During the past four years, the English violinist Kate Suthers has firmly established her position in South Australian musical life through her successful appointment as Concertmaster of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.

In 2026, she adds another pertinent string to her bow by taking charge of the chamber music-based Coriole Festival as artistic director. Through her local and international endeavours, she has corralled a truly excellent group of chamber musicians with whom she presented a balanced and compelling series of concerts centred on Viennese art music – particularly composers associated with fin-de-siècle late Romanticism and more conservative musical traditions. The vast majority would flee to America after the Nazi scourge of the 1930s. Many took up teaching positions, influencing and adding much to the textures and structures of 20th-century musical forms in that vast country.

Coriole Music Festival Artistic Director Kate Suthers. Portrait © Jamois

In order to avoid repetition regarding Suthers’ confederates within this sympathetic and balanced group of chamber musicians, it is best to mention them individually here. Joining Suthers were the experienced soprano Desiree Frahn and the quietly formidable, gentle yet masterly pianist Michael Ierace, who is equally at home in more radical music as he is in empathetic lieder and chamber music accompaniment. Joining them was an excellent and balanced group of string players, all able to breathe life into these performances.

These musicians have been gathered through Suthers’ considerable experiences in the UK, within the ASO and elsewhere throughout Australia. They include the gifted Elizabeth Layton (also English) on violin, alternating with Suthers as first violinist; violinists Alison Heike and Belinda Gehlert, the latter also a gifted composer whose Stellar (a world premiere) was presented in her approachable style.

The “bottom end” of these performances was given tangy and exciting underpinnings by Neil Thompson, Richard Waters (a masterly UK threat), Martin Smith and Gemma Phillips on cello, while Damien Eckersley provided grounding support on double bass.

Things began with youthful works by Korngold and Mahler. The prodigiously gifted son of an influential critic, Erich Wolfgang Korngold was writing mature standalone works by his early teens, and the String Sextet, Op. 10, is certainly a masterpiece of fin-de-siècle music. It occupies a similar sound world to Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, a musical equivalent, perhaps, to the artwork of Gustav Klimt.

From here, there was a step backwards to works influenced by earlier composers. Beethoven’s final quartet from the Op. 18 set – Quartet No. 6 in B-flat major – dates from 1800, a period when the composer stood at a crossroads: experienced, ambitious and confident of a bright future. He was emerging as a favourite of high society. This quartet is sophisticated, its four movements endowed with serious meaning while still looking backwards to Haydn and Mozart. Beethoven was intent on displaying his mastery of the Classical style. Mahler, meanwhile, was represented not by his magisterial symphonic voice but by an early movement from a Piano Quartet (1876?), which seems to emulate Brahms rather than the more mature and gargantuan Mahlerian style.

Next came two examples of ecstatic and expansive Liebeslieder from the fabled teacher Zemlinsky and his brilliant student Alma Mahler, for whom Zemlinsky would become the first in a collection of geniuses that would later include Mahler, architect Walter Gropius, novelist Franz Werfel and artist Oskar Kokoschka.

Then, with the quiet roar of pianist Michael Ierace, it was off to Béla Bartók’s 1918 Piano Suite. Here the composer was writing music built around percussive patterns and folk elements. These ideas would be further investigated and consolidated in the thornier selections from the still-problematic Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, Op. 20, written during the First World War.

These pieces, like the equally alien elements of Bartók’s Fourth Quartet, still do not fall easily upon the modern ear. Bulgarian-English composer Dobrinka Tabakova’s The Smile of the Flamboyant Wings – its title after Miró – similarly cuts up and recombines local folk sonorities.

Caroline Shaw’s Blueprint, written for string quartet, is unmistakably contemporary yet melodically grounded. The work began life as a “harmonic reduction” of Beethoven’s Quartet No. 6, Op. 18, and, as many have suggested, good chamber music is ultimately conversation without words. Shaw’s work reflects both the joys and melancholy of Beethoven and its Haydnesque influences. Here is a piece that is solitary, dark, melodic and driven with real punch.

The second concert demonstrated how these musical forms evolved towards a distinctly American style, commencing with Dvořák’s harmonious Nocturne in B major, Op. 40, adapted from an early string quartet from 1870. Yet it is in its version for string quintet that the work is most often heard. From there came the majority of a song cycle by a first-generation Eastern European exile who would become perhaps the greatest – and certainly the most American – of all modernist American composers: Aaron Copland.

The 2025 Coriole Music Festival. Photo supplied

In his Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, Desiree Frahn and Michael Ierace performed 10 of the 12 sections with complete assurance, capturing both Copland’s early harmonic language and the hints of the pre-dawn Bernstein style that his student and greatest interpreter would later embody. With this cycle, Copland effectively created one of the first successful syntheses of Middle European musical influence and masterly American verse.

As suggested above, the second concert also investigated the influence of various folk traditions. Sydney-based Francophile Alice Chance’s Nose Scrunch Reel, written as an encore for the Australian String Quartet, drew inspiration from the composer’s early busking experiences and from the percussive energies and astringent grounding harmonies of Irish music.

Michael Ierace returned to perform selections from Grieg’s arrangements of Norwegian Songs and Folksongs, Op. 17, where one can hear influences ranging from secular ballads to church music and native dance forms. The section concluded with contemporary arrangements of Scandinavian folksongs and dances adapted by the Danish String Quartet, a personal discographic favourite of Kate Suthers.

The third and final concert commenced with an effective reduction of Richard Strauss’s late lament for the loss of German artistic culture, Metamorphosen — a work encompassing the broad dicta of German art, including Goethe, long regarded as a balance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

Delightfully described as “Romanticism’s long coda” by recording producer Walter Legge, husband of Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Strauss’s late postwar compositions remain among his finest, including Capriccio, the Duett-Concertino and the glorious Four Last Songs. Before landing firmly on American soil, a similar chamber masterpiece by the Italian operatic master Puccini was offered in the form of his 1890 string quintet Crisantemi (Chrysanthemums), a flower associated in Europe with death because of its late-autumn flowering.

John Adams’s minimalist string septet Shaker Loops was perhaps the first work I heard by this modern master. Initially based on an unsuccessful work attempting to emulate the dispersion of pools of water, the piece evolved into an exploration of “loop” forms akin to those of Steve Reich and the hymnal, near-static dances of the Shakers.

Although later adapted for larger string forces, the work remains most effective in its original chamber version, first premiered under the baton of the recently deceased Michael Tilson Thomas – perhaps the most important of Bernstein’s acolytes as conductor, pianist and composer.

Firmly underpinned by Damien Eckersley’s unerring double bass, as deeply rooted as the East Coast’s giant sequoias, the performance arrived at a form of truly American music: melodic, rhythmic and uniquely pulsating. What a musical journey, and what a distinctly American climax.

The Coriole Music Festival took place 15-17 May.