INCREDIBLE FLORIDAS: CHAMBER LANDSCAPES CURATED BY KIM WILLIAMS FRIDAY 5–MONDAY 8 MARCH It’s uncommon knowledge that corporate leader Kim Williams is a composer and passionate philanthropic advocate for new Australian music. His 2017 Peggy Glanville-Hicks lecture, one of the most inspirational public statements on art ever delivered in this country, was triggered by anger at a former Prime Minister’s refusal to deem Peter Sculthorpe worthy of a State Funeral, and an anxiety that art music, ‘as core to my being as breathing,’ was in danger of becoming irrelevant to most. It was also peppered with wit and fun. Riffing on his friend Christopher Hogwood’s Academy of Ancient Music (which took its name from a seventeenth-century ensemble specialising in music two decades old, and, on occasion, pre-historic relics from a century ago), he proposed a hypothetical ‘New Academy of Ancient Australian Music’ to ‘promote… fresh creative adventure and to know and honour our creative past.’ The 2021 Adelaide Festival proudly gives him that opportunity: Incredible Floridas is an entertaining and mind-expanding weekend that honours our musical elders and mounts a bold assault on cultural amnesia. A stellar Australian cast performs not only major works by Sculthorpe, Glanville-Hicks, Richard Meale, Margaret Sutherland, Ross Edwards, Percy Grainger and Alfred Hill, but also those of the current generation that stand on their shoulders. All this alongside seminal European music of the twentieth century that deeply informed their styles.
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Yes, there is challenging material, but the curator’s hand balances it with ‘ancient’ and more recent hits: Elena Kats-Chernin’s Wild Swans Suite, Grainger’s Handel in the Strand, Satie’s Gnossiennes, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night and in a rare outing, the ‘other Right of Spring’: a theatrically authentic Pierrot Lunaire in all its glorious 1912 weirdness. There is even a screening of an experimental film by Peter Weir, and poetry readings will preface each fascinating program. Choose a concert, choose a day if you must but attendance for the entire weekend should be mandatory. It’s a UKARIA experience like no other. Generously supported by: Ulrike Klein AO The Mount Barker District Council Full program and tickets available at: adelaidefestival.com.au
