ABC Wide Bay Breakfast host David Dowsett talks to Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra’s co-artistic director and principal clarinettist Nicole van Bruggen about the ARCO tour to Bundaberg, Fraser Coast and Gympie, her historical basset clarinet and so much more.
David Dowsett, ABC Wide Bay
Listen here (starts at 45.00)
Dancing strings, lilting clarinet – the Australian Romantic & Classic Orchestra has returned to Bundaberg with sparkling chamber music from three brilliant composers.
The ‘Mozart’s Clarinet’ tour soars from joyful Schubert to the freshness of female composer Emilie Mayer and one of music’s best-loved pieces: Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, played on a rare period basset clarinet.
ARCO co-artistic director and clarinetist Nicole van Bruggen said they were excited to bring this gorgeous music for the first time on period instruments to this part of Queensland.
“And we’re even happier to partner with so many wonderful local ensembles, music educators and filmmakers to celebrate Mozart with the whole community.”
Angela Norval, Bundaberg Today (photo: Elka Scherer)
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Dancing strings, lilting clarinet – the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra returns to regional Queensland with sparkling chamber music from three brilliant composers.
The ‘Mozart’s Clarinet’ tour soars from joyful Schubert to the freshness of female composer Emilie Mayer and one of music’s best-loved pieces: Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, played on a rare period basset clarinet.
Read full story in Gympie Today.
Download pdf.
The Australian Romantic and Classical Orchestra (ARCO) is coming to Bundaberg to showcase the beautiful and uplifting concert tour, Mozart’s Clarinet.
The tour soars from joyful Schubert to the freshness of female composer Emilie Mayer and one of music’s best-loved pieces: Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, played on a rare period basset clarinet.
ARCO co-artistic director and clarinetist Nicole van Bruggen said it was a show not to be missed.
“We’re excited to bring this gorgeous music for the first time on period instruments to this part of Queensland,” she said.
Bundaberg Now
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The Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra brings Mozart’s beloved Clarinet Quintet, musical talks and community film screenings to Bundaberg in a range of options that has to be seen to be believed, embracing a variety of musical tastes, talents and age groups.
The ‘Mozart’s Clarinet’ tour soars from joyful Schubert to the freshness of female composer Emilie Mayer and one of music’s best-loved pieces:, Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, played on a rare period basset clarinet.
Angela Norval, Bundaberg Today
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The Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra (ARCO), under leader Rachael Beesley, are a crack Antipodean outfit defined by a rigorous approach to historically informed performance particularly pertaining to the 19th century and its 18th- and 20th-century fringes.
[In ‘Midsummer Dreams’] the Beethoven Symphony No. 8 thrillingly builds up the sound with great individual timbres, and energetic heft balanced with lightness throughout.
ARCO end with more Mendelssohn, this time the ‘Scottish’ Symphony, the opening made afresh with distinctive period wind. The sound is by turns tender, deep and rich, with an energy that can be truly exciting; the final movement is full of gutsy drive, superb phrasing and expression.
Sarah Unwin Jones, BBC Music Magazine
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The concert was recorded at a live performance in Sydney in August 2023, but the program was also performed at the Albert Hall in Canberra.
ARCO’s Operations and Communications manager (and double bass player) Rosemary Ponnekanti says the recording combines the generally upbeat but often overlooked Beethoven Symphony No 8 in F major with the more moody and romantic Mendelssohn ‘Scottish’ Symphony No 3 in A minor.
The orchestra, founded in 2012 by the late Richard Gill, comes together for three tours a year and is considered to be the forefront of historically informed performance.
Richard Scherer, Living Arts Canberra
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One of Australia’s HIPpest bands just got a lot hipper.
This latest recording from the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra under co-artistic director Rachael Beesley is a masterclass in historically informed performance (HIP), offering listeners an electrifying, visceral experience that transports them back to a richly imagined 19th-century sound world. Indeed, these thrilling performances, captured live, of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Overture, Op. 21, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8 in F, and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Scottish (1843 version), are among the finest and most exciting I’ve heard.
Will Yeoman, Limelight
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Local classical music lovers can rejoice because the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra will be bringing a Mozart mini-festival to Gympie on 28-29 June, with a concert and film screening.
Gympie Today
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The Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra (ARCO) was made for this feat [the first Australian HIP performance of the Bach/Mendelsson 1841 St Matthew Passion]. ARCO joined forces with the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs’ Chamber Singers and VOX choirs under the direction of SPC’s Associate Music Director Dr Elizabeth Scott in the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House.
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In the heart-rending Erbarme dich.…Rachael Beesley’s performance was faultless and arresting, and her phrasing especially thoughtful….Apart from the prominent use of cellos and bass, the most interesting change in orchestration in the Mendelssohn version is the use of clarinets. In the Baroque, the oboe came closest to the human voice. In the Classical and Romantic age, it was the clarinet. Nicole van Bruggen on clarinet added the nostalgic warmth that the Mache Dich calls for.
Aryan Mohseni, State of the Art
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Sydney Philharmonia Choirs’ Vox and Chamber ensembles have come together with the Australian Romantic and Classical Orchestra (ARCO) to present Bach’s St Matthew Passion in the 1841 arrangement of the work by Felix Mendelssohn.
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At times it feels like a revelation, a radically different palette of tone colours, bringing unfamiliar texture and suspense to the score.
