Four Winds blow over length and breadth

Four Winds Easter Festival
April 18-21
Bermagui
★★★½

Beyond the familiar cultural hubs of Australia’s major metropolises, arts lovers the length and breadth of the country are well served by regional events.

However, few of these can match Bermagui’s Four Winds Festival for sheer evolutionary accomplishment. Some 28 years ago, when this fledgling classical music fest had its first outing, the stage was little more than a flatbed truck with a simple plywood reflector, rolled into a natural amphitheatre by untamed bushland on the Sapphire Coast.

From these humble beginnings, Four Winds has flourished and now boasts two sophisticated purpose-built venues – the outdoor Sound Shell and an intimate recital hall, the Wind Song Pavilion – at the same outback location.

The Four Winds Easter Festival blends art with nature and engages local audiences.Credit:

And it’s not just the facilities that have developed over the past three decades; an impressive roll call of past artistic directors have successively upped the ante of the Four Winds offering.

Now in the hands of noted accordionist James Crabb, legacy, accessibility and community appear to be the central tenets of the festival’s current identity, with a particular emphasis on cultivating young musicians and engaging with local audiences.

This year’s program featured an eclectic and often mercurial mix of repertoire both old and new, with a combination of marquee level international artists rubbing shoulders with home-grown talents, including the likes of the Australian String Quartet, Arcadia Winds and a superb contingent of students from ANAM.

In residence this year, the country’s most prolific composer, Elena Kats-Chernin, received a rock-star reception, her personal brand of approachable, easy-listening proving a big hit with a thoroughly enthusiastic crowd.

Lutenist Jakob Lindberg on stage with British soprano Emma Kirby.Credit:

Of the imported headliners, Viennese pianist Stefan Vladar was perhaps the least known quantity. Tackling an ambitious evening of core masterworks, including Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata and Schubert’s sonata in B flat major, his solo recital revealed him as a musician for whom passion and spectacle outrank precision and safety.

This showboating joyride certainly delivered some thrilling moments, but a little less haste and little more subtlety might have better served the music’s truest intentions.

By contrast, British soprano and early music icon Emma Kirkby’s performance of Italian, French and English Baroque lute songs, alongside lutenist Jakob Lindberg, was as delicate as it was detailed. While there were odd moments when the voice was less secure, Kirkby was nonetheless a masterful storyteller, somehow capable of extreme intimacy and epic theatricality in the same breath.

The culmination of the weekend’s festivities saw an all-star scratch band of festival artists assembled for a rousing performance of Beethoven’s third piano concerto, with Vladar as both conductor and soloist.

Four Winds Easter FestivalCredit:

With an impromptu chorus of birdsong overhead joining the orchestral ranks, it was a fitting finale for an event that so perfectly brings together art in nature.

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