This year’s Port Fairy Spring Music Festival (PFSMF)  features 29 concerts – including four masterclasses, 10 free events, more than 60 composers and one Kawai Pop-Up piano, dropped on the lawn at Fiddler’s Green – all in 48 hours.

Co-Artistic Director and pianist Stefan Cassomenos takes one deep breath when it launches, and only lets it go when it’s all over. 

“It’s kind of bigger than Ben-Hur, now that I think about it. It’ll be a superhuman 48 hours,” he tells Limelight.

Stefan Cassomenos. Photo supplied

Superhuman, aptly, is this year’s theme, which might be his favourite one yet. Spanning French Baroque and Romantic, Bach with a jazz twist, improvised electronics and chats about AI, there’s a lot of ground to cover.

“Superhuman encapsulates ideas about where humanity is headed, and what is specific about human beings; what makes us unique, what we can hold onto as we look into the future.”

One of the projects that Cassomenos, a self-professed “piano nerd” is buzzing about this year is a heap of two piano, four hands performances. He’ll perform works by Debussy, Messiaen and Ravel alongside past festival director Stephen McIntyre, and with the Brisbane-based Alex Raineri, Adams and Rachmaninov. In the concert’s Opening Gala, he’ll also perform in an eight-hand arrangement of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.

“Sometimes I wish I could just watch the performances, but we always end up needing an extra pair of hands,” he laughs.

“The Gala opens with New York Counterpoint because it’s an amazing work, and [clarinettist] David Griffiths is an amazing player. There’s also Shostakovich’s Two Pieces for String Octet – he’s really one of the composers superhuman in his courage and tenacity – and William Barton’s Kalkadunga Yudu, which is an amazing expression of his heritage.” 

This year, there’s four world premieres on the program. The Australian Chamber Orchestra’s Richard Tognetti has penned a flute and synthesizer piece called Last Flight to Mars for Cassomenos and Sally Walker, and there’s also new works from Robert Davidson, Sam Williams and Jeanette Hajncl – the latter, composing for an all-recorder program Radical Renaissance.

“We’re always excited to find a way in which we could feature a significant local community music-making component,” says Cassomenos. “Jeanette is quite active in the local recorder scene. We’ve got the Warrnambool Recorder Quartet, a local recorder consort called The Blow-Ins, and the Recorder Co-Op, four nationally-regarded players who have formed a quartet. Jeanette’s work, Journeyings, is written for this large ensemble.”

The Closing Gala, Cassomenos will also premiere a collection of pieces he’s co-written with local schoolkids, alongside performances of works by Rameau, Rebel and Barton.

“There’s this real mix of the old and the new; this diverse mix of genre and music, and  seeing how they interact, is really what the Festival is all about,” Cassomenos says.

It’s certainly diverse. There’s a new opera about dating apps and office gossip on the program, as well as To Be Human, Lior and Ade Vincent’s song cycle that ponders art, humanity and the rise of generative AI – not to mention Michael Daughtry’s Elvis Everywhere for string quartet, saxophone and three recorded Elvis impersonators.

There’s also Beethoven’s First String Quartet (ironically, the second he wrote) and his beloved Moonlight Sonata, and a survey of the French Baroque on period instruments.

William Barton performing iwth the Brodsky String Quartet. Photo © Laura Manariti

PFSMF also celebrates superhuman performers. One of these that Cassomenos points out is GK (a.k.a Grace Kenny or Greatness Known), a spoken word hip-hop artist who lives with disability, who launches her EP alongside a chamber ensemble. Another is William Barton, who’s performing at the festival with his mother, Auntie Delmae Barton.

“The thing that’s so superhuman about what [Barton] does is that it’s this incredible extension of tens of thousands of years of culture and music and storytelling, which is translated into the most amazing way into the 21st century with his compositions.”

Cassomenos takes a minute to decide on his favourite piece, but he lands on The Sounds of Chow Gar – a film featuring solo Kung Fu forms live scored by composer Thomas Green on electronics, percussion and strings.

“I’m a huge fan of Thomas’s music, and the fact that he’s been able to map these physical gestures with a soundscape; it’s really beautiful. It’s just such cool music. But I also love John Adams; I think Hallelujah Junction is one of my favourite things ever. It’s hard to narrow down, because Monica [Curro, the festival’s co-director] and I have chosen music that we really love; there’s nothing in this program which is not music we love very much.”

Aaron Wyatt’s Digital Echoes would be Curro’s favourite, Cassomenos speculates. In the work, the Noongar violist-composer’s performance is captured, beamed via the internet to different places around the country, and then fed back into the performance space, where it resonates a series of percussion instruments. 

“Whether it’s a film with music or an immersive digital experience, or a recorder ensemble late-night jazz experience  – I think that’s why people love the Festival. You can talk to two people; for  one person, it’s classical chamber music repertoire, and for another person, it feels like a new music festival,” he says.

“I love talking about this program. It really excites me. It’s one of my favorite themes that we’ve ever programmed; it’s gonna be a super weekend.”

The 2026 Port Fairy Spring Music Festival runs from 9–11 October.