Dimity Hall
Dimity Hall's violin is the quiet force inside the Australia Ensemble and Goldner String Quartet: refined tone locked with Dene Olding, chamber playing that can turn Schubert unearthly and Sculthorpe fierce without ever raising its voice for effect.
Reviews keep returning to the same things: spontaneity with structural grip, a partnership that makes the quartet special, and tone that stays smooth when the music hardens. In Schubert's great C major Quintet she helps hold that tranced Adagio stillness and the hushed Andante at the heart of the scherzo, so the outer Prestos land with real exuberance. With the Goldners she has lived inside Peter Sculthorpe's quartets across decades of recording in the composer's presence, from the austere lyricism of the 1960s through Pacific colours, Earth Cry, Jabiru Dreaming and the late works of loneliness, asylum-seeker anger and hard-won calm. Shostakovich's Piano Quintet and Trio come out slow, brooding and fully felt, searching rather than flashy; Mozart and Brahms clarinet quintets find her in joyous lightness and sombre warmth beside the clarinet. The line is sinewy, the intonation sure, the temperature always the music's own.
Performing as Australia Ensemble
The Australia Ensemble, resident at the University of New South Wales since its founding in 1980, is widely recognised as Australia’s leading chamber music ensemble. Seven principal instrumentalists form its core, joined by guests for standard repertoire and unusual combinations.
Mozart & Brahms: The Clarinet Quintets
Catherine McCorkill joins the Australia Ensemble for two pillars of the clarinet chamber repertoire: Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581, on basset clarinet, and Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet, Op. 115.
Shostakovich
Two of Shostakovich's most powerful and popular chamber works, given hair-raising performances by Australia's finest chamber ensemble.
Schubert
Schubert's best-loved chamber works: the great String Quintet in C and The Shepherd on the Rock, played by The Australia Ensemble with guest artists Jennifer Bates (soprano) and David Pereira (cello).
Performing as Goldner String Quartet
The Goldner String Quartet plays Peter Sculthorpe's complete string quartets with the authority of an ensemble totally inside the music: precise, tonally varied, and alive to landscape, ritual rhythm and sudden cascades of harmonics.
Peter Sculthorpe: The String Quartets, Vol. 3
Tall Poppies presents this third volume of Peter Sculthorpe’s string quartets as a tribute on the occasion of his 80th birthday in April 2009.
Peter Sculthorpe: The String Quartets, Vol. 2
The Goldner String Quartet, the string players of the Australia Ensemble at the University of NSW, presents this historic survey of Sculthorpe’s string-quartet oeuvre, available as a set on CD for the first time.
Peter Sculthorpe: The String Quartets, Vol. 1
The Goldner String Quartet — the string players of the Australia Ensemble at the University of NSW — presents this historic first volume, making Sculthorpe’s substantial body of string-quartet writing available on CD for the first time.
Dimity Hall also appears on
Australian Premières, Vol. 2
This CD proves a concerto can be recorded with a soloist and a digital orchestra, and at the same time brings to light four remarkable works never recorded before, two of them never performed. Patiently languishing in archives, they can now see the light of day.