2024 Featured Artists

Enjoy a kaleidoscopic program spanning 300 years, taking you on a captivating journey from Bach to Bossa and beyond – with four of Australia’s leading guitarists as your tour guide.

Artistic team Amy Moore and Stephanie Dillon lead Castalia with a focus on beauty of sound and a fearless approach to repertoire old and new. With internationally and nationally acclaimed Australian singers, Castalia combines exquisite vocal artistry with dynamic programming.

Estampa joyously blends elements of world, folk, and jazz music. Their performances evoke the charm of Parisian streets, the passion of South American culture, and the haunting beauty of Swedish folk music.

Australia’s most revered string quartet performs masterpieces including Mozart, Shostakovich and Beethoven.

The dramatic, politically-charged, Soviet-era intensity of Shostakovich and Schnittke is balanced by the beauty and peace of Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov’s Silent Songs. This is superb chamber music: huge feelings compressed into the most intimate form, passionately expressed by two wonderful musicians.

One of Australia’s most exciting and versatile pianists brings to life images, scenes and characters in music from Schumann's brilliant Carnival and Stravinsky's unforgettable virtuosic Petrushka.

Listening with the Body is a journey through the powerfully moving resonances of the harp. Together Alice Giles and Moran Wiesel create a space for the audience to explore the art of listening. Moran draws on meditative and sensory awareness practices to help us listen in a deeply embodied way to the harp, our inner worlds, each other, and the music. This creates the freedom for the audience to move if they wish, or to sit and feel within themselves the sound, colour, and complex patterns of Alice’s harp playing.

The Clarinet Trio of Johannes Brahms is a towering masterpiece of the chamber music canon. Two new Australian works by Christine McCombe and Alys Rayner bookend the dance-like Fantasy Trio by Polish-American contemporary master Robert Muczynski, proving that the flexible and inspiring combination of clarinet, cello, and piano is as alive and relevant now as it was when Brahms wrote his magnum opus over one hundred years ago.

The acclaimed Partridge String Quartet bring audiences three groundbreaking pieces in a concert that defies expectations. 

Passionate, sensitive performances from Australia's greatest musical duo. This program spans cultures, generations and genres – from standard works for guitar and cello to creations by contemporary composers, their own compositions and arrangements which shine a new light on familiar favourites.

Extraordinary concert pianist, Simon Tedeschi, is one of Australia's best-loved classical musicians. With a long-harboured love of jazz, and three celebrated albums of Gershwin’s music to his name, Tedeschi teams up with legendary jazz vocalist and violinist, George Washingmachine, for something a little different - Gershwin favourites and classic jazz standards by Cole Porter, Oscar Peterson, Fats Waller and more.

Women of Song is an innovative new show, developed by the acclaimed Jessie Lloyd (of Mission Songs Project) including themes of intergenerational practices, singing on and from country, commitment to community, and preserving knowledge in song. It’s an intimate celebration of the ‘here and now’ of Indigenous culture, a rare mix of spontaneous conversation and songs, exploring the modern-day practice and living heart of the ‘world’s oldest living culture’.

ZÖJ, meaning ‘couple’ in Farsi, is singer and Kamancheh player Gelareh Pour and drummer Brian O’Dwyer, who have developed a reputation for their deeply moving, experimental free form music.

Women and girls around the world struggle against legally enshrined gender inequality and discrimination. Following the death of Masha Jina Amini in police custody, the girls and woman of the Women-Life-Freedom movement in Iran have courageously and peacefully demonstrated for their fundamental human rights. Protests have been met with fatal reprisals by authorities.

Experimental duo ZÖJ perform There Is No Celebration Here, a dark, romantic, and poetic set of structured improvisations, for an intensely moving experience.