Beyond the Frame: On Interpreting the Masters
As both composer and performer, I’ve long been drawn to the paradox of fidelity in interpretation. What does it mean to be “faithful” to the work? As I work intensively—four hours a day, seven days a week—on the Chopin Ballades, I keep circling this question.
Of course, authorial markings matter. They are a kind of case study in intent. But they can never be exhaustive. And if interpretation were merely the perfect execution of notational data, we would never need more than one great performance of any given work. The notion that fidelity demands suppression of the interpreter’s voice seems to me not only incorrect, but creatively barren.
My approach is to honour the structure, yes, but to allow for a reading that may be, in some small way, “unauthorised”—not in the sense of betrayal, but of illumination. An angle of light falling across a familiar figure in a way that reveals something newly alive.
That image—of light—brings me to the analogy I often use:
The score is the painting. But the performance is the gallery space in which the painting is hung. Its dimensions, its walls, the placement of the canvas and—most crucially—the light. The light may be deliberate: the conscious interpretive choices of the performer. But it is also seasonal and circumstantial: the weather outside, the hour of the day, the unconscious being of the one who stands in the space.
In this analogy, I am both the gallery architect and its lighting designer. But I am also a 21st-century Australian man living in a semi-rural environment. That part—the part of me that I didn’t script—is like the sun streaming in through the high windows, casting shadows I did not plan.
So when I play Chopin, I aim to understand the truth of the work, but not to fix it in amber. Even if a miraculous cylinder recording of Chopin himself playing the Ballades were to surface tomorrow, I wouldn’t imitate it slavishly. Reverence, yes—but not ossification. A great work endures not because it is frozen in a single ideal performance, but because it can refract across the centuries, through changing seasons, and still reveal more.
And in that refracting light—sometimes warm, sometimes strange—we find the work not diminished, but alive.
Between the Notes: Toward a Higher Plane for Pianists
What pianists most need to cultivate is the capacity to listen when they’re no longer physically involved in sound production. On the surface, the piano is an instrument of impacts — a key is struck, a hammer hits strings, the note sounds, and from that moment on, the pianist’s role appears to end. Unlike a wind player who supports the tone through breath, or a string player who continuously draws the bow, the pianist is not required to do anything further once the note has been played. And so, many do nothing. They abdicate responsibility.
But this gap — this so-called inactivity — is in fact the crucible of higher pianism.
When I strike a note or chord, and then wait before striking the next, I can no longer influence the note already sounding, at least not in the usual sense. Yes, adding sustain pedal after the fact induces subtle sympathetic resonances, but beyond this nothing more can be done to the tone itself. And yet, something essential can still occur: I can listen. Deeply. Even transcendentally. And that listening is not passive. Though it does not alter the note that has already sounded, it profoundly shapes the next one.
This is not a mystical abstraction — it is a practical reality. The manner in which I listen to a ringing note or chord, the fullness of my attention to its decay, directly influences how I approach the next sound. So even though the piano offers us only a chain of percussive events, how we live in the space between those events determines the shape and arc of the music. The piano begins to sing. We approach, through consciousness, the continuous expressive worlds of singers, wind players, and string players.
When I listen to pianists I don’t connect with, I often hear: hit, hit, hit, hit, hit — each note isolated, inert, nothing in between. But real music exists between the notes, in the invisible threads of intention, resonance, and responsiveness.
There’s also a physical analogue to this. Sometimes, after playing a long note, I find myself gently wiggling the finger holding it down — a kind of faux vibrato, as if I were a string player shaping the tone. It’s a gesture without acoustic effect. An instrument builder once challenged me on this: “What in the hell is the use of doing that? It doesn’t change the sound. It doesn’t do anything to the instrument.” And he was right. It doesn’t.
But it does do something to me.
It sustains my engagement with the sound, deepens my awareness, and alters how I will approach the next note. This act — part listening, part physical attention, part ritual — keeps the chain of music unbroken. In that sense, the secret of high-level pianism lies not only in how we strike the keys, but in how we attend to everything between the strikes. Our silence is not empty. It listens back.
© 2025 Mark Isaacs
Video of World Premiere of Sonata for Soprano Saxophone and Piano (2023)
for Loretta Palmeiro
World Premiere: St Stephen’s Uniting Church, Sydney, Wednesday February 26, 2025
LORETTA PALMEIRO: Soprano Saxophone
MARK ISAACS: Piano
I. Rhapsody
II. Benediction
III. Fiesta
The composition of this sonata was assisted by the donations of supporters to Creative Partnerships Australia through the Australian Cultural Fund, and directly to the composer.
