★★★★½ Festivalgoers are in for quite a treat if its prelude is anything to go by.

Prelude to the Huntington Estate Music Festival 2015, Mudgee, NSW
November 21-22, 2015

The opening two concerts for this year’s music festival at the Huntington Estate in Mudgee, NSW, augured well for the remaining concerts. Both concerts offered artists who were new to the festival as well as others who were familiar to the audience. The presence of the Austrian baritone Wolfgang Holzmair was especially welcome at this time when lieder recitals are rarely heard in Australia. At the first concert, he sang a group of Schubert songs; at the second, a group by Hugo Wolf. In a relatively quiet song such as Schubert’s Der Einsame, Holzmair’s singing was well-nigh perfect; in more dramatic songs, such as Schuberts Prometheus, Holzmair, like many other lieder singers today, sang much too loudly.

The Orava Quartet, composed of young guns who all seemed under thirty, gave an excellent performance on the opening night of Shostakovich’s Quartet No 6. This work, which dates from 1956, is a complex and serious composition without any of the seemingly trivial characteristics of much of this composer’s music. The Orava Quartet was equal to all...