UKARIA Cultural Centre
June 11, 2018

UKARIA Cultural Centre’s annual UKARIA 24 festival centres on the vision of its guest curator, who is given (more or less) carte blanche to program as they see fit. Australian recorder player Genevieve Lacey curated the inaugural festival in 2016, while accordionist James Crabb curated last year’s festival. In 2018, German-French cellist Nicolas Altstaedt – artistic director of the Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival, which inspired UKARIA 24 – brought his unique musical vision (and a handful of world-class soloists) to the Adelaide Hills, presenting an intelligent program of music from Haydn and Bach to John Cage and Jörg Widmann, in a festival humming with Altstaedt’s own intense energy, musical flexibility and zest for multi-disciplinary collaboration.

While the evