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Canberra International Music Festival

14 - 23 May 2010

From the Artistic Director

The 2010 Canberra International Music Festival program is construct-

ed around works that relate to GOLD, as we believe that the Creative
Arts represent the true Gold of our time. Gold is universally seen as a
symbol of love, marriage, warmth, incorruptibility, excellence, purity,
malleability, and transcendence. Given that the only human activities
that seem to remain in use for up to a century are the very best works
Artists create and the finest Architecturally designed buildings, we
believe the Creative Arts represent excellent and lasting value. There-
fore we have assembled 30 concerts of the finest music of our time
and from the past including events that combine architecture and music, to display the qualities of warmth,
purity and excellence – a festival of Golden Music.

Chris Latham, Artistic Director

Tickets

Tickets will be available to purchase from Canberra Ticketing on Friday 12 March. For Gold Passes and
Weekend Tickets, contact the Pro Musica Office on 02 6230 5880 or at info@cimf.org.au

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 YOU ARE HERE : Home / Festival Welcome

I have been in love with music since my childhood piano lessons.

Now I enjoy it more every year, and every day of my life. I am de-
lighted to welcome patrons to the 16th Canberra International Music
Festival, and I look forward to sharing with you the brilliant and eclec-
tic blend of musical delights it gathers from across the world.

Quentin Bryce
Governor-General of Australia

It is my pleasure to welcome all who love fine music to the 16th

Canberra International Music Festival. The cool and quiet of Can-
berra’s autumn months provides a beautiful backdrop to the Festival,
which is now established as one of Canberra’s leading music events.

The Festival regularly features some of Canberra’s and the world’s

best musical performers and I am pleased that in this regard the
2010 Festival is no different. Another strength of the Festival is that
it makes use of a great variety of venues across Canberra bringing
the experience of music to many audiences in many different set-
tings.

Works to restore Canberra’s most historic performance venue, the

Albert Hall, will be completed in August this year and, following the
Festivals successful 2009 opening held at the Hall, I look forward to
seeing further Festival performances staged there in the future.

Once again I welcome you to the 16th Canberra International Music

Festival. I encourage you to enjoy all the Festival has to offer and to enjoy Canberra at its best in one of our
city’s favourite seasons.

Jon Stanhope
Chief Minister and Minister of the Arts

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 What I feel Pro Musica is doing with its way forward,
and in this Festival, is locating the bridge that spans
the whole specturm from young to old and the whole
range of musical taste. I feel this programme gives
people the opportunity to come and listen again to well
loved works and also to let themselves go into the new.
There is courage in the air. There is encouragement in
its wake. We need to build up in young people and in
older people, never too late! - the happy habit of con-
cert going and lead them towards becoming an eager,
informed and discerning audience.

On with the Festival with its offerings to regular and

newcomers, and to us oldies at the far reach, something
of that adventure we had when young of discovering great wonders to be explored.

Barbara Blackman
Patron Pro Musica

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 YOU ARE HERE : Home / 2010 Festival
2010 Festival

Festival By Day

Concert Series

Amazing Spaces

Free Events

Additional Events
Buy Tickets

2010 Festival Brochure

(PDF Download 4.4mb)

The creative arts are like gold, representing true and lasting value, with the best creations enduring centu-
ries. We have chosen golden masterworks from the past to stand beside the golden treasures of today. Each
concert is paired with a sublime flower image of Harold Feinstein that represents its inner nature so feel free
to pick a bunch of your favourites.
You may also review our previous festivals (2004-2009).

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 YOU ARE HERE : Home / Free Events
Free Events

Amazing Space 1 - Playing the House

Sunday 9 May, 2pm

Parliament House - Map

More information...

Chopin Lecture

Thursday 13 May, 5.00–6.30 pm

Conference Room, National Library of Australia - Map

Chopin in the theatres and concert halls of Australia: lecture with collection viewing.

Presented by the Music and Dance Curators of the National Library of Australia Ms Robyn Holmes and Mr
Lee Christofis.

National Museum of Australia: In-gallery performance and talk

by Elena Kats-Chernin

Thursday 13 and Friday 14 May 2010, 12.30pm-1.30pm

Bookings essential on (02) 6208 5021
Information Desk, National Museum of Australia - Map
More information

National Carillon Concert

Saturday 15 May, 12.30pm

National Carillon - Map
More information...

Jazz at the Old Bus Depot Markets

Sunday 16 & 23 May, 10am–3pm

The Old Bus Depot Markets - Map

More information...

