Adelaide Festival 2026

27 February:

And now for tour number two or the year, the one closest to home. Very privileged to lead this year's Adelaide Festival tour from today until Thursday for Hayllar Music Tours.

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28 February:

Last night our Adelaide Festival tour started in a sublime, enriching way. In the Adelaide Town Hall we experienced a program of German Lutheran church music from the 17th and 18th centuries performed by one of the world's leading early music ensembles, Pygmalion, under their founder director, Raphaël Pichon.

Regular readers will know I'm massive fan of Pichon, having heard his Berlin Philharmonic debut last December and before that experiencing his marvellous reconstruction of Rameau's Samson in Aix en Provence in 2024.

Last night's concert was beyond beautiful. The music, from a wide range of composers, was often unfamiliar, but of stunning quality. The performances were simply as perfect as one could wish for. There were 12 singers, 2 violins, 2 violas da gamba, cello, violone, recorder, bassoon, harpsichord, organ and theorbo. The sound was rich and gorgeous, and deeply moving. The 17th century works in particular exhibited a world-weariness and yearning for peace, even death, in the midst of the devastation of the Thirty Years War.

We're going to experience two more programs with these marvellous performers so expect the raves to continue.

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Saturday on our Hayllar Music Tours visit to the Adelaide Festival saw us head into the hills to the beautiful Ukaria Cultural Centre near Mt Barker. One of the world's best-known pianists, Olli Mustonen, was on hand to give us the immersion of a lifetime into the Beethoven piano sonatas.

Mustonen is giving three all-Beethoven programs in the Festival; we saw the first two today but will miss the third tomorrow. Still, we don't feel short-changed. We heard nine Beethoven piano sonatas over two concerts, and after each concert he still had energy to give us some encores.

The 11.00 am concert comprised...

Sonata No. 1 in F minor, Op. 2/1

Sonata No. 2 in A major, Op. 2/2

interval

Sonata No. 22 in F major, Op. 54

Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57 (Appassionata)

After a lovely buffet lunch we then experienced, at 2.30 pm...

Sonata No. 9 in E major, Op. 14/1

Sonata No. 7 in D major, Op. 10/3

interval

Sonata No. 24 in F-sharp major, Op. 78 (à Thérèse)

Sonata No. 25 in G major, Op. 79 (Cuckoo)

Sonata No. 26 in E-flat major, Op. 81a (Les Adieux)

The sheer stamina on display to get through this much monumental (and fiendishly difficult) music was jaw-dropping. Mustonen's style pulls no punches and takes no prisoners. It's powerful, in your face, even aggressive. It's not to everybody's taste but it made me imagine that this might be how Beethoven himself played these works. It certainly reminded me (a non pianist) of how utterly radical these works still sound after more than 200 years.

It was an extraordinary experience, enhanced by the beauty of Ukaria and its now fully-developed, gorgeous gardens. For we Adelaide people there was the bizarre sensation of seeing droplets of water fall from the sky - our interstate friends called it "rain" - but it didn't dampen our parade and a wonderful day was had.

Ukaria

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1 March:

Sunday at the Adelaide Festival started with a Q+A session with the festival's Artistic Director, something we're privileged to be able to do each year on this tour. Matthew Lutton is leading the first of his [currently] three contracted Adelaide Festivals and it was a delight to have him to ourselves for 45 minutes to answer my questions about the festival's program, methods and aspirations.

Joining him was Marshall McGuire, one of Australia's finest musicians and arts administrators, who is the festival's Classical Music Advisor (and a friend of mine of more years' standing than I think either of us would care to remember!). Marshall enhanced Matthew's insights with his own, specifically relating to the way the classical music program is run in an international festival of this scale.

Both men were thoroughly engaging, giving us a wonderful behind-the-scenes glimpse of the inner workings of this great event.

Then this afternoon we attended a play. If I say The Cherry Orchard you'd most likely think Chekhov, but this was something else. Brilliant Australian theatre director Simon Stone has written his own modern version of Chekhov's classic, set in Seoul in South Korea in the present day. This has then been translated into Korean, and performed by a troupe of leading Korean actors.

It was a brilliant thing, of that there's no doubt, but a couple of things stymied my own enjoyment of the performance. In the cavernous reaches of the Adelaide Festival Theatre, the actors were all miked to an extremely high level. The intensity of the play, often with many actors screaming at each other simultaneously, made the volume levels extremely uncomfortable for some, including myself. My tinnitus reacted badly and I'm still, some hours later, partly deaf in my right ear.

In the interests of fairness, many people weren't at all bothered by this so my reaction is just a personal one.

Being given in Korean, the performance was surtitled, but still being with only one properly functioning eye* I was unable to read the projections clearly, so I missed a great deal of what was going on. Again, this was a personal issue, and the audience by and large seemed to be able to follow the proceedings well with the surtitles. The audience response at the end was extremely positive, with many on their feet.

