‘Visceral energy’: Coriole Music Festival promises musical crossroads
Contradictory worlds and the experience of opposites: classical music’s other side will be explored in Simon Cobcroft’s 2025 Coriole Music Festival.
There’s a reason Simon Cobcroft has titled his third program as Coriole Music Festival’s music director ‘Musical Crossroads’: a conviction that the unplanned collision of ideas is not a product of art’s misadventures but rather the fuel by which art thrives.
“It’s about all the wonderful places where folk art and high art meet, the profane meet, and fantasy and reality meet in their contradictory worlds,” Cobcroft tells InReview from Sydney, where he is associate principal cello of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
Cobcroft has planned three concerts for the festival’s 2025 edition that he says will illustrate how connecting the disconnected, and bringing previously unrelated ideas into union, is a process that underpins so much great art across the ages.
He implores us to expect the unexpected over the event’s two days. From the hallucinatory wonders and terrors of Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit to the jagged extremes of Nigel Westlake’s Piano Trio, audiences will encounter many meeting grounds where a fistful of experiences vie and jostle.
The journey will be “nothing too strict”, he says, but will be uncharted in feel to reflect the venturing, unpredictable spirit of the works that he has selected.
“By way of example, Ravel, who was described in the pejorative by Stravinsky as ‘a perfect Swiss watch maker’, was the perfectionist and technician who in some ways is a classicist at the crossroads in his mighty Gaspard de la nuit, where a fantasy world meets with that stylistic perfection,” Cobcroft says.
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This staggering piano work, one of the most frighteningly difficult pieces in the repertoire, will be performed by the British-Malaysian piano virtuoso pianist, Mei Yi Foo – one of the festival’s great coups in 2025.
Ravel reappears when Melbourne-based mezzo-soprano Victoria Lambourn sings his three exotic Chansons Madécasses (Madagascan Songs). This song cycle does not stem from any first-hand experiences Ravel had with Madagascar, but he nevertheless expresses a deep affinity with the island’s traditional culture and the tragic consequences of European settlement.
Cobcroft says the Chansons Madécasses may surprise us with the depth of feeling Ravel had for this ancient, isolated culture. The empathy he felt towards the Malagasy people allowed him to “express something fantastical and infused with folk ideals”.
Partnering Lambourn in this performance will be the internationally renowned UK flautist Joshua Batty — another impressive get — as well as Mei Yi Foo and Cobcroft himself on cello.
It is Mendelssohn, however, who holds central importance in this festival, and a clutch of his loveliest works adorn the second concert.
For his enchanting Sechs-Lieder, Op.63, Lambourn will be joined by soprano Lorina Gore, who returns to Coriole from 2021, and well-known pianist Anna Goldsworthy, the event’s previous artistic director. Afterwards comes Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio no.2 in C Minor, Op.66, in which we hear Lyrebird Trio, the longstanding group that Cobcroft formed with colleagues Glenn Christensen (violin) and Angela Turner (piano) when they graduated from the Queensland Conservatorium — this group delighted Coriole audiences last year with their terrific performance of Shostakovich.
According to Cobcroft, all these works show how a composer responds to diametrically different impulses to inspire their finest creativity. He cites the Second Piano Trio as example of how “extraordinary technical mastery and spiritual classicism merge with low brow ideas from Scottish folk music, forming one of Mendelssohn’s greatest compositions”.
“We might not appreciate the tensions within folk and classical ideas, but the irony [of their co-existence] is what gives all these masterpieces their greatness.”
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How this juxtaposition occurs is a topic of deep intrigue to Cobcroft. “I have pondered over many years the nature of conflicting ideas. There are so many masterpieces borne of this seeming contradiction.”
Cobcroft is fascinated by how coherence can be wrought from seemingly contradictory elements — like Brahms, Bartók or even Ligeti, all of whom in various ways fuse “the profane, fantasy and high art”.
This is born out in spectacular form in Bartók’s Contrasts, whose “violent assault and visceral energy” will be sampled in the third concert. This dance-based work will be performed by violinist Elizabeth Layton, clarinettist Philip Arkinstall, and Foo again on piano.
Another example is Brahms and his similar adoption of ‘lowbrow’ Hungarian folk music . His Piano Quartet no.1 in G Minor, Op.25, to be played by Lyrebird Trio, Foo and violist Justin Julian, features the infectiously racy ‘Rondo alla Zingarese’, alternatively known as Brahms’s ‘Gypsy Rondo’.
Of course, the idea of conflicting streams of thought feeding one another finds its quintessential place in later 20th-century and contemporary art, and Cobcroft has programmed a number of works to illustrate this.
Nigel Westlake’s Piano Trio will be a standout. One of this well-known Australian composer’s well-known works, it is prodigious in its emotional, intellectual and spiritual span. Lyrebird Trio will perform this in what should be a festival highlight. This work sums up all the complexity of the bustling post-modernist world in which we live, says Cobcroft.
An even newer work is Richard Mills’ Sonata for Cello and Piano. Commissioned for this year’s Coriole Music Festival, it will receive its world premiere in the event’s middle concert with Cobcroft partnered by Goldsworthy. Cobcroft calls it a “dramatic work” from a composer who “doesn’t compromise”.
“It should be a great drama, and we’re certainly looking forward to it,” he says.
Juxtaposing the familiar with the unfamiliar, enticing listeners into new territories, and coupled with the famously lavish food and wine that Coriole Vineyards turns on at these events, it promises to be a rewarding time.
Coriole Music Festival 2025 runs from May 17 – 18 at Coriole Vineyards