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 Open Rehearsals at the Fitters Workshop

Saturday 22 May, 9am–12.30pm and Sunday 23 May, 9am–11.30am

Fitter’s Workshop - Map

Music for Everyone

Saturday 22 May, 11am–4pm

Foreshore Gallery, Old Bus Depot - Map

More information...

Sleep - An all night sound installation

Friday 21 May, 11pm–7am and Saturday 22 May, 12am–7am

Fitter’s Workshop - Map
More information...

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 YOU ARE HERE : Home / Artists
2010 Festival Artists

Composers

Ross Edwards
Elena Kats-Chernin
Peter Sculthorpe
Bill Risby
Dominico de Clario

Ensembles

Song Company - directed by Roland Peelman

T'ang Quartet
New Zealand String Quartet
Jouissance
Music For Everyone
The Harp Consort
New Purple Forbidden City Orchestra
Australian Baroque Brass
Canberra Camerata
ANU Contemporary Music Ensemble
ANU School of Music Chamber Orchestra
DRUMatrix

Pianists / Keyboards

Daniel de Borah - Piano

Tamara Anna Cislowska - Piano
Calvin Bowman - Organ/Harpsichord
Geoffrey Lancaster - Fortepiano/Harpsichord/Organ
Alan Hicks - Piano/Fortepiano
Timothy Young - Piano

Singers

Simone Riksman - Soprano

Louise Page - Soprano
Nicole Thomson - Soprano
Christina Wilson - Mezzo Soprano
Tobias Cole - Countertenor
Mal Webb - Vocal Adventurer

Instrumentalists

Thomas Indermühle - Oboe

Catherine McCorkill - Clarinet
Anna McMichael - Violin
Matt Ockenden - Bassoon
Virginia Taylor - Flute
Vernon Hill - Flute
Tor Fromyhr - Viola

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 David Pereira - Cello
Max McBride - Bass
Chris Latham - Violin
Nicole Canham - Clarinet
Alan Vivian - Clarinet
Megan Billing - Oboe
Richard McIntyre - Bassoon
Graeme Jennings - Viola
Miroslav Bukovsky - Trumpet
Michael Dixon - Horn

Choirs

VOX
Oriana Chorale
Igitur Nos
The Resonants
Combined Canberra Grammar Schools' Chamber Choir
Radford College Chamber Choir
Burgmann Anglican School Chamber Choir
Woden Valley Youth Choir

Associate Artists

Sonia Anfiloff Soprano

Susan Antcliff - Carillon
Tom Azoury - Basset Horn
Rachel Best-Allen - Clairnet
Burgmann Anglican School Ensemble
Joan Chia - Carillon
Ben Connor - Baritone
Lyn Fuller - Carillon
Angharad Johnson - Horn
Jehan Kanga - Baroque Violin
Robert Shearer - Tenor
Luke Sweeting - Piano
Bill Williams - Bass
Ed Rodrigues - Drums
Marko Sever - Organ
Luke Sweeting - Piano
Jennifer Vaughan - Flute
Noeleen Wright - Baroque Cello
Paul Wright - Violin

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 YOU ARE HERE : Home / Artists - Ross Edwards
Ross Edwards - Composer

CIMF Concerts:

The Wellspring

Myrhh

Amazing Space 3 - Sounding the Churches

The Spirit of Water

Biography:

One of Australia’s best known and respected com-

posers, Ross Edwards has created a unique sound
world by which he seeks to help reconnect music
with elemental forces and restore such qualities as
ritual, spontaneity and the impulse to dance. Intense-
ly aware of his vocation as a composer since early
adolescence, he has largely followed his own direc-
tion, shunning sensible career moves and depending
on his music to have the strength to speak vividly and directly. He takes very seriously what he believes to
be his responsibility to make the most effective use of one of the planet’s most powerful forces to commu-
nicate vividly and widely at the highest possible artistic level. His music, universal in that it is concerned
with the age-old mysteries surrounding humanity, is at the same time deeply connected to its roots in Aus-
tralia, whose cultural diversity it celebrates, and from whose natural environment it draws its ethos - as well
as many of its shapes and patterns - from such sources as birdsong and the mysterious drones of summer
insects. Edwards’ belief in the healing power of music is reflected in a body of contemplative works inspired
by sounds of the Australian landscape.

