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Chamber Music Festival 2026
Coady Green and fortyfivedownstairs present
Chamber Music Festival 2026
21 April – 3 May 2026
SHOW DETAILS:
Tuesday 21 April – Sunday 3 May 2026
times: the schedule varies so please check the times below before booking tickets
ticket price: $32-$48
bookings: 03 9662 9966
Click on the buttons below to buy tickets to individual concerts. If you would like to purchase a package to see multiple concerts at a reduced price, click HERE.
Opening Night: Hamlet, Ophelia and a Midsummer Night
Tuesday 21 April, 7:30pm
To open the 2026 Chamber Music Festival, pianists Coady Green, Ian Munro and Charlotte Roberts will be joined by renowned actor Helen Morse to present a program inspired by the Bard – Edward MacDowell’s Hamlet and Ophelia Opus 22 arranged for two pianos, Sally Beamish’s Sonnets for three pianists on two pianos (narrated by Morse), Liszt’s Hamlet S.644 arranged for two pianos, and Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream Opus 61 arranged for four hands (narrated by Morse).
Dante’s Lovers and Visionaries
Wednesday 22 April, 7:30pm
Inspired by Dante’s La Commedia, this evocative program traces a journey from the torments of Inferno to the redemptive vision of Paradise. Liszt’s monumental Après une lecture du Dante features amongst a sequence of works exploring Dante’s most compelling figures, including the tragic Francesca da Rimini. At the heart of the concert is the world-premiere of Gordon Kerry’s major song cycle Dante and Beatrice, performed by soprano Rachel Joyce, mezzo-soprano Dimity Shepherd, tenor Boyd Owen, and baritone Christopher Hillier. Drawing on Sir Samuel Griffith’s English translation (OUP, 1911), with story adaptation by Margot Costanzo and libretto by Costanzo and Kerry, the cycle charts Dante’s spiritual passage toward Beatrice. Music by Granados and new commissions, including Gulliver Poole’s Paper Love, create an unmissable Dantean tableau.
Beethoven 9th Symphony arranged by Franz Liszt
Thursday 23 April, 7:30pm
Legendary Australian pianist Michael Leslie returns from Germany to join Melbourne virtuoso Peter de Jager for a monumental musical event: Franz Liszt’s epic two-piano arrangement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. A towering feat of pianistic imagination, Liszt’s arrangement is a complete re-creation of Beethoven’s orchestral, choral, and solo forces through the hands of just two performers. In this dazzlingly difficult tour de force, two pianists at two pianos conjure the full sonic architecture of the symphony, from its elemental opening to the transcendence of the “Ode to Joy.” Liszt, himself the greatest piano virtuoso of the nineteenth century, created these symphonic transcriptions to bring the orchestral canon to wider audiences before the age of recording. Today, the Ninth Symphony arrangement remains one of the rarest and most formidable works in the entire piano duet repertoire, seldom performed, and even more rarely attempted live in concert.
My Favourite Penis Poems (and Other Love Stories)
Friday 24 April, 7:30pm
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Del Tredici was one of the first major classical composers to fully embrace queerness in a radical act of joy, eroticism, and defiance. This concert highlights two sides of Del Tredici’s queer expression. There’s the outrageously camp My Favourite Penis Poems – a virtuosic, hilarious, and unabashed song cycle setting his favourite poems on the rise and fall of His Majesty, the Penis – and the deeply moving Gay Life – a meditative and tender exploration of queer identity, composed in 2001. Both works receive their Australian premieres, performed by a sensational ensemble of musicians including acclaimed American pianist and Del Tredici’s longtime friend, Marc Peloquin, baritone Bailey Montgomerie, tenor Boyd Owen, and soprano Marjorie Hannah.
From Verona to Manhattan: Romeo and Juliet in Music
Saturday 25 April, 7:30pm
Opening with Bellini’s rarely heard overture on the warring Montagues and Capulets, this celebration of Shakespeare’s timeless love story continues with Linda Kouvaras’ The Nurse’s Curse from She Who Should Have Been a Queen, Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story for two pianos, the Australian premiere of Tchaikovsky’s epic Romeo and Juliet Overture arranged for two pianos by Karl Klindworth, and Ned Rorem’s Four Dialogues, a witty and lyrical set for two voices and two pianos. Performers include pianists Coady Green and Marc Peloquin and soprano Elena Xanthoudakis.
The Melbourne Mozart Project
Sunday 26 April and Sunday 3 May
Click HERE for more information on this exciting series of events.
