The music just keeps coming in the Newcastle Music Festival. The 10-day festival, running August 11-20, features 15 concerts from a plethora of top musicians and singers.
While there are five events this weekend, including Rhapsody in Blue (The Best of Gershwin) on August 11 at Adamstown Uniting Church, Life on Land's Edge by the stunning Bowerbird Collective (Anthony Albrecht and Simone Slattery) at Adamstown Uniting Church on Saturday, August 12, and Opera Cocktails at Stanley Park on Sunday, August 13,more delights await next week.
From Monday, August 14, through Sunday, August 20, there is something for everyone to enjoy with day and evening concerts, from organ music to jazz, and a thrilling appearance by Deborah Conway and Willy Zygier on Saturday night, August 19.
The Bowerbird Collective play their second concert of the Festival on Monday night at Adamstown Uniting Church. Titled Where Song Began, after Tim Low's book of the same name, the concert celebrates the evolution of all the world's songbirds from Australian birds. Performed on cello and violin, combined with beautiful images and video from some of Australia's leading bird photographers, and sound recordings of bird song, this multi-media show entrances young and old alike. Tickets only $10 for students.
Tuesday brings Peter Guy back from Europe to perform his annual lunchtime organ concert in Christ Church Cathedral, with food available for purchase from midday, prior to the concert at 1pm. Guy will also perform on piano. On Tuesday evening at 7.30pm, another creative duo brings modern classics to the Cathedral, when The Nano Symphony, formed by husband-and-wife team Neil and Catherine Thompson, creates unique restful, ambient music on clarinet, viola, and sampled sounds.
The festival has a proud history of showcasing brilliant pianists, such as Tamara-Anna Cislowska, Simon Tedeschi and Maria Raspopova. This year we welcome again Andrea Lam, who has settled back in Australia after a period in New York.
Well on her way to being counted in the pantheon of the world's brilliant pianists, Lam, whose prodigious memory enables her to effortlessly perform long and demanding programs, will play works by Robert Schumann, Brahms, Prokofiev and Arvo Part in her solo concert titled Arc of Life.
Lam says, "This program is a journey through the arc of life - its joys, its challenges, its pleasures and its pain." This concert at Christ Church Cathedral is 7.30pm on Wednesday, August 16.
Jazz and guitar are the themes for Thursday. If you were quick, you may have secured tickets to Music on a Plate: Two Guitars at Foghorn Brewery for Thursday lunch, with a brilliant concert by two Australian guitarists whose biographies read like a 'who's who' of legendary performers.
Mark Johns has performed with the likes of Ray Davies, Lou Reed, and Doug Parkinson, while Guy Strazz is a brilliant jazz guitarist and teacher, and has collaborated with the likes of Dale Barlow, Don Burrows, and Joe Chindamo. The ever-popular Dungeon Big Band perform on Thursday night at Adamstown Uniting Church, with Heather Price on vocals, in You and the Night and the Music.
Clarinetist Mitchell Berick comes to town on Friday, August 18, to perform with the Christ Church Camerata Quartet, then on Sunday, August 20, at 2.30pm with the full Camerata to play the work that was the first ever winner of the Classic 100 Countdown on the ABC - Mozart's Clarinet Concerto.
But before that, the Cathedral will rock to the big voice of Deborah Conway, with partner guitarist Willy Zygier on Saturday night. Conway and Zygier have a long career of composition and performance and both their contemporary and older works will be featured on Saturday, August 19, at 7.30pm in Christ Church Cathedral.
Tickets @ newcastlemusicfestival.org.au and at the door.
Jillian Albrecht is editor of Newcastle Music Festival.