Ross Edwards’ compositions, which are performed worldwide, include five symphonies, concertos, orches-
tral, chamber and vocal music, children’s music, film scores, opera and music for dance. Works designed for
the concert hall sometimes require special lighting, movement, costume and visual accompaniment – nota-
ble examples are his Fourth Symphony, Star Chant and his Oboe Concerto Bird Spirit Dreaming. Based in
Sydney and the Blue Mountains, he is married with two grown-up children. Increasingly prolific, his recent
works include a Clarinet Concerto for David Thomas and the Melbourne Symphony, and Tucson Mantras,
commissioned by the Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival, Arizona, where it was premiered in March
2008 to great acclaim. Also in 2008, he completed the score for U.S. choreographer Nicolo Fonte’s new bal-
let, The Possibility Space, for the Australian Ballet, and his String Quartet No. 2, which will be premiered
this month by the Goldner Quartet for Musica Viva Australia. Other recent works include Missa Alchera
– Mass of the Dreaming, commissioned by the Brisbane Chamber Choir and Schola Cantorum and Sacred
Kingfisher Psalms, commissioned by the Canberra International Music Festival, Ars Nova Copenhagen and
the Edinburgh International Festival Society. He is currently working on a commission from the West Aus-
tralian Symphony.

Website: www.rossedwards.com

Ross Edwards image: Bridget Elliot

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 YOU ARE HERE : Home / Pro-Musica
About Pro Musica

The Canberra International Music Festival was founded by the late Ursula Callus (1939 - 2001), President
of Pro Musica Incorporated, a non-profit community organisation with a long history of assisting develop-
ing musicians. Pro Musica was founded by the late Edith Butler. The first Festival, in April 1994, won the
Canberra Critics Circle Award for Music Innovation. Since 1997 the Festival has been an annual event, and
audiences have grown steadily.

The Pro Musica Vision

Music is our business. We love playing it and listening to it but we have a deeper purpose as well. Put
simply, music, like human creativity generally, is good for us as individuals, and especially good for us as
a society. Money spent on making or listening to music is the cheapest way to help build good, cheerful,
responsible societies. We believe that we can improve the quality of Australian life, for very many people,
by involving them in music.

How is it so? Music is built into us. All human beings sing, or whistle, or hum, or tap their feet to music,
especially when happy. There is other music to assist us when we are sad. In the womb, before our birth, we
pick up our mother’s heart-beat; that pulse stays with us throughout life, for the heart-beat is a familiar pat-
tern in music. Music helps us deal with mundane tasks in a cheerful way, by lifting our spirit. Music enables
us to rise out of the ordinary and experience something special. It can inspire us to be better than we thought
we were.

How music does this we barely know, for it is the creative art that is least adequately discussed in words.
The American composer Aaron Copland once expressed it this way:

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, ‘Is there a meaning to music?’ My answer would
be ‘Yes’. And ‘Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?’ My answer to that would be ‘No’.

Music is another kind of language, an expressive flow that has to be experienced to be understood. We know
it has an effect on us. The skilful use of good music has been shown to accelerate learning, to heal the body
and to improve confidence. Classical music played in large supermarkets reduces theft. It can enhance and
change our moods.

Pro Musica sees its role as that of an ‘enabler’, bringing these rich experiences to larger and larger groups
of people. Our special approach is small-scale musical events, for chamber music really means music that
you hear in a room (originally a drawing room or reception room). In these environments the audience
participates in the music, because we are close to the performers, and they are conscious of us. We see this
as ‘music-making among friends’, and believe that it offers a much more intense experience, for everybody,
than that offered by the traditional large concert hall.

We know that live music in small venues is often seen as ‘stuffy’ or ‘highbrow’, and we are working to
dispel this impression. We do it by providing venues and programs that are deliberately aimed at attracting
younger audiences. Classical music, like much music in the concert hall, is also often seen as representing an
undue veneration of the past. This impression we try to dispel by ensuring that music written by people alive
today is made available to today’s audiences.

At the same time, we strive to remind people that making an effort to understand a piece of music that one
has never heard before is rewarding. It is almost a truism that important artistic work often endures opposi-
tion and initial resistance, accompanied with scorn, before becoming adopted and then venerated. It is not
simply audiences that initially protest: the experienced players who gave the first performances of many of
Beethoven’s string quartets shook their heads and laughed at one of his compositions, believing that he was

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 trying to make them seem foolish. If we program a piece of music, we believe that it is really worth listen-
ing to, and making the effort to listen, not merely to hear. Today’s composers want an audience. They are not
trying to shock.