Production Team:
Sound Recording, Engineering & Editing – Scott Christie
Camera Work – Ian Mackenzie
Film Editing & Producing – Marlene Palmeiro
Page Turning – Timothy Fisher
Piano Tuning & Adjustment – Theme & Variations Piano Services
Espousal Support Crew – Tony Arnold & Jewel Isaacs
Concert presented by St Stephen’s Uniting Church and Loretta Palmeiro & Mark Isaacs
Special Thanks:
Reverend Tim Robinson
Reverend Ken Day
The Jazz Upstairs team
The wonderfully supportive community of St Stephen’s Uniting Church in the city
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.
Saxophone Sonata World Premiere + Extemporisations
Loretta Palmeiro & Mark Isaacs
Wednesday February 26, 2025, 6pm-7pm
ST STEPHEN’S IN THE CITY
197 Macquarie Street, Sydney
Bookings here
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, with the support of private donations including through the Australian Cultural Fund, composer/pianist Mark Isaacs wrote a Sonata for Soprano Saxophone and Piano, to be given its world premiere by his long-standing duo with saxophonist Loretta Palmeiro, to whom it is dedicated.
Though this work has many jazz stylistic inflections in its vocabulary, it is fundamentally a fully notated, through-composed ‘classical’ work. The duo has always played only freely extemporised music, but both performers are also classical artists, so this project was seen as a refreshing and diametrical change in approach from their work to date.
The sonata is in three movements, which are entitled ‘Rhapsody’, ‘Benediction’ and ‘Fiesta’.
After the twenty minute sonata premiere, the remainder of the one-hour concert will consist of the duo’s return to free extemporisation. At the time of the concert, Loretta and Mark will not have improvised together, whether in public or private, since the duo’s previous performance at St Stephen’s more than eighteen months ago, wishing to share with their audience the actual joyous moment of the duo’s re-engagement after so long with this cherished way of music-making.
Loretta Palmeiro & Mark Isaacs
Following five years of rehearsal, Loretta and Palmeiro & Mark Isaacs gave their first performance in 2017. Up until the 2025 saxophone sonata premiere, they have exclusively composed their music together on the spot, 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
Feature review of ‘Grace City’ songs EP in ‘Rhythms’ magazine
“Part Leonard Bernstein, part Burt Bacharach as interpreted by Dionne Warwick and Dusty Springfield — it’s almost symphonic pop!”
‘Rhythms’ magazine, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2025
Video of premiere of Mark Isaacs’ ‘BODHI: Chaconne for solo violin’ (2024)
World premiere performed by Amalia Hall in St Paul’s Church, Burwood, Sydney, on Sunday October 6, 2024
Videography: Lyndon Roberts
Commissioned by the Spencer White family & Studiowdoubleyou
Release of ‘Grace City’ (feat. Deborah Dicembre) (E.P.)
Another facet of Mark Isaacs’ musical world: a turnaround to his major debut as a songwriter and producer, writing all the lyrics as well as composing and arranging the music, and playing piano and keyboards. Featuring the strings of the Czech National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mark and the astonishing vocals of Deborah Dicembre.
“The Grace City EP is a thing of beauty. Exquisite songs, singing and musicianship. Spend time with it – it’s time that will bring glorious and wonderful rewards.” STUART COUPE music journalist and author
“Part Leonard Bernstein, part Burt Bacharach as interpreted by Dionne Warwick and Dusty Springfield – it’s almost symphonic pop!” Michael George Smith RHYTHMS MAGAZINE
Released November 11, 2024 and available on major digital music platforms.
This recording was assisted by the NSW Government through Create NSW
Concert: World premiere of Mark Isaacs’ ‘BODHI: Chaconne for solo violin’ (2024)
Distinguished New Zealand violinist Amalia Hall will perform the world premiere of my very recent composition ‘BODHI: Chaconne for solo violin’ at this concert, for which it was especially commissioned. The concert celebrates the work of one of my favorite Australian composers, Miriam Hyde, as well as the sesquicentenary of the Sydney suburb of Burwood where she lived.
For more information see here.