Our guests are also attending - if they wish - a number of optional performances at the festival which have been included in the Hayllar Music Tours itinerary. In these posts, though, I'm only writing about the events in the primary schedule for the tour.

*I was still in the recovery period following my cataract surgery.

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3 March:

Our Monday started with me giving a talk to our guests. Then in the early evening we had a wonderful dinner together before heading to our evening performance.

It's not often I'm lost for words but I'm trying to find some way of adequately describing what we experienced in that performance last night.

I've adored the Monteverdi Vespers ever since the wonderful Robert Constable taught us about it in music history lessons at the Conservatorium High School. It opened the world of Monteverdi, and the musical glories of the 17th century, to me at a time when I knew almost no music before Bach.

Last night at the Adelaide Festival I was part of a packed St Peter's Cathedral audience, witnessing a performance of the Vespers such as I've never experienced before. Raphaël Pichon directed a performance with his ensemble Pygmalion which has set the bar so high that I doubt I'll ever be satisfied with any other ever again.

It was musically thrilling, theatrically enthralling, emotionally enriching. This was no mere concert. It was beauty, pure and simple. Astonishing.

These musicians have recorded the Monteverdi Vespers, and their performance in the chapel at Versailles is available to see on YouTube. I can't recommend them highly enough.

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4 March:

Tuesday on our Hayllar Music Tours visit to the Adelaide Festival began with my fourth talk for our guests, covering the two performances on the day's schedule.

First was a lunch hour concert at Elder Hall, part of the "Breath and Bow" series curated by eminent British violinist Anthony Marwood. The two works on the program were Tomasi's Fanfare liturgiques (with, I think, the third movement omitted) and Beethoven's Septet Op 20. The musicians from the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra (led by Marwood in the Beethoven) gave us a lovely performance in a venue that contains countless memories for me.

Then in the evening we went to Her Majesty's Theatre to see Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine. This work pays tribute to the legendary Joséphine Baker (1906-75) and features the brilliant American soprano Julia Bullock in a one-woman show for soprano and six instrumentalists.

While there is no doubting Bullock's extraordinary vocal and dramatic skills, the piece itself left me rather unmoved. I'd done a lot of reading on Baker in preparation for my talk on her for our guests, and that background made much of what transpired in Perle Noire make sense. But the unrelentingly slow, mostly atonal score by Tyshawn Sorey (who played piano and percussion in the performance) seemed very old fashioned and tedious to me.

There was only one up-tempo number in the entire two hours of the show, and the text of the whole piece focused almost entirely on Baker's racial struggles. There were only fleeting references to her incredible career triumphs and her wartime heroism. The spoken texts were cringey and overlaid with so many pregnant pauses that the pace dragged and interest waned very quickly. I came away ultimately disappointed at a lost opportunity to reveal a great artist of the past in any depth.

This was the second show directed by Peter Sellars that I'd seen within the past year; the other was The Nine-Jewelled Deer in Aix en Provence last July, which I also found tedious and ultimately uncommuncative. In both cases what we were presented with was a concert with a bit of movement and some lighting, and from someone with his credentials I really expected more.

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I've just returned from the final Adelaide Festival performance of this current tour. This was the third program on offer from the wonderful Pygmalion ensemble, directed by the also wonderful Raphaël Pichon.

This was yet again 17th century music but whereas their first program was entirely in German (17th century Lutheran church music) and the second in Latin (the Monteverdi Vespers), this was a work in Italian which premiered in Paris in 1647 and which tonight received its first Australian performance.

Luigi Rossi - not a familiar name - lived from c. 1597 to 1653. He had strong connections with French-aligned nobility while working in the highest circles in Rome and these connections saw him spend time in France as well. Best known for his small-scale vocal music, he wrote two operas. The second of these, Orfeo, was premiered at the royal theatre In Paris then lost for two and a half centuries before being rediscovered in Rome in 1888.

I gave our tour guests a talk on Rossi and Orfeo this morning, after which we enjoyed a wonderful three course farewell lunch together.

Then tonight in the Adelaide Town Hall we witnessed an extraordinary concert performance of Rossi's Orfeo in which yet again Pichon and his musicians dazzled us with their virtuosity, musicianship, and sheer sensuous theatricality. The very large cast had not a weak link in it; every singer owned and inhabited their roles and held the audience captive for three hours (and this time there was an interval!).

Sadly, the surtitles were a shambles. The information on the projections was superb but whoever was operating them simply couldn't keep up. Great slabs of the second and third acts were spoiled by surtitles not keeping up with the singers, scrolling backwards and forwards, a huge distraction. I hope this is rectified in time for the second performance on Friday.**

Having Pygmalion here for the first week of the Adelaide Festival has been a coup for Adelaide and a thrill for those of us privileged to have witnessed all three of their programs.

**Since writing this for Facebook I discovered that the score being followed by the surtitle operator - presumably provided by the performers - was not a completely accurate reflection of the content of the performance.

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I'm so privileged to live here.