Sydney Symphony Orchestra / Learn & Explore

Speaker Biographies

Tony Cane

A former ABC news correspondent in south-east Asia and India, Tony Cane worked for eight years in London engaging ABC concert artists and helping set up the Sydney Symphony’s 1974 tour of Europe. Joining the ABC Music Department following his return to Australia in 1976, he became a writer and broadcaster about music. He was among the Sydney Symphony’s first pre-concert speakers and is still heard occasionally on ABC Classic FM.

Nicholas Carter

Nicholas Carter is our Associate Conductor. You can read his full biography here.

Dr Robert Curry

Robert Curry received his musical training at the NSW State Conservatorium of Music; the Fryderyk Chopin Academy of Music, Warsaw; and at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, where he studied for four years under the American pianist-scholar, Charles Rosen.

Before returning to Sydney in December 2006 to take up the position of Principal of the Con High, he had been Head of Classical Music at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. In addition to his Conservatorium position he is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Sydney. He is editor of the forthcoming Festschrift for Charles Rosen on his Eightieth Birthday.

Peter Czornyj

Peter Czornyj was born in Staffordshire, England, and studied musicology, conducting and composition at Hull University (England) and Music Research at Hamburg University (Germany). He is the author of a doctoral dissertation on Telemann and Berlin.

From 1992 to 1998 he was Director of the preeminent label for early music, Archiv Produktion, at Deutsche Grammophon. Following that, he was founding managing director of a small production company and the label Glissando, also based in Hamburg. In 2001 he was named Artistic Administrator of the Cleveland Orchestra, where he worked with conductors Christoph von Dohnányi, Franz Welser-Möst and Pierre Boulez.

In Cleveland he was involved in major opera-in-concert performances, including Siegfried, Don Carlos, Elektra, Hänsel und Gretel, Le Rossignol and Act II of Wagner’s Parsifal, the latter performed in Cleveland and at New York’s Carnegie Hall, conducted by Pierre Boulez. In addition, he was instrumental in managing a wide commissioning and co-commissioning program, which included many new works from composers such as Julian Anderson, George Benjamin, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Chen-Yi, Marc-Andre Dalbavie, Georg Friedrich Haas, Hanspeter Kyburz, Matthias Pintscher, Kaija Saariaho, Johannes Maria Staud, Rolf Wallin and others. In 2006 he was appointed Vice President for Artistic Administration at the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, where he worked closely with Music Director David Robertson.

In August 2008 Peter Czornyj joined the team of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra as Director of Artistic Planning.

Scott Davie

Scott Davie has given concerts throughout Australia and overseas, and his recordings are regularly broadcast on radio. From 2005 to 2007 he collaborated with Graeme Murphy and the Sydney Dance Company in their production of Grand, which was acclaimed throughout Australia, the United States and China. His academic research has led to performances and lectures in Europe, and his focus on Russian music has resulted in lecturing on that topic at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Yvonne Frindle

Yvonne Frindle is the Sydney Symphony’s Publications Editor and Music Presentation Manager. Born in Sydney, she began working in orchestral administration in 1996, first with Symphony Australia, then as Artistic Administrator of the WASO. From 2002 to 2005 she was Artistic Administrator of Apollo’s Fire in Cleveland, where she presented talks for the Cleveland Orchestra. Known to Australian audiences as a writer and speaker, she also admits to playing the flute.

Listen to a preview of Yvonne Frindle's pre-concert talk for the 2008 concert, Stravinsky's Petrushka: Pianos and Puppets (duration 13').

Yvonne Frindle tweets for the Sydney Symphony @sydsymph

David Garrett

As a speaker and writer about music, David Garrett has contributed to the presentations of most of Australia’s major music organisations, notably in program notes and pre-concert talks. After a career in music which has included managing Sydney Philharmonia Choirs and programming for the Australian network of symphony orchestras, he is now engaged in research towards the history of the ABC as a music organisation. This year David Garrett is once more giving the talks for all the concerts in the Mozart in the City series, as well as for other concerts in the season.

Listen to David Garrett in his audio feature Mahler & Nietzsche, focusing on Mahler's Third Symphony. (Duration: 18 minutes)

Felicity Glennie-Holmes

A strategic corporate affairs and communication specialist, Felicity Glennie-Holmes has spent the past 15 years managing reputation issues for high-profile Australian and international companies in both the public and private sector. With a degree in English and music from Sydney University, her career began at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and then moved to focus on communication challenges in the industries of corporate law and regulation, banking, insurance and financial services. Felicity began giving pre-concert talks for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the age of 21 and this year returns to the SSO from the Middle East.

Robert Johnson

Robert Johnson plays Principal Horn in the Sydney Symphony. Read his full biography here.

Gordon Kerry

Gordon Kerry is the composer of a number of works premiered by the Sydney Symphony under conductors such as Mark Elder and Markus Stenz, including a Clarinet Concerto for Francesco Celata. The most recent is his Symphony, commissioned by the Ian Potter Cultural Trust and to be first performed in 2011 under Benjamin Northey. He writes extensively on music – including annotations for concert programs – and is the author of New Classical Music: Composing Australia, published in 2009 by UNSW Press.

www.gordonkerry.com

Genevieve Lang

Genevieve Lang performs regularly as section and guest principal harpist with the Sydney Symphony. She has also enjoyed a long association with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. She is a founding member of SHE (Seven Harp Ensemble), a group directed by harpist Alice Giles which is active in commissioning and performing new Australian music. Genevieve Lang currently presents a course in chamber music appreciation at the University of Sydney’s Centre for Continuing Education, and has tutored the Australian Youth Orchestra's music journalism course, Words About Music. In 2008 she undertook the Symphony Australia Traineeship in Artistic Administration, which provided opportunities to work with a number of Australian orchestras, including the Sydney Symphony, and with ABC Radio. Genevieve was also selected as the Australian Youth Orchestra Music Presentation Fellow in 2007, an experience which confirmed her love for the world of words.

