Artistic Director Eugene Ughetti’s 2026 program is deeply rooted in place, from site-specific bell works at Parliament House and the National Carillon to chamber and choral premieres.
Anna-Louise Cole sings Wagner Lieder and Strauss’s Four Last Songs, the Australian String Quartet surveys British music from Purcell to Britten and Rebecca Clarke, and Switzerland’s Ensemble Contrechamps delivers a meditative performance of Jürg Frey’s Récit des sensations fragiles at Snow Concert Hall. Luminescence Chamber Singers unveils a program built around a bespoke vocal-processing system, while The Rite of Spring closes the festival in Stravinsky’s own arrangement for two pianos and percussion

Limelight Editor’s Choice

Tissages du Temps traces more than three centuries of French musical innovation, showing how each generation transcended the language of the one before while remaining deeply connected to its legacy.

From the ornate architecture of the high Baroque to the colour-saturated sound world of impressionism and the radical harmonic and timbral innovations of Spectralism, this concert reveals French music not as a sequence of isolated eras, but as a vibrant continuum – threads of imagination woven seamlessly across time.

The program opens with music from France’s early masters, heard here through the vibrant sonorities of Lyrebird Brass, Australia’s trailblazing brass ensemble. Their performance highlights the ceremonial brilliance, rhythmic finesse and expressive detail that defined a French Baroque musical identity.

From this world of elegance and ornament, we move to the shimmering landscape of French impressionism with Maurice Ravel’s intoxicating Daphnis et Chloé, performed in a sumptuous two-piano realisation by Kristian Chong and Timothy Young. Together they conjure the work’s sensuous harmonies, expansive vistas and mythic lyricism, illuminating the colours and gestures that would inspire a seismic shift in French composition.