involving famous artists, Afghan cameleers, Morse code and […]

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A career in composition with George Dreyfus

Rows of hardback books, notated film scores and family photographs line the walls of George Dreyfus’s living room. One of Australia’s most prolific film and television composers, it may be surprising to learn that the internationally-acclaimed, Melbourne-based composer didn’t always know that he wanted to pursue music professionally. Born in 1928 in Wuppertal, Germany, his […]

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New perspectives on jazz with Professor Paul Grabowsky AO

One of the most refreshing elements of contemporary jazz practice is the way it has become less concerned with adhering to narrow stylistic conventions and more about the open embrace of innovative musicianship and composition across all genres. Whether it’s American legend Miles Davis (known for his groundbreaking jazz-rock record Bitches Brew) or current-day movers […]

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The 2018 season launch in pictures

On Tuesday, the 20th of February 2018, we launched our inaugural season of MLIVE. The event was held on the stage of the Robert Blackwood Hall, where guests were treated to a selection of finger food and drinks. The proceedings kicked off with a speech from the Vice Chancellor, “MLIVE has been many years in the […]

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Tackling stage fright and set lists with The King’s Singers’ Jonathan Howard

Since their legendary formation at King’s College, Cambridge in 1968, internationally-adored a cappella ensemble The King’s Singers have been known for their unwavering commitment to musical diversity through their popular coupling of contemporary and classical arrangements. Equally at home with renaissance church repertoire as they are with jazz, pop and folk songs from contemporary culture […]

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Composer Peter Rutherford on his bringing The Dressmaker—A Musical Adaptation to life

Although Australian composer Peter Rutherford always felt the pull towards writing music, he resisted the urge to pursue it professionally because his brother was, and still is, a composer. After finding enough diverging interests to feel he could carve his own path without being in competition with his brother, Rutherford wrote his first musical at […]

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