The Firm, 2011

Mahler

Des Knaben Wunderhorn

Chapman Smith

Abendröte

Wolfgang Rihm

Ländler

Grant

The Lost Boy

Robert MacFarlane

tenor

Tenor Robert Macfarlane completed a Bachelor of Music in December 2006 (with High Distinction in Voice Performance) and graduated with First–class Honours in December 2007 from the Elder Conservatorium at the University of Adelaide in South Australia. He studied under the head of vocal studies Keith Hempton. He has also been awarded a Helpmann Optus Mentorship to study with soprano Merlyn Quaife in Melbourne and continues studies in Adelaide with Mezzo–Soprano Cheryl Pickering and Tenor Patrick Power. Robert has participated in Masterclasses and private lessons with many distinguished singers, teachers and repetiteurs including Simon O’Neill, Teddy Tahu Rhodes, Roy Howat, David Hamilton, Ralf Ernst, Kenneth Griffiths and David Harper. He also studied and performed in recital with pianist Malcolm Martineau during his Adelaide residency in 2008 which was recorded by ABC Classic FM for broadcast in 2009. Robert will continue intensive German and Italian language study at the University of Adelaide this year. Robert recently won the 3rd Annual Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Aria competition for oratorio singing – which has resulted in a contract with the choir for 2010.

Leigh Harrold

piano

Pianist Leigh Harrold has emerged in recent years as “a musician of rare talent and intelligence” (The Advertiser) and is one of Australia’s busiest and most sought-after piano players, recently winning the Adelaide Critics’ Circle prize for Best Emerging Artist of 2005.

Born in Whyalla, South Australia, Leigh completed undergraduate and post-graduate studies in Adelaide with concert pianist Gil Sullivan. During this time he had many competition successes including being a National Finalist in the Young Performer Awards, a semi-finalist in the Lev Vlassenko Piano Competition, twice winner of the Geoffrey Parsons Memorial Award and recipient of the prestigious Beta Sigma Phi Classical Music Award. He moved to Melbourne in 2003 to take up a full scholarship at the Australian National Academy of Music and in 2004 was made the Academy Fellow — the first person in the institution’s history to be chosen as such after just one year of study.

As a soloist, Leigh has performed with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, the ANAM Chamber Orchestra and the Elder Conservatorium Symphony Orchestra. He has premiered works by Australian composers in Canberra, Melbourne and Adelaide and been broadcast on ABC-FM, 3MBS, 4MBS and 5MBS. He maintains a fruitful and ongoing relationship with the composers of The Firm and has had several piano works written for him as a result. He is their Performer in Residence for 2006.

As a chamber musician he has earnt an international reputation, having performed as duo partner with such luminaries as Thomas Reibl, lecturer in viola at the Salzburg Mozarteum; Michael Cox, principal flautist with the BBC Symphony Orchestra; Daniel Gaede, ex-concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra; Swedish cellist Mats Lidstrom; and British pianist Mark Gasser. Of the performance with the latter, The Melbourne Age remarked, “As an advertisement for the high standard of public music-making produced by the academy, it would be hard to go beyond the experience of hearing [the] overpowering, white-hot expression of compressed ecstasy realised with extraordinary cohesion and eclat by these gifted young musicians.”