Sydneysiders just keep coming back to Townsville for their chamber music fix, says the festival director.

Following his intimate solo Chopin recital at Sydney’s City Recital Hall, Australian pianist Piers Lane donned his chamber music hat, inviting the audience to stay for the launch of his 2011 programme as artistic director of the Australian Festival of Chamber Music.

Appointed festival director in 2007, Lane has drawn on his extensive experience and contacts as an internationally acclaimed chamber music performer. The 2011 line-up features his regular piano quintet partner The Goldner String Quartet, as well as British clarinettist Michael Collins, with whom Lane recorded the recital disc The Virtuoso Clarinet (Chandos CHAN10615), a recent ABC Classic FM CD of the Week.

Australian artists set to appear at the event include AFCM stalwart William Barton on didgeridoo, Sony-signed saxophonist Amy Dickson, and soprano Lisa Gasteen in her much-anticipated return to singing following a neck injury in 2009.

The programme celebrates the anniversaries of two composer-pianists: the bicentenary of Liszt’s birth, and 50 years since the death of Australia’s own Percy Grainger. “The inclusion of these two great pianist-composers, Liszt and Grainger, means that pianos will have an even more prominent role...