Menu

Recordings

Mark Isaacs: Sonata for Soprano Saxophone and Piano

, ,


Mark Isaacs: Sonata for Soprano Saxophone and Piano
Loretta Palmeiro & Mark Isaacs

 ‘Spearing, heart-rending lines….they travel deep into a land of melodic luxuriance’
— John Shand, SYDNEY MORNING HERALD (4½ stars)

‘A deep, near spiritual, communication, along with an openness to risk-taking, and the trust and confidence it requires’
— Des Cowley, RHYTHMS MAGAZINE

In 2023, composer/pianist Mark Isaacs wrote a Sonata for Soprano Saxophone and Piano for his long-standing duo with saxophonist Loretta Palmeiro, to whom the work is dedicated. The composition was supported by private donations, including support through the Australian Cultural Fund.

Though this work has many jazz stylistic inflections in its vocabulary, it is a fully notated, through-composed ‘classical’ work. The duo had always played only freely extemporised music, but both performers are also classical artists, so this project was a refreshing and radical departure.

The sonata brings together Isaacs’ classical compositional voice and the spirit of the duo’s long-standing improvisational intimacy in a work of lyrical intensity and spiritual depth.

This release documents the live world premiere, recorded in early 2025 at St Stephen’s Uniting Church, Sydney, and is also available on YouTube as a music video.

The sonata is in three movements, which are entitled ‘Rhapsody’, ‘Benediction’ and ‘Fiesta’.

The sonata recording will be launched in concert:
Sunday 24 May 2026, 4–5 p.m.
Phoenix Central Park’s The Church, Alexandria, Sydney

The concert will open with the Benediction movement of the sonata. It will then feature first performances of new pieces by Loretta Palmeiro and by Mark Isaacs, alongside the jazz standard My One and Only Love and their celebrated duo extemporisations.

 

Recording available 22 May 2026 on all major platforms | Gracemusic/MGM


***

Following five years of rehearsal, Loretta Palmeiro and Mark Isaacs gave their first performance in 2017. Up until 2025, they exclusively created their music spontaneously in performance, in real time, and without any safety net or roadmap.

Major live performances have included Sydney International Women’s Jazz Festival, Sydney Conservatorium Jazz Festival, Johnston Street Jazz/Annandale Creative Arts Centre, SIMA ‘Jazz: Now’, NSW Government ‘Great Southern Nights’, St Stephen’s Church and Orange Winter Jazz Festival.

During 2020 they released an album, an EP and two live music videos for SIMA and Phoenix Central Park. Their debut album All Who Travel With Us was a finalist in two separate categories in the 2021 Art Music Awards, being shortlisted for ‘Performance of the Year: Jazz/Improvised Music’ and ‘Work of the Year: Jazz’.

In early 2025 they performed the world premiere of Mark Isaacs’ Sonata for Soprano Saxophone and Piano at St Stephen’s Uniting Church, Sydney, releasing a YouTube video of the premiere, and the live recording will be released in May 2026 on the major music platforms.

TRACKLISTING

 

  1. Sonata for Soprano Saxophone and Piano: I. Rhapsody 5:31
  2. Sonata for Soprano Saxophone and Piano: II. Benediction 7:13
  3. Sonata for Soprano Saxophone and Piano: III. Fiesta 6:00

Total playing time: 18:44

Benaud Trio release ‘Closer’

, ,

Benaud Trio (pianist Amir Farid, violinist Lachlan Bramble, and cellist Ewen Bramble) have released my composition Closer on their brand new album Oblivion. This is a transcription I did for classical piano trio (especially for them) of the title track of my year 2000 jazz quintet release on Naxos.

Mark Isaacs: Symphony No. 2 release

, ,

Mark Isaacs: Symphony No. 2
Czech National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mark Isaacs
Release on major digital musical platforms 18 April, 2025.

 ‘Mark Isaacs is one of Australia’s premier composers and his Symphony No. 2 proves why. This is a wonderfully dramatic, passionate and deeply expressive orchestral work.’
— ALEXANDER BRIGER AO Music & Artistic Director, Australian World Orchestra

Mark Isaacs’ first symphony was commissioned by Kim Williams AM for the Queensland Symphony Orchestra (Isaacs was Williams’ composition student at age 14). Its very well-received premiere in 2013 was the subject of a TV program, which Mark Isaacs co-produced, and this was shown multiple times on Foxtel Arts in Australia and Sky TV Arts New Zealand. On the strength of all this, Creative Australia funded Isaacs to compose his Symphony No. 2 which he completed in 2017. Despite the finished work being offered to Australian orchestras and conductors, by 2024 it still had not been programmed for public premiere.

