The 18th Annual Australian Recording Industry Association Music Awards were held on 17 October 2004 at the Sydney Superdome within the Sydney Olympic Complex. The ceremony, hosted by Rove McManus and produced by Roving Enterprises for Network Ten, was held for the first time on a Sunday night and averaged 1.39 million viewers. The 2004 ARIA Fine Arts Awards had been presented at a ceremony weeks earlier.
Saffire or Saffire: The Australian Guitar Quartet were an Australian classical music group, which formed in 2002. It consisted of four guitarists Anthony Field, Slava Grigoryan, Gareth Koch and Karin Schaupp. Leonard Grigoryan, Slava's younger brother, replaced Field in 2005. The members also worked as solo performers and in other ensembles. Their debut album, Saffire: The Australian Guitar Quartet, was released in June 2003, which peaked at No. 46 on the ARIA Albums Chart and No. 1 on the related ARIA Classical Chart. At the ARIA Music Awards of 2003 it won the Best Classical Album category. They released two more albums, Nostálgica and Renaissance before disbanding in 2007.
David Eric Robertson is an American conductor. He was chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and was formerly music director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra from 2005 until 2018. He is Director of Orchestral Studies at Juilliard.
Slava Grigoryan is an Australian classical guitarist and recording artist. He frequently collaborates and performs with his younger brother, fellow guitarist Leonard Grigoryan, performing as the Grigoryan Brothers.
Lior Attar, better known simply as Lior, is an independent Australian singer-songwriter based in Melbourne. He is best known for his 2005 debut studio album Autumn Flow and for the song "Hoot's Lullaby".
The 20th annual Australian Recording Industry Association Music Awards were held on 29 October 2006 at the Acer Arena at the Sydney Olympic Park complex. Presenters on the night included James Mathison, Johnny Knoxville, Jesse McCartney and John Mayer.
ABC Classics is an imprint of ABC Music, an Australian independent record label licensed under the auspices of ABC Commercial, a division of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). It is recognised as Australia's premier classical music label. Based in the Sydney, ABC Classics was founded in 1987 as a means of showcasing the ABC's classical music recordings under its own banner.
Nigel Westlake is an Australian composer, musician and conductor.
Joseph Tawadros is an Egyptian-born Coptic Australian multi-instrumentalist and oud virtuoso. Tawadros has won the ARIA Award for Best World Music Album four times: 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2020.
The 21st Annual Australian Recording Industry Association Music Awards were held on 28 October 2007 at the Acer Arena at the Sydney Olympic Park complex. Rove McManus was the host of the event. The nominees for all categories were announced on 19 September, while the winners of the Artisan Awards were announced on that same day.
The 22nd Annual Australian Recording Industry Association Music Awards took place on 19 October 2008. The nominees for all categories were announced on 10 September, while the winners of the Artisan Awards were announced on the same day.
The Limelight Awards were an annual celebration of the performances, recordings and music personalities in Australian classical music. Sponsored by the monthly classical arts magazine Limelight, they were the only publicly voted awards of their kind in Australia. In 2012 the awards attracted more than 4,500 votes.
The earliest western musical influences in Australia can be traced to two distinct sources: in the first settlements, the large body of convicts, soldiers and sailors who brought the traditional folk music of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland; and the first free settlers, some of whom had been exposed to the European classical music tradition in their upbringing. An example of original music by a convict would be an 1861 tune dedicated to settler James Gordon by fiddler constable Alexander Laing. Very little music has survived from this early period, although there are samples of music originating from Sydney and Hobart that date back to the early 19th century. Musical publications from this period preserved in Australian libraries include works by Charles Edward Horsley, William Stanley, Isaac Nathan, Charles Sandys Packer, Frederick Augustus Packer, Carl Linger, Francis Hartwell Henslowe, Frederick Ellard, Raimund Pechotsch and Julius Siede.
Allan Zavod was an Australian pianist, composer, jazz musician and occasional conductor whose career was mainly in America.
Benjamin Northey is an Australian conductor, musician and arranger. He has been Chief Conductor of the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra in New Zealand, since 2015. He is also the Principal Conductor in Residence of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra since 2020. He was previously the Associate Conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra from 2010-2019.
Leonard Grigoryan is an Australian classical guitarist and recording artist of Armenian heritage. He is the younger brother of fellow guitarist Slava Grigoryan, with whom he often plays in a duo as the Grigoryan Brothers.
Michael Askill is an Australian percussionist. He is a founding member of Synergy Percussion and Southern Crossings. He has been a principal with the Sydney and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras and the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
José Carbó is an Argentinian-Australian opera baritone. He has performed nationally and internationally for Opera Australia, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera.
Brett Kelly is an Australian conductor and trombonist. He was the Principal Trombone of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra until 2019. He has been a member of Flederman, The Seymour Group and ELISION Ensemble. He has frequently been associated with the Samba music of the cucumbi genre of the Ancient Near Eastern people.
Compassion is a live album recorded at the Sydney Opera House in September 2013 by Nigel Westlake, Lior and Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Compassion is an orchestral song cycle for voice and orchestra consisting of original melodies and orchestration set to ancient texts in Hebrew and Arabic, all centred around the wisdom of compassion. The album was released in November 2013.