Listen to Genevieve Lang in Edward Elgar - Man or Symbol?, adapted from talks and an ABC Classic FM interval feature for the 2008 Elgar Festival. (Duration: 21')

Ilmar Leetberg

In his career as an artist liaison manager, Ilmar Leetberg has been engaged by the London, Melbourne, and Sydney symphony orchestras, working directly with more than 2,000 conductors and soloists over a 20-year period. He is particularly interested in the relationship between musicology and art history. He read for his Masters in Arts Administration in London following studies in Art History in Florence under the late John Pope-Hennessy and Harold Acton. In 2000 he accepted an internship at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, and since that time has represented the Louvre Museum in the Oceania area. In 2006 and 2007 he acted as a foreign emissary to the Vatican Museums in Rome. Ilmar Leetberg has presented lectures in every Australian State and is currently completing his first book on the history of the Hotel Lambert in Paris.

Robert Murray

Robert Murray is Director of Marketing and Customer Relations at the Melbourne Recital Centre and a freelance journalist. His writing has appeared in the Australian Financial Review Magazine, Limelight and The Strad, and he has written program notes for the Sydney Symphony, Australian Chamber Orchestra and ABC Classics. As an arts marketer, he has worked for the Australian Youth Orchestra, Sydney Symphony, Australian Chamber Orchestra and Sydney Opera House. Robert Murray has a Bachelor of Music degree from the Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music, majoring in performance (flute).

Natalie Shea

Natalie Shea trained as a linguist, teacher, translator, singer and musicologist – all skills which she is delighted to be able to place at the service of music. She is currently Publications Editor for the record label ABC Classics; prior to that she spent four years working for Symphony Australia, writing and editing material for all the major Australian symphony orchestras. She has presented talks for Sydney Philharmonia Choirs and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, as well as for the Sydney Symphony.

Kim Waldock

Kim Waldock is the Head of Education for the Sydney Symphony. A graduate of the Sydney Conservatorium and the University of New South Wales, she has spent the past 20 years teaching in schools and devising curriculum material for NSW school syllabi. She is a regular speaker at professional conferences for music teachers, and often runs musical analysis workshops for senior school students around NSW. She has published many teaching resources through the Australian Music Centre and written educational material for the Sydney Symphony, Musica Viva and other leading arts organisations.

Rod Webb

Rod Webb was an accountant, a grain broker, a concert manager and a publisher until the late 1970s, when he switched to cinema exhibition as director of the National Film Theatre of Australia. He later joined the Australian Film Commission as its Cultural Events Officer.

He directed the Sydney Film Festival for five festivals between 1984 and 1988, then served two years as exhibition manager of the Australian Film Institute. He then joined SBS Television in 1991, where he was network programmer between 1995 and 2003.

Between 2003 and 2011 Rod Webb was head of programming at the ABC’s international television service, now named Australia Network. During that period he also gave pre-concert talks for the Sydney Symphony’s performances of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Cinema Fantastique, and annotated programs for Symphony at the Movies, The Film Music of John Williams, Crime Time and Battleship Potemkin.

Listen to Rod Webb in Themes of the Ring, a preview of his talk for The Fellowship of the Ring in 2011. (Duration: 24')

Gordon Kalton Williams

Gordon Kalton Williams is a writer, editor and speaker. As librettist, he collaborated with composer Andrew Schultz on the cantata Journey to Horseshoe Bend, based on the novel by T.G.H. Strehlow. He has written narrations for Beethoven’s Egmont music (Sydney Symphony, 1993) and Falla’s Three-Cornered Hat (Queensland Symphony Orchestra, 1996).

He was project co-ordinator for Music is our Culture (by Kiwat, Rotumah, McKenzie, Warusam and Chester Schultz), the first work for symphony orchestra by indigenous Australians, and he produced the Orchestra Dreaming concert in which that work was premiered at the 1998 Adelaide Festival. He has been the co-producer and co-presenter of ABC Classic FM specials on indigenous music in the concert hall and in 1999 wrote and presented the radio feature The US of Opera, a survey of modern American so-called ‘CNN’ opera. He was an actor and writer with Darwin Theatre Group (1987–88), producing the group-derived play Dust-Off Vietnam, Writer/Director-in-Residence for the NT Arts Council in Tennant Creek (1987), and in 1981 instigated the position of Composer in the Community in Alice Springs.

Gordon Williams graduated from the NIDA Playwrights Studio in 1988 and the Faculty of Music, University of Melbourne in 1978. He was editor of publications for Symphony Australia (1999–2005), and his program notes appear regularly in Sydney Symphony programs.

Raff Wilson

Raff Wilson was the Artistic Manager of the Sydney Symphony from 2005 to 2010 and is now the Director of Artistic Planning with the Hong Kong Philharmonic. He studied languages at Sydney University and his musical training was as a tenor; while in Sydney he was active as a choral singer. He produced several CDs for SSO Live, including an ARIA-nominated disc of music by Brett Dean.

Listen to a preview of Raff Wilson's pre-concert talk for the 2010 concert, Beethoven & Stravinsky Masterpieces (duration 19').