Marking ANAM’s 30th anniversary and the end of his tenure as Artistic Director, Paavali Jumppanen curates five concerts exploring “science and matter”, “music of the outdoors” and “music of the inner world”. Program highlights include Augusta Read Thomas’s SPIRALS: life force from her HELIX SPIRALS for string quartet and Stockhausen’s Die Schmetterlinge spielen (The butterflies are playing) as well as music responding to the 2019–20 bushfires by Elena Kats-Chernin, Nat Bartsch, Olivia Davies and Maria Grenfell. Kitty Xiao and Paweł Mykietyn turn to urban life alongside Boccherini and Gershwin, while Salina Fisher opens a concert exploring the human psyche. Three world premieres by Thomas Meadowcroft, Kate Milligan and Ilari Kaila also feature in this festival spanning centuries.

Limelight Editor’s Choice

Join us for the final Chamber Music Festival curated by Paavali Jumppanen, ANAM’s Artistic Director.

The festival begins where biology meets sound. In Bree van Reyk’s How We Fell and Augusta Read Thomas’s life force from Helix Spirals, music becomes a living, breathing thing. From there, the program moves into the subtle, quieter worlds of insects and shifting seasons, linking Handel and Telemann with modernists Stockhausen and Meriläinen across centuries.

Then the energy shifts. Four leading Australian composers—Elena Kats-Chernin (ANAM Set 2021), Nat Bartsch, Olivia Davies, and Maria Grenfell (ANAM Set 2021) —bring to the stage Fire Dances, a powerful response to the collective experience of climate change.

The festival closes by turning inward, exploring the intensity of the human psyche and asking what we hold onto and what we lose. Works by Salina Fisher, Poulenc, Brahms, and Ivette Herryman Rodríguez explore the fine line between want and loss.