2021 Program
Festival Overview
The Coriole Music Festival encompasses two days of beautiful chamber music, with meals and wine included.
There are two concerts on Saturday and one on Sunday. Each of the weekend’s three concerts will be followed by a delicious meal in the Coriole courtyard, where performers and audience can mix while enjoying fine food by chef Tom Tilbury and superb Coriole wines.
On each morning, before the first concert, Artistic Director Anna Goldsworthy will give a talk to introduce the program of music.
Introduction
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.
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.
Artists
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 Anna Goldworthy’s 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.
Saturday 22 May 2021
10.15 am
Introductory talk by Anna Goldsworthy with coffee and tea from 10 am
11 am
Concert One – Roaring Twenties
We begin with a program that speaks to the vibrancy and eclecticism of the 1920s. The influence of jazz is felt in Milhaud’s The Creation of the World, and in the ‘blues’ movement of Ravel’s beguiling violin sonata. Anne Cawrse’s song cycle, Flame and Shadow, is inspired by Sara Teasdale’s poignant poetry collection of 1920, while Cantaloube’s evocative and colourful Chants d’Auvergne draw on folk music.
1.30 pm
Three-course lunch (with Coriole wines)
3.30 pm
A World in Flux
Anna Goldsworthy speaks to Anne Cawrse and Holly Harrison about composing for the times
5 pm
Concert Two – Thirties
In the 1930s, we see an even greater widening of idiom. Alongside the neo-classical imaginings of Hindemith and Françaix, young Sydney composer Holly Harrison glances back to the exuberant gypsy jazz of guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stéphane Grappelli. Shostakovich’s dramatic cello sonata offers a premonition of the Stalinist purges, while Rachmaninov’s Variations on a theme of Corelli look back to the past, and also deeply within.
7.30 pm
Supper (with Coriole wines)
Sunday 23 May 2021
10.15 am
Introductory talk by Anna Goldsworthy with coffee and tea from 10 am
11 am
Concert Three – Forties
Our 1940s concert takes us to the stars and back. Weinberg’s clarinet sonata glances at Shostakovich, before a detour to the Golden Age of Hollywood. Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time provides a last word on these tumultous decades, and on music’s great power of transcendence.
1.30 pm
Lunch (with Coriole wines)