Our practice

Our principal activity is an annual international music Festival, built around some unique attributes of the
nation’s capital city. We combine international performers who come to us through the aid of foreign embas-
sies, Australian performers drawn from across the nation, interesting and varied venues that include embassy
buildings themselves, the marvellous and colourful ambience of Canberra’s autumn, and a mixture of musi-
cal forms, lectures and other artistic possibilities that give those who take part a wonderful cultural experi-
ence.
Our vision

We are working to make our Festival a national event that is of the same scale and scope as those in other
cities, and thereby to make in our own way a significant contribution to the place of culture in daily life for
the musicians and concert-goers of the next generation, as well as those of today. We have been assisted to
do so through a munificent gift from philanthropist and audience-builder Barbara Blackman. Barbara Black-
man's gift provides us with the basis on which to create a brighter future for musicians and audiences with
the chance to expand ideas of contemporary music. We will do this through providing a platform for emerg-
ing and experienced contemporary composers, a larger and more interesting repertoire for chamber music
and by inviting more people to share the positive benefits of music with us as audience members.

Our invitation

The cultural development of an entire nation happens over time. The pressure on arts organisations to make
their work sustainable requires them to be able to offer a consistently high quality product to the increasingly
time-poor, information-overloaded Australian. There needs to be a wide understanding that simply funding
and expecting things to become self-sustaining after a few years is only part of the picture. Significant work
and new achievements in the area of audience development are long overdue, and our Festival provides
an ideal environment to explore these changes: a short duration, continuing excitement and buzz, and the
chance for a jolt out of the everyday in the context of the human capacity that lifts our spirits and our sense
of ourselves as creative people.

Will you join us?

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 YOU ARE HERE : Home / Pro-Musica / Our Patron
Barbara Blackman, Pro Musica Patron

About Barbara

Barbara Blackman, essayist, librettist, letter writer, was an only child, born and bred in Brisbane, caught up
in the Barjai art/literary group of the Forties, the Melbourne Contemporary Art Society of the Fifties and
the Australian wave in London of the Sixties. She was married to painter Charles Blackman for thirty years.
She has worked as a child psychologist, an artists' model, a magazine columnist, a radio producer for Radio
for the Print Handicapped, and an oral historian for the National Library. She was a co-founder of the Little
Lookout Theatre in Sydney and is a member of the C.G. Jung Society and the National Federation of Blind
Citizens. Her pleasures are contemporary music, coffee drinking, visiting Perth, solitude, her three offspring
and six grandchildren.

Our principle patron is Barbara Blackman Barbara has been blind most of her adult life and has listened and
enjoyed and celebrated music with an appreciation and intensity few of us can match. Barbara made a won-
deful speech to launch the program of the 12th Festival early in 2006.

Launching speech for Chamber Music Festival 2006

I am tickled pink at your certifying me as the Patron Saint of Audiences. I love it. When I was a little girl I
used to go to the old P.S.A.'s, the Pleasant Sunday Afternoons when someone who could play the piano a bit
did it, and the So-and-so sisters, if asked, would perform a duet, and perhaps sometimes a violinist might
give us a treat. "Rustle of Spring", "The Kerry Dance", "Flight of the Bumble Bee" were all part of that time.
Parlours of elderly relatives and the Brisbane Business Girls Club (of which my mother was a member into
her seventies) were the sites for P.S.A.

I sat there as a good quiet little audience, and somewhere must have thought to myself, "Music must be bet-
ter than this." Perhaps that is where it all began. Then I started going to real concerts when my mother was
given tickets to all the recitals in the City Hall, and then when she herself gave me subscriptions to the Youth
Symphony series. And so it goes.

Be deciding last year to execute my will now and give money to music, and have the fun of it, I thought I
was taking a step in one direction but now find myself spun around into quite another, quite unexpected. I
find myself invited to speak from the love-of-music platform. And now I find this is also the "wisdom of
the elders" platform. Old age has such a poor profile. Actually I am finding it to be a Through the Looking
Glass adventure. To reverse a popular saying: "Go for it. You're only old once." Just as well. It's hard. But
then the same is true of youth. That's hard too: trying to work out what the world has to offer and how to find
a personal path in it, a direction for oneself.