Brahms, Liszt & Mendelssohn: Hungarian Fire and Italian Light
Tuesday 28 April, 7:30pm
Performers Josephine Vains (cello), Sofija Kirsanova (violin), Coady Green (piano), and Ricardo Roche Idini (piano) combine forces in this expansive celebration of Romantic colour, vitality, and collective virtuosity. The program begins with the complete set of 21 Hungarian Dances by Johannes Brahms. Arranged for piano four hands, violin and cello, and overflowing with melodic buoyancy, rhythmic bite and emotional depth, these dances remain among Brahms’s most captivating works. This is followed by Franz Liszt’s blazingly virtuosic Hungarian Rhapsody, also arranged for piano four hands with strings, and an arrangement of Felix Mendelssohn’s exuberant Symphony No. 4, the Italian, whose sunlit energy and lyrical sweep bring the concert to a jubilant close.
Meta Cohen and Olivier Messiaen: Prophecy and Eternity
Thursday 30 April, 7:30pm
A rare opportunity to encounter one of the twentieth century’s great visionary masterworks: Olivier Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen, performed by Coady Green and Marc Peloquin on two pianos. Composed during the Second World War, this vast, mystical meditation moves from creation and love to judgment and eternity, revealing Messiaen as theologian, mystic, and ecstatic colourist. The program opens with Delphi Songs by Meta Cohen, performed by Jessica Aszodi and Coady Green, a haunting cycle inspired by prophecy and the final Oracle of Delphi, whose voice foretold the end of her own sacred order. Also featured is Cohen’s brand new piano suite The Warning Never Heard, based on the myth of Cassandra. Spanning millennia, Cohen’s work contemplates revelation, authority, and the fading boundary between divine utterance and human mortality.
The Crossing Machine performs The Juliet Letters by Elvis Costello and The Brodsky Quartet
Friday 1 May, 7:30pm
Melbourne string quartet The Crossing Machine (violinists Marianne Rothschild and Matthew Rigby, violist Margaret Butcher and cellist Charlotte Jacke) will be joined by vocalist Jordan Z to perform The Juliet Letters, the genre-defying song cycle created by Elvis Costello in collaboration with The Brodsky Quartet. Originally released in 1993, The Juliet Letters is a sequence of letters written to Shakespeare’s Juliet, revealing a gallery of fractured lives, longing, regret, and dark wit. Since beginning this project in 2018, The Crossing Machine has been breathing new life into the work, approaching it with deep respect for the score while bringing a distinctly contemporary energy and emotional clarity. The quartet is currently in the final stages of an exciting new CD release and this performance forms part of a small number of anticipated launch concerts planned for 2026.
Triptych of Shadows: Satie, Ullmann, Kouvaras
Saturday 2 May, 7:30pm
Meditations on love, death, memory, and what remains
Erik Satie’s luminous Socrate, performed by soprano Lily Flynn and pianist Coady Green, offers a serene, translucent meditation on the philosopher’s final hours, a work the composer called a “symphony in white.” Viktor Ullmann’s Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke, with actor Paul English and Green, transforms Rilke’s prose poem into a hallucinatory wartime monodrama composed in Theresienstadt before Ullmann’s death in Auschwitz. The program concludes with a world-premiere preview of Linda Kouvaras’s The Boarding House, Carlton, 1972: Those that Remain, narrated by Tiriki Onus and featuring baritone Alex Owens, with text by Richard Ward, a searing reimagining of memory, violence, and 1970s Melbourne.
The Melbourne Mozart Project Part I: Four Concerts of Mozart Piano Concertos in One Day
Sunday 26 April
A festival within a festival, The Melbourne Mozart Project celebrates Mozart through two parallel musical journeys. Part I: Rising Stars showcases Melbourne’s most exceptional young pianists in a one-day concerto marathon. Across four concerts, pre-tertiary soloists perform complete Mozart piano concertos, partnered by some of our finest established instrumentalists accompanying in string arrangements of the orchestral parts. Curated by leading pianist-educators Coady Green and Glenn Riddle, the project offers these outstanding young musicians a rare professional platform within the fortyfivedownstairs Chamber Music Festival. A celebration of mentorship, virtuosity, and musical inheritance, Rising Stars reveals the next generation of Mozart interpreters in performances of brilliance, ambition, and joy.
