The Woodend Winter Arts Festival 2026 will foreground an expansive and stylistically diverse music program when it returns to Victoria’s Macedon Ranges across the King’s Birthday long weekend (5–8 June), bringing together leading Australian performers, composers and ensembles in a concentrated four-day celebration.

At the centre of the festival is a strong classical offering spanning early Baroque masterworks to contemporary Australian composition. A headline event sees Claudio Monteverdi’s monumental Vespers performed by Ensemble Gombert and Accademia Arcadia, with tenor soloists Christopher Watson and Christopher Roache. Presented twice across the weekend, the work returns by popular demand following its earlier outing at the festival, reaffirming the event’s commitment to large-scale sacred repertoire.

Ensemble Gombert & Accademia Arcadia. Photo supplied

Baroque music continues with Accademia Arcadia’s performance of JS Bach’s Musical Offering, featuring period instruments including baroque flute, violin, cello and Cristofori piano. Meanwhile, festival Artistic Director Jacqueline Ogeil will present a rare recital of keyboard sonatas by the 18th-century Spanish composer Sebastián de Albero, part of her ongoing advocacy for the rediscovery of lesser-known repertoire.

Piano takes a prominent role throughout the program. A major drawcard is Ancient Letters, a four-hands collaboration between ARIA Award-winning pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska and composer-pianist Elena Kats-Chernin, showcasing works from their chart-topping ABC Classic recordings alongside new material.

Cislowska and Kats-Chernin will also lead a newly introduced piano masterclass, offering advanced young pianists the opportunity to perform and receive feedback.

Coady Green. Photo supplied

Virtuosic solo repertoire is further explored in a recital by Coady Green, who juxtaposes Franz Liszt’s Sonata in B minor with a contemporary sonata by Australian composer Linda Kouvaras, creating a dialogue across centuries and musical traditions. The program highlights the festival’s ongoing interest in placing canonical works alongside new Australian voices.

Chamber music also features strongly. The Seraphim Trio will present a program pairing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio in A minor with a set of newly commissioned variations on a Schubert waltz by Australian composers including Elena Kats-Chernin and Andrea Keller.

The Affinity Quartet offers a program titled UpLIFT, combining works by Beethoven and Shostakovich with Paul Wiancko’s contemporary quartet LIFT.

Expanding the instrumental palette, accordionist James Crabb presents a wide-ranging solo recital spanning five centuries, with music by composers including Astor Piazzolla and Jean-Philippe Rameau. Younger performers are also given a platform through Ensemble Area 57, a Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School group combining jazz trio instrumentation with classical cello in a cross-genre program.

Jazz and contemporary styles are woven into the program, beginning with an opening-night concert by the Chris Johnstone/Mat Jodrell Quartet, showcasing original compositions alongside jazz standards. The Melbourne Octet continues the jazz thread with a close-harmony program featuring arrangements of works by Duke Ellington, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers.

Family audiences are catered for with 1001 Nights!, in which Inventi Ensemble brings Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade to life through storytelling and newly commissioned Australian works.

The T-Shirt Opera Company. Photo supplied.

Opera also features in a more informal guise with Opera Unmasked, a dinner-and-performance event by The T-Shirt Opera Company combining arias with commentary designed to demystify the art form.

Beyond music, the festival maintains its interdisciplinary scope through a parallel Words & Ideas program. Highlights include the Sheila Drummond Memorial Lecture delivered by journalist David Marr, as well as talks by social researcher Hugh Mackay and former Chief Scientist Alan Finkel, addressing themes of social cohesion and artificial intelligence. Pianist and writer Anna Goldsworthy appears in conversation on AI and culture.

Theatre is represented by The Highly Strung Players, performing three short plays by Peter Rose, adding a dramatic dimension to the weekend’s offerings.

For more information and tickets, visit the Woodend Winter Festival website.