What I feel Pro Musica is doing with its way forward, and in this Festival programme, is locating the bridge
that spans the whole specturm from young to old and the whole range of musical taste. I see bridge as Arch-
way over Causeway: as above, so below. Old age is a vantage point of far horizons. At this end of life's span,
so many experiences of one's youth now loom clear. Things that were seemingly small happenings in youth
have become large presences in our lives: for instance, a remembrance of moments in times past, certain first
hearings, that feeling of being "the first that ever burst into that silent sea" - those immense the distance of
years as the event, the chance, the opportunity that entered one upon a lifelong path of pleasure and discov-
ery.

The arch from those first initiations has swept up though the celestial range and now is grounded again in
insights. What I am saying is that we elders can offer those in their years of formation a wide taste for new
things, in this case of music. This Festival offers that - to the little fellas to make music with the big fellas;
to those seething with pop music to see round corners to other thrills; to those who think they can only relish

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 what is familiar, well known, comfortable, to trust this Festival to invite them to other feasts; to those who
think the bigger the orchestra, the more important the work, to listen more attentively. Humility in attention
is always of advantage.

The causeway traffics forwards over a gulf or chasm. In the context of music this gulf is a belief that music
has fixed categories, like religions, professions or races, and that venture into strange territory is dangerous.
Actually, behold, we live in times of mixed marriages, ecumenical worship, global technologies. Boundaries
are breaking down, gulfs filling, chasms closing in, in all directions. Music Festivals are part of this whole
land shift.

To come to ground: I feel this Festival programme gives opportunity to people to come and listen again to
well loved works and also to let themselves go into the new. There is courage in the air. There is encour-
agement in its wake. We need to build up in young people and in older people, never too late! - the happy
habit of concert going and lead them towards becoming an eager, informed and discerning audience. Audi-
ence and musicians have a reciprocal role in music making and appreciation. I wince at empty seats at good
concerts. If my "applause by donation" patronage helps to fill those seats and to fill the sitters therein with
the beauty and love of music, then I happily wear my P.S.A. hat and salute the Pro Musica Board for their
prodigious work.

On with the Festival with its offerings to regular and newcomers, and to us oldies at the far reach, something
of that adventure we had when young of discovering great wonders to be explored.

Barbara Blackman
Patron Pro Musica

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 YOU ARE HERE : Home / Pro-Musica / The Board
The Board

The Canberra International Music Festival is managed by Pro Musica Inc, a not for profit registered charita-
ble organisation. The Board is elected annually and is made of community and business representatives.

About our President

Don Aitkin AO is a former Vice-Chancellor (University of Canberra, 1991-2002) who finds himself just as
busy in 'retirement', where he spent six months of that long-awaited release serving as the CEO of a R&D
company. He is the Chairman of the Boards of the Cultural Facilities Corporation, the NRMA/ACT Road
Safety Trust, and Pro Musica Inc.. He has a continuing role with the Canada Foundation for Innovation as
well as a number of Australian organisations interested in education, research, urban development, and gov-
ernance, matters about which he has strong views, and on the whole unorthodox ones. He is a Fellow of the
Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, the Australian College of Education and the Australian Plan-
ning Institute. He was the first Chairman of the Australian Research Council (1988-1990), where he trebled
the budget and established the ARC as an organisation of world class; he served for six years as a member of
the Australian Science and Technology Council (1996-2002).

A historian and political scientist, he was a professor at Macquarie University (1971-1979) and the ANU
(1980-1988), and the author of a number of books on Australian history and politics as well as a novel. His
most recent book, What Was It All For? The Reshaping of Australia, was published in October 2005, and he
writes a weekly column on education for the Australian Financial Review. In past times he was a widely read
newspaper columnist in the National Times and the Canberra Times, a contributing editor of Newsweek, and
a television and radio commentator. In what passes for his spare time he writes books and plays the piano.

The full Board is:

Prof Don Aitkin, AO, President

Former Vice Chancellor, University of Canberra

Dorothy Danta, Vice President

Artist and former Gallery manager

Will Laurie, Treasurer

Retired Partner, Accountancy firm

Barbara Campbell, Secretary

Lawyer

Phil Butler, Member

General Manager, Australian Institute of Company Directors

Ian McLean, Member

Former General Manager, Canberra Symphony Orchestra, Former Officer Commanding, Royal Military
College Band, Duntroon

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 YOU ARE HERE : Home / Contact Us
Contact us

The Canberra International Music Festival is managed by Pro Musica Inc, a not for profit registered charita-
ble organisation.

Pro Musica
Ainslie Arts Centre
Elouera St Braddon ACT 2612

Tel: +61 2 6230 5880

Fax: +61 2 6230 5970

Email: info@cimf.org.au

ABN: 46 381 984 616

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