2027 Commissions - Coriole Music Festival

Our 2027 Commissions

In 2027, the Coriole Music Festival is excited to be commissioning two new works. First, a new work by French Australian composer Alice Chance titled The Shimmering Quiet, and also a new work by Australian composer Luke Altmann with Tristan Louth-Robins. See below for more details about these fantastic works.

To support the activities of the Coriole Music Festival, you can donate online via credit card through either the Coriole Music Festival website, or the McLaren Vale Music Festival Association website. Donations are used to build a sustainable corpus of funds for our Association, ensure ticket prices are kept equitable, and engaging with composers for new commissions whenever we can.

If you prefer to donate via EFT, you can do so via the following bank details:

BSB: 015-208
Account Number: 423415136
Account name: McLaren Vale Music Festival Association Public Fund

Once you have made a donation via EFT, please email accounts@mvmf.asn.au with the details, and we will issue you a tax deductible receipt.

Donations are tax deductible. For any questions, please contact either the Chair – Mark de Raad – or the Treasurer – Kimberly Philp.

Alice Chance
Photo by Emma Grant Williams

The Shimmering Quiet
With thanks to the 2027 Commissioning Circle.

In Alice’s words:

“The Shimmering Quiet explores this year’s festival theme of Chaos from a different angle, namely the idea of chaos as rest.

Throughout nature, examples can be seen of disorder being associated with calm and safety, while order is saved for emergencies. Happy schools of fish churn with random movements until a sudden movement triggers a flash expansion. A flock of starlings that looks like a beautiful, relatively loose cloud suddenly becomes an extraordinarily coherent organism when threatened. Bee hives bustle with individuals going about their tasks until they need to defend themselves and suddenly, highly synchronised behaviour can be observed.

I have been working with similar concepts in vocal music as a collaboration with scientist Judith Mine-Hattab a CNRS researcher Computational Quantitative and Synthetic Biology laboratory, IBPS, Sorbonne University, Paris. Judith studies similar behaviour at the cellular level, primarily in proteins, and I have enjoyed beginning to translate her research into music for voices.

This work for Coriole is a chance to throw off some of those research shackles and luxuriate in the questions such research raises. If disorder can equal calm and safety, how might one explore that in chamber music? Exactly how much fun are we allowed to have?

One thing’s for sure: while listening to The Shimmering Quiet, audiences can expect a lot more shimmering than quiet.”

About Alice

Alice Chance is an award-winning composer whose works have been performed in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, the USA, Japan, Singapore and across Australia. A firm believer that playfulness should be taken seriously, Alice weaves together diverse influences from contemporary classical music, art song, early music, musical theatre, sound design, folk and blues to create her distinct sound.

She recently returned from living in Paris where she completed a Masters in Composition at the École Normale de Musique with acclaimed French composer Régis Campo. In 2024, she won the APRA Art Music Award Work of the Year (Large Ensemble) for her piece ‘Through Changing Landscape,’ commissioned as part of the Sydney Symphony’s 50 Fanfares project. She is also a four-time finalist in the Work of the Year (Choral) category.

Recent collaborations include Sydney Symphony & Genevieve Lacey, Ensemble Offspring, Omega Ensemble, Sjaella (Germany), Sequenza 9.3 (France), Affinity Quartet, CoMA Contemporary Music for All (UK), Hawai’i Symphony Orchestra, Laura Vaughan & Liam Byrne, The Australian Voices, Sydney Children’s Choir, Van Diemen’s Band & Andrew O’Connor, Musica Viva and the Australian String Quartet. A recipient of the 2026 Fluxus Opera Lab grant, Alice is currently working on a children’s opera.

https://alicechance.com/

Luke Altmann
Photo supplied

Fleurieu
With thanks to our 2027 Commissioning Circle.

In Luke’s words:

“Luke Altmann and Tristan Louth-Robins join forces to present a new work for the 2027 Coriole Music Festival. This collaboration promises to bring to Coriole’s Barrel Room an environment of sounds specific to the Fleurieu Peninsula in the context of a classical concert performance.

Sounds of nature and the environment are a constant and welcome presence at Coriole Music Festival. Birds nesting in the rafters of the Barrel Room while chamber music is played and rain falls lightly on the tin roof is more than just a concurrence of sounds; it represents an acoustic signature that defines this listening place and makes it unique among our concert venues.

The new work draws on field recordings gathered through Louth-Robins’ Fleurieu & Kangaroo Island Sound Map, a project he has facilitated since 2011 documenting the acoustic character of the region. Rather than simply playing these recordings alongside live music, the piece is conceived as a single electroacoustic instrument: acoustic transducers transmit the field recordings from within the piano itself, causing its strings and soundboard to resonate sympathetically with the sounds of the Fleurieu and Kangaroo Island landscape. Altmann‘s live piano and the transmitted recordings become inseparable, with the piano acting as both performed instrument and resonating chamber for the environment being evoked.

Altmann and Louth-Robins have known and worked alongside one another for over twenty years, though this new commission marks the first time the two have collaborated directly on a single work – bringing together, for the first time, Altmann‘s composition and Louth-Robins’ sound art practice in a piece built specifically for Coriole’s distinctive listening environment.”

About Luke

While still an undergraduate music student at Elder Conservatorium Luke co-founded weekly new music broadcasts at Radio Adelaide with a special emphasis on the work of South Australian composers, which he presented for twelve years. He’s currently a producer and presenter for ABC Classic.

In 2005 he transformed Adelaide’s inner-city art studio de la Catessen into an experimental music venue where he presented over 200 events in four years, featuring performances by artists from around the world. In Port Adelaide in 2021 he relaunched de la Catessen as a record label with a particular focus on experimental music from his immediate neighbourhood, along with Australian artists who performed at his venue. This internationally distributed discography is now approaching thirty LPs and CDs of original local music.

Luke’s reputation as a composer for the concert platform rests on over twenty-five years of regular appearances on Adelaide’s chamber music concert programmes. A member of new music organisation The Firm since 2005, his works have also been presented by Musica Viva, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, ANAM, COMA, and ABC Classic. Portrait albums of his solo piano music and chamber music have been recorded by Konstantin Shamray and by Benaud Trio.

With his score for the Sydney Film Prize nominated drama Fell (dir. Kasimir Burgess) Luke quickly became established as a composer for cinema. APRA and AACTA nominations followed. Currently he’s working on his seventh feature film score.

https://www.altmann.net.au/