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Concertmaster Rachael Beesley and flutist Melissa Farrow bring mellifluous virtuosity to their obligato accompaniments while Teddy Tahu Rhodes shines as a charismatic and eloquent Christus. Finally, the hero of the evening is Andrew Goodwin as the Evangelist, his voice reaching into the heavens with sublime ease.
Harriet Cunningham, Sydney Morning Herald
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The Sydney Philharmonia Choirs (SPC) has premiered in Australia this first historically authentic and rare performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, Mendelssohn version, at the Sydney Opera House…Dr Elizabeth Scott, the Associate Music Director of SPC, conducted with a minimalist conducting style, but with maximum effect, the combined Chamber Singers and VOX choirs, the soloists and the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra (ARCO) performing on period instruments.
Bach wrote some very beautiful music for this Passion, with his orchestral accompaniment played brilliantly by ARCO. This includes a mesmerising flute quartet and oboe solo, as well as featured violin parts performed superbly by Rachael Beesley, the Concertmaster and Co-Artistic Director of ARCO.
Shirley Politzer, J-Wire
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Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra continue to provide audiences with quality historically informed performance firsts in exciting orchestral concerts and recordings. This Holy Thursday that excitement went next level, with a collaboration which presented Mendelssohn’s 1841 arrangement of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, as Mendelssohn would have expressed it at the time.
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Outbursts and high volume and the shifts to choir as characterised groups were achieved with great dramatic force and contrast, well supported by the HIP colours and shapes from Mendelssohn’s ‘Bach-plus’ orchestra paying Mendelssohn’s creatively orchestrated cover version.
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The many fine creative and research strands to this event will hold an important part in Sydney’s performance history, and in the Mendelssohn and Bach performance histories both in Australia and globally. This project showcases a stunning status quo and bright future for HIP performance practice plus choral and vocal music in this country.
Paul Nolan, Sydney Arts Guide
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With the Philharmonia’s Chamber and VOX choirs being joined by the Australian Romantic and Classical Orchestra (ARCO) for this one-off concert under Associate Music Director Elizabeth Scott, a Sydney audience got Australia’s first taste of what [Mendelssohn’s 1841 revival of Bach’s St Matthew Passion] sounded like.
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The mellower sound of the clarinet and basset horn featured enchantingly alongside Melissa Farrow’s flute solo in soprano Penelope Mills’s ariaAus Liebe, will mein Heiland sterben…and ARCO Concertmaster Rachael Beesley’s gut stringed solo violin added a concerto-like feel to the accompaniment of the beautiful pivotal aria Embarme Dich….There were moments of sheer magic – irresistible Mendelssohnian textures over Bach’s glorious tunes – as well as tenderness, majesty and despair.
Steve Moffat, Limelight
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What we heard at the Sydney Opera House on Thursday evening was not just Bach, it was Mendelssohn’s Bach: his 1841 version for the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, heard for the first time in Australia in a historically informed performance. This was an ambitious, rich, and at times revelatory collaboration between the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra and Sydney Philharmonia Choirs under Elizabeth Scott, with soloists of exceptional calibre. A partnership I hope we’ll hear again.
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A packed Opera House…(and) an extraordinary collaboration…brought more than just power. It brought tenderness, clarity and, in moments, transcendence.
Pepe Newton, ClassikON
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Is there a better piece of music by a teenager than Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream? I’ve not heard a HIP version of it before and the different balance between the smaller string section and the older design wind and brass makes for a quite different listening experience: the textures more transparent, the overall sound considerably rawer.
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The second movement of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No.3, Vivace non troppo, is probably the best of the nine individual tracks on the recording; it has everything I want to hear in Mendelssohn.
David Barker, Music Web International
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On Thursday the 27th of March, 2025 The Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra will release their newest album Midsummer Dreams. … The result is a carefully curated, historically informed performance that balances precision and passion, transporting the listener as closely to the sound world of Mendelssohn and Beethoven’s 19th century audiences as humanly possible.
If you are looking to simply listen and enjoy, the amount of thought and love that has been poured into every note allows for an equally enriching experience.
Molly Jenkins, ClassikON
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Hear 3MBS FM host Adrian McEniery and Michael Leighton Jones interview ARCO conductor Rachael Beesley live on Daybreak, 21 March 2025. The trio talk about ARCO’s latest album Midsummer Dreams, and listen to excerpts by Beethoven and Mendelssohn.
Adrian McEniery, 3MBS-FM
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The Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra releases its newest album Midsummer Dreams on 27 March under the ARCO label. This fourth album of their discography features popular Romantic works by Beethoven and Mendelssohn performed by 41 musicians playing on gut strings, historic winds, natural brass, including a rare ophicleide and timpani.
The anthology begins with a fairytale, ends with a brooding landscape and bounds through a spirited symphony. Midsummer Dreams, roams over a sweep of Romantic visions from Beethoven and Mendelssohn in an Australian premiere recording on period instruments with historically informed performance (HIP).
Sounds Like Sydney
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The next instalment in the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra’s discography, Midsummer Dreams, is released this March. It is another brilliant live recording, this time from a concert tour of nineteenth century music that took place in July 2023. This recording of the live performance was from The Concourse, Chatswood as part of that tour.
The choice and juxtaposition of this album’s works highlight Mendelssohn and Beethoven’s championing their new approaches within the forms and styles of the old. They refreshed and extended musical practices with new colours, sheens and expression. In turn they catapulted their art form forwards into a vibrant place full of new sound opportunities.
Paul Nolan, Sydney Arts Guide
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