This "thrilling study of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No 8 . . . makes a strong case for its quality . . . we shall never listen to it in the same way again" ( Guardian, UK).On September 12, 1910, Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony had its world premiere at Munich's new Musik Festhalle. It was the artistic breakthrough for which the composer had yearned all his life. An array of royals and stars from the musical and literary world were in attendance, including Tho...

Two Melbourne TV journalists are on a well-earned holiday, travelling New Zealand in a motorhome. Will they survive a monster storm and a killer on the loose?Kim Prescott survived a killer's bullet in Melbourne but can't shake the PTSD. For Jo Trescowthick the trip is a chance to confront family demons. The third in the Melbourne Spotlight series finds Kim and Jo on a road trip from Auckland on the north island to the tourist mecca of Queenstown in the deep south; Rotorua mud pools...

A captive woman, a lover betrayed, an idealistic journalist.Three women - their fates strangely aligned by a killer obsessed with retribution.Melbourne Spotlight journalist Kim Prescott is promoted to the TV reporting staff after the program's expose of the Tugga's Mob murders in Australia and New Zealand was a ratings bonanza.The TV show's high progile now attracts stories.One anonymous tip-off will horrify the nation all over again. Despite the scandal that ne...

The Eighth Symphony was going to be different from anything Mahler had ever done before. The intensely personal dramas of his earlier symphonies were a thing of the past - or rather, they were now to be seen as preludes to this new, culminating symphonic statement: he was quite sure it was the greatest thing he had ever written. The first seven symphonies were all, in their very different ways, acts of private confession, the unburdening of a hypersensitive soul, struggling to make sense o...

A powerful look at the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness, including author Stephen Johnson's struggle with bipolar disorder.BBC music broadcaster Stephen Johnson explores the power of Shostakovich’s music during Stalin’s reign of terror, and writes of the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness. Johnson looks at neurological, psychotherapeutic and philosophical findings, and reflects on his own experie...

From the bestselling author of How Shostakovich Changed My Mind comes a new book about the cathartic power of music.For critic and composer Stephen Johnson, there have been moments when music has confronted him with life-changing insights. Some of these have been hard to accept, but once accepted they have opened up new possibilities of thinking, feeling and living. Through an exploration of seven pieces — by Anton Bruckner, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Johann Seb...

From the bestselling author of the award-winning How Shostakovich Changed My Mind comes a new book about the cathartic power of music. For critic and composer Stephen Johnson, there have been moments when music has confronted him with life-changing insights. Some of these have been hard to accept but once accepted they have opened up new possibilities of thinking, feeling and living. Through an exploration of seven pieces – by Anton Bruckner, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Johann Sebastian ...

For Gustav Mahler, there was nothing abstract or escapist about music. The symphony must be like the world, he insisted. It must embrace everything. He lived up to that ideal spectacularly, creating works of such emotional range and imaginative power that each feels like a world in itself. Uniquely, Mahler made himself the prism through which that wealth of experience is refracted. This book follows Mahlers development as man and composer, and sets out the experiences the personal joys and...

What happens on tour stays on tour was the mantra for the southern hemisphere backpackers who swarmed Europe in the 1980s. Foreign countries had to be explored and devoured in every way possible.Waikato-born Judy Williams worked hard for her big OE: London, Paris, Rome, Gallipoli; and her adventures were dutifully recorded in her diary.A diary that also recorded how the obsessive Tugga Tancred and his Kiwi mates turned Judy's trip of a lifetime into a nightmare of sly sexua...

Music broadcaster and composer Stephen Johnson explores how Shostakovich's music took shape under Stalin's reign of terror, and how it gave form to the hopes of an oppressed people. Johnson writes of the healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness and tells of how Shostakovich's music lent him unexpected strength in his struggle with bipolar disorder.

A dark, winding road beckons. And it leads straight to terror…A businessman discovers he has a ghostly twin whose presence may be far more ominous than he had thought... Mischievous children learn that supernatural forces are nothing to toy with, after a Halloween prank goes wrong. And holiday festivities set the backdrop to a terrified teen's worst fears, when his grandmother's corpse comes looking for revenge…Hit the road for a journey into fear ...

In music, the period from the middle of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth is usually referred to as the Classical era. This was a period in which the art, literature and architecture of Ancient Greece and Rome were being rediscovered and re-evaluated, which in turn strongly influenced the modern art of the time. But this was also a period of immense social change and political unrest, with challenges to the old established order culminating in the French Revolution of ...