With further support from Creative Australia, in 2024 Isaacs travelled to Prague, accompanied by an independent documentary team, to conduct the premiere recording of his Symphony No. 2 with the acclaimed Czech National Symphony Orchestra. The work had already attracted effusive praise:

     ‘I am delighted to endorse Mark Isaacs as one of the finest contemporary symphonists working in Australia. His symphonies are amongst the most attractive Australian orchestral works of the last decade.’
— PROFESSOR RHODERICK McNEILL Author: ‘The Australian Symphony from Federation to 1960’ (Ashgate/Routledge, 2014) & ‘The Symphony in Australia 1960-2020’ (Routledge, 2022)

‘I felt a flash of the best of Broadway and Bernstein in the orchestral grandeur, but the spirit of Stravinsky was also there in the insistent driving rhythms and irregular meters which changed frequently…Mark Isaacs’ Symphony No. 2 is a substantial, complex and powerful work.’
— Julie McErlain LIMELIGHT MAGAZINE

‘This symphony is crafted with all of Isaacs’ immense skill in melody, harmony, rhythm, and orchestration. The work is always rhythmically interesting, often exciting. The harmony always works, intelligible without being predictable. His scoring is highly sophisticated; he can use all the colours of a full orchestra as well as anyone…..resembling Richard Strauss at his most exuberant….. nothing in this piece outstays its welcome’
— Nicholas Routley AUSTRALIAN STAGE

Also during last year, in a rather unprecedented display of versatility, and with assistance from the NSW Government through Create NSW, Mark Isaacs recorded and released his debut EP as a songwriter and producer, Grace City, writing all the lyrics as well as the music, featuring vocalist Deborah Dicembre and the strings of the Czech National Symphony Orchestra recorded during the Symphony No. 2 sessions in Prague. Rhythms Magazine said: “Part Leonard Bernstein, part Burt Bacharach as interpreted by Dionne Warwick and Dusty Springfield—it’s almost symphonic pop!” and distinguished music journalist Bernard Zuel (SMH/The Age) wrote of it: “Presenting pop songs whose craft and class demand more of singers and musicians, without making it sound like it demands more of the listener, gets my respect”

The composition and recording of Mark Isaacs: Symphony No. 2 has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.

SONATA release on ABC Classic June 30, 2023

,

SONATA: Solo Piano Works Composed & Performed by Mark Isaacs

Recorded for the ABC Classic label, this album is an intimately authentic selection of recent solo piano classical compositions by Mark Isaacs, performed by the composer. It features a suite of six Songs Without Words, a set of variations on the English folksong The Snow It Melts the Soonest, and his Sonata.

“Both in life and in his music, pianist and composer Mark Isaacs is searching in the darkness for truth; a profound intelligence guides him but never stands in the way of his heart. These probing, introspective solo works are deeply moving, gracefully played, and filled with humanity.”
—JAMES GAVIN biographer and journalist

“Music, at its absolute best, touches the realm of infinity. This is the feeling I have always had with Mark Isaacs’ music, delirious with the beauty and depth of his masterful storytelling, sensitive technique and razor-sharp intelligence.”—SIMON TEDESCHI concert pianist and author

“In the 19th century it was normal that composers would play their own piano music—one thinks of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt…(a line of which perhaps the last was Rachmaninov). It is a mark of the originality of Isaacs’ project that he can surmount the considerable technical demands of his own piano music and present these works in performances so carefully sculpted that their changing moods strike us with an intimate authenticity. A performer’s job is to make any music he performs his own—well, here the music, being Isaacs’ own, leaps off the page under his fingers.”
—NICHOLAS ROUTLEY composer, pianist, conductor, musicologist

CD AUD$24.95

Shipping at ‘Buy Now’ button above to Australia only: International customers please order here (prices are in Australian dollars)
Available on major digital music platforms.

Ravel: Ondine – Music video and audio release by Mark Isaacs

,

New solo piano classical repertoire single & YouTube music video
from Mark Isaacs
 
Ravel: Ondine
 
Available on all major digital music platforms
plus YouTube music video of the recorded performance. 
 
