Artistic Director Simon Cobcroft further consolidates his prowess with this year’s festival, titled To Find a Way Home. It brought together a wide and varied collection of music – from composers, familiar and less so – with works special place to the festival’s local, interstate and overseas performers.

Over two days and within three generously filled concerts, audiences were treated to fine performances of works by composers as disparate, familiar, and challenging as Vaughan Williams, Smetana, Sculthorpe, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and the Argentinian renegade Osvaldo Golijov.

Featured artists included familiar names such as Konstantin Shamray, as well as the much-hyped relative newcomers, the Orava Quartet.

After a welcoming speech and introduction, the audience was treated to an opening concert of works by composers including the dependable Anna Goldsworthy and Peter Sculthorpe, who conjured up images of the native Australian landscape with Djilie and Night Pieces. It contrasted strongly with Vaughan Williams’ Six Studies in English Folk Song and the early song cycle Songs of Travel (with texts by Robert Louis Stevenson).

Samuel Dundas and the Orava Quartet. Photo © Jamois

A sense of opposing contrast was immediately set up between the more traditional Anglo-Australian...