Hobart Baroque 2014 program announced

Julia Lezhneva

From a standing start in April 2013, HOBART BAROQUE is already established as a
significant new player on the Australian cultural scene.

Just as Hobart is unique among Australian capitals, so its exciting new music festival. It
is the only festival in the country solely dedicated to performance of music of the late
seventeenth and early 18th centuries

The inaugural HOBART BAROQUE in April 2013 was a spectacular success with public
and critics alike. Impressed by the response and the exceptional number of interstate
visitors, and recognizing its enormous potential, the State Government of Tasmania has
increased support for HOBART BAROQUE, seeing it as a perfect foil for MONA FOMA and
DARK MOFO, the two equally original local festivals created by MONA.

“With our second annual festival, HOBART BAROQUE consolidates its position as yet
another innovative cultural event particular to Tasmania”, said Executive Director,
Jarrod Carland.

“With its superb array of historic buildings and compact scale, Hobart is in many ways
the perfect city for a highly focussed festival of this nature.”

Artistic Director, Leo Schofield AM said, “As this event grows in scale and importance,
as it surely must, and attracts larger audiences and even more musicians of the highest
calibre, local and international, other magnificent heritage buildings, houses and
churches will be drafted as performances venues. The concept of early music in early
buildings is rock solid and the stock of possible sites almost inexhaustible.”

“We are honoured to have been enabled to create something unique on this already
unique island and we thank the State Government, our many supporters and the people
of Hobart and Tasmania for helping us lend substance to what has remained for a long
time just a dream, not only ours but also that of others before us”, said Schofield.

The second HOBART BAROQUE offers an exceptional range of events, including a fully
staged performance of Orlando, an operatic masterpiece by Handel. This beautiful
production by director Chas Rader-Shieber and designer David Zinn premiered at
Glimmerglass Festival, the company at the forefront of Baroque resurgence in the USA,
and was later shown to great acclaim at Lincoln Centre in New York.

The young and prodigiously talented Russian coloratura soprano Julia Lezhneva came to
international attention when, at just seventeen years of age, she won the Grand Prix at
the 6th Elena Obraztsova International Competition for Opera Singers in St Petersburg.
Now twenty-three, she is in demand in opera houses and concerts hall throughout the
world and being touted as the next Cecilia Bartoli. HOBART BAROQUE is honoured to host
this astonishing young singer in her only Australian performance with orchestra. She will
appear in an exclusive concert with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra.

Barcelona-born countertenor Xavier Sabata makes his Australian debut in a brilliant
recital exclusive to HOBART BAROQUE, featuring Orchestra of the Antipodes, conducted
by Erin Helyard. His latest CD, BAD GUYS, an album of arias that Handel wrote for some
of the nastier characters in his operas has had critics scrambling for superlatives.

Helsinki-born Timo-Veikko Valve was one of the virtuoso cellists in MONACELLO, an
outstanding attraction in the inaugural HOBART BAROQUE festival. He returns with his
superb 1725 Italian Baroque instrument, complete with gut strings, to play three of
Bach’s magnificent unaccompanied cello sonatas. This is a great opportunity to
experience these masterpieces as the composer himself would have heard them.

The marvellous Melbourne early music ensemble Latitude 37 returns to the scene of its
triumphant HOBART BAROQUE debut with a program featuring Bach, Handel and their
contemporaries.

Keyboard virtuosos Erin Helyard and Donald Nicolson alternate in a selection of the
best-known and best-loved sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, each a miniature
masterpiece, in the special event, Duelling Harpsichords.

Young Greek guitar virtuoso and composer Smaro Gregoriadou will play music from the
Baroque (Bach, Scarlatti, Handel) through to the present. She’ll play on three guitars
differing in type, number and material of strings, timbre and tunings. The guitars were all
built by Yorgos Kertsopoulos, whose instruments embody exhaustive historical and
aesthetic research with practical acoustic applications for modern audiences.

Key soloists from the Orchestra of the Antipodes will combine in chamber configuration
to perform Bach and Handel on original instruments, mixing familiar favourites with
some surprising lesser known works in a final celebration of the Town Hall series.

Participating artists include performers on the cusp of significant international careers
as well as many fine young Australian musicians, with a special emphasis on young
Tasmanian performers.

As HOBART BAROQUE is not restricted by a charter to present only work that emanates
from other islands, HOBART BAROQUE 2014 will showcase artists and musicians from
Finland, Spain, the UK, Israel, Greece, Russia, New Zealand and Turkey. This is truly an
international festival.

And in a ground-breaking innovation a special series of early evening recitals aimed at
gently easily young audiences into an appreciation of classical music, has a ticket price
of just five dollars.

The festival is supported by the Tasmanian Government through Events Tasmania.

HOBART BAROQUE will run from Friday 28 March – Saturday 5 April 2014.
Tickets go on sale to the general public Monday 18 November 2013 at 9am.

For program and ticketing information:

HOBARTBAROQUE.COM.AU

• The small island with Big Ideas

• Listen, read reviews of …

Julia Lezhneva

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cysUerSgnWc

Xavier Sabata


http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/feb/06/handel-bad-guys-review

Kathryn Lewek – starring in Orlando
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT92xXQXX00
Hobart Baroque