Mark Isaacs’ 2020 classical repertoire album Intimacies (Gracemusic/MGM) received lavish accolades:
 
"Few would dare reinvent such icons of the Western canon. But for Mark Isaacs, to perform is to reinvent…he not only remakes the wheel, but sends it spinning merrily down the road less travelled…even the most familiar of phrases seem to be at Isaacs’ beck and call, their cautious new identities almost convincing us that Isaacs is the composer, making it up as he goes along….just tender admiration and a striking vision" SYDNEY MORNING HERALD (4½ stars)
 
“Exquisitely judged by Isaacs….transfigured beauty….a melody which, in Isaacs’ hands soars" LIMELIGHT Magazine
 
“His debut solo classical release comes with all the warmth that one would expect of his jazz performances”
ABC CLASSIC “Feature of the Week”
 
Now, recorded in Adelaide’s superb Elder Hall, with concurrent multicam video shoot, comes his brand new interpretation of Ravel’s Ondine, a masterwork of French Impressionism which sumptuously evokes the manifold levels of emotion brought forth by the mysterious and sensual spirit of the water
 

New solo piano classical repertoire album from Mark Isaacs “INTIMACIES”

,

Music by Chopin, Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Debussy, Satie & Poulenc

Release date Sept 11, 2020, by Gracemusic/MGM on CD & major digital music platforms


Order Intimacies CD (with 16-page booklet): AUD$24.95
Shipping to Australia only at “Buy Now” button below. International customers please order here (prices are in Australian dollars)

“Why should we listen to Mark Isaacs playing this wonderful treasure-chest of well-known, gorgeous pieces, rather than, say, Martha Argerich, or Lang Lang? My answer is this: Every performance by a complete musician is different, and gives an insight into the music not found elsewhere. Isaacs is a complete musician.He is not about nimbleness of fingers, though he has this. Beethoven once accused contemporary pianists of losing all feeling in the nimbleness of fingers. Isaacs believes rather, with Beethoven, and indeed Argerich, that music which is played from the heart will go to the heart: Von Herzen – Möge es wieder – Zu Herzen gehen! (Beethoven’s epigraph to the score of the Missa Solemnis).”
Dr NICHOLAS ROUTLEY – Associate Professor of Music, University of Sydney

“Here is an album of sparklingly fresh, warmly intimate and deeply personal takes on some of the most lyrical and beloved solo piano works in the entire classical repertoire. These precious gems of unrestrained lyricism are given singularly personal and engaging treatments by one of Australia’s most accomplished musicians, internationally-renowned pianist and composer Mark Isaacs. Following two ARIA-nominated albums in jazz, this is his keenly-anticipated debut release of solo classical repertoire.

“The world would have more musical polymaths like Leonard Bernstein, André Previn, and indeed, Mark Isaacs, if more of we classical musicians were able to compose, improvise and play jazz.”
LACHLAN BRAMBLE– Intimacies Recording Producer; Associate Principal 2nd Violin, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra; Benaud Trio

 


ENCOUNTERS with Dave Holland & Roy Haynes – AVAILABLE NOW!

,

**REISSUED DUE TO DEMAND FROM JAPAN**

Mark Isaacs, Dave Holland, Roy Haynes Encounters

$24.95 (Australian dollars) Free shipping worldwide

When Encounters was first released in Australia by ABC in 1990, it was described as “a landmark in the internationalisation of Australian jazz”. In a Manhattan recording session in 1988 the then 30-year old Australian Mark Isaacs joined as record producer and pianist with two of the legends of international jazz: the British-born, ex-Miles Davis bassist Dave Holland, for many decades an acclaimed leader in his own right, as well as drummer Roy Haynes, currently 88 years of age, still playing up a storm and immortalised as a first-guard bebop pioneer who had played with Charlie Parker and Bud Powell.

This reissue is sparked by strong current demand for the recording from Japan. Encounters had been released twice in Australia by ABC and also in Europe by the German label veraBra, but has been out of print for nearly 20 years. This new release is sure to spark renewed interest in this remarkable album. New York writer James Gavin, who has produced acclaimed biographies of Chet Baker and Lena Horne as well as writing for the New York Times, Vanity Fair etc. says in his liner notes to the current edition:

Encounters was conceived in Manhattan, where Mark had gone to hear his chamber piece “So It Does” performed at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall by the Australia Ensemble. The New York Times called the work “energetic” and “winning”; Mark felt so exhilarated, he had to follow it up with something else before he left New York…. Was he nervous? Not really, he says. “At thirty, I thought the world was my oyster. I would have been intimidated if I’d tried to play fast bebop with them. But in this milieu, I had confidence in myself as a composer, particularly, and I thought that I could meet them on this journey.”

Mark requested a rehearsal, but Haynes advised that it would defeat the purpose. Mark got the point. When the musicians met at New York’s Power Station studio, there wasn’t a shared note until the tape ran. Mark began each take by striking a chord; when the moment seemed right he signaled an end. Later he would pick the best tracks… Less than four hours after they’d begun, he had an album. Mark looks back on it as “free music that still aspires to a song form and a kind of melodicism.” Twenty-five years later, the results are still exciting.

Load More