This year, at the Coriole Music Festival, Australia’s finest musicians converge upon McLaren Vale for a thrilling tour through the twenties, thirties and forties. We begin with Milhaud’s jazz-inflected The Creation of the World and end with Messiaen’s transcendent Quartet for the End of Time. In between, we offer time capsules of those heady interwar years, in which worlds old and new collide — jazz, folk idioms, modernism, romanticism — and which speak directly to our own time.

For the first time, we open with a movie night, as improvising pianist Ashley Hribar provides a live soundtrack to the Expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. We present Adelaide composer Anne Cawrse’s lyrical and moving song cycle, Flame and Shadow, based on Sara Teasdale’s 1920 book of poetry, alongside a Coriole-commissioned new work by brilliant young Sydney composer Holly Harrison, inspired by the 1930s gypsy jazz of guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stéphane Grappelli. 

Soprano Lorina Gore — well-known to Adelaide audiences for her star turn as Ophelia in Brett Dean’s Hamlet — is joined by superstar trio Andrew Haveron (violin), Tobias Breider (viola) and Umberto Clerici (cello), all principal players in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Vibrant young clarinetist Lloyd van’t Hoff meets my treasured colleagues at the Elder Piano School, Konstantin Shamray and Lucinda Collins, along with Adelaide favourites, violinist Helen Ayres and oboist Celia Craig, for a memorable journey through a world in flux.

— Anna Goldsworthy, Artistic Director