Concert 1: The Early Spark – 11:00am
Piano Concerto No. 5 in D major, K.175: Soloist: Seth Raudam
Piano Concerto No. 8 in C major, K.246 Soloist: Malik Johnston
Piano Concerto No. 12 in A major, K.414 Soloist: Charlie Wu
Concert 2: The Virtuoso Emerges – 1:30pm
Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat major K. 595 Jeunehomme Soloist: Diego Yu
Piano Concerto No. 11 in F major, K.413 Soloist: Jacqueline Wang
Piano Concerto No. 13 in C major, K.415 Soloist: Caitlin Au
Concert 3: Shadows and Light – 4:00pm
Piano Concerto No. 14 in E-flat major, K.449: Soloist: Arul Verty
Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat major K. 482 Solo: Jack Brunialti-Sykes
Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K.466 Solo: Charlotte Roberts
Concert 4: Masterworks – 7:30pm
Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major, K.467 “Elvira Madigan” Soloist: Abby Zhao
Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, K.488 Soloist: Oriana Kang-Kurniawan
Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K.503 Soloist: Stefania Robu
Ticket Prices:
Full: $42-$48
Concession: $32-$38
Group 6+: $32-$38
Concessions:
Pensioners/Full-time students/MEAA members
Ticket sales are subject to a booking fee of $5.00 per ticket plus any merchant charges for payments by American Express
Ticket fees are charged reluctantly. As an unfunded CBD located venue, our expenses continue to rise. If fortyfivedownstairs is to survive, we are obliged to increase our revenue without inflicting costs on already struggling artists. Without support, we risk losing artists or having to close our doors. We do hope for your understanding!
Book to see three or more concerts and receive a discount! Click the buttons below to book online or call (03) 9662 9966.
What inspired you to launch the Festival back in 2023?
I felt there was a real gap in Melbourne for a major chamber music festival that brings together leading Australian artists and outstanding visiting performers, while also championing adventurous and diverse repertoire. The ethos of fortyfivedownstairs itself, eclectic, artist-driven, and creatively fearless, felt like the perfect match too. From the beginning, the vision was to create an intensive two-week program where audiences could experience both beloved masterworks and bold new music side by side, and where diversity of voices, styles, and perspectives is genuinely at the centre of the programming.
What do you love about performing at fortyfivedownstairs?
I first performed at fortyfivedownstairs in 2008, when I was living in London and returning to Australia every year or two. I loved it immediately, for both its resonance and captivating atmosphere. It is an unexpected “loft-style” performance space of the kind that you find in New York and Berlin. I also know so many colleagues – actors, visual artists, sound designers and musicians – who share this love, so it has a community spirit as well.
For a patron who hasn’t attended a Chamber Music Festival event, what would you recommend as an introduction?
Try opening night – Helen Morse reciting excerpts from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Nights’ Dream, accompanied by Mendelssohn’s beautiful (and virtuosic) incidental music… Or come along to a night inspired by Romeo and Juliet, with visiting American virtuoso Marc Peloquin, featuring works from Tchaikovsky to Bernstein… Or a vivid night with the complete Brahms Hungarian Dances, arranged for piano four hands, violin and cello, paired with Mendelssohn’s 4th Symphony. Or the world-premiere of Gordon Kerry’s new song cycle Dante and Beatrice in a concert of works inspired by Dante… Or the complete works by Mozart for piano four hands and two pianos in two concerts on Sunday May 3rd – something you’ll likely never experience again in this way. There’s also the monumental Liszt arrangement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony for two pianos, a piece so rarely performed, with visiting guest artists Michael Leslie and Peter de Jager.
Another monumental work for two pianos that many people love but is rarely played is Messiaen’s exquisite Visions de l’Amen, which I will be playing with guest Marc Peloquin. This is an enormous work, and really very special. We are pairing it with Meta Cohen’s evocative song cycle on the statements of the oracle at Delphi – Delphi Songs.
And what would you suggest to the patron who sees numerous live music performances who is looking for something new and surprising?
The late, Pulitzer-Prize-Winning American composer David Del Tredici features in the festival, with two Australian premieres – his profoundly moving song-cycle for baritone and piano, Gay Life, and the outrageous My Favourite Penis Poems. Need I say more?
For regular patrons, I wouldn’t miss the Messiaen Visions de l’Amen, which is such a great, epic work. Another wonderful surprise is the complete Elvis Costello Juliet Letters, performed by the Melbourne string quartet The Crossing Machine, with guest vocalist Jordan Z.
Also in the new and surprising category – a performance of a new song cycle for baritone, piano and narrator by Linda Kouvaras, with narration about local (and very surprising) stories from Carlton… this is paired with a rare performance of Satie’s beautiful Socrate, taking text from Plato, and Viktor Ullman’s Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke, with actor Paul English, which transforms Rilke’s prose poem into a hallucinatory wartime monodrama composed in Theresienstadt before Ullmann’s death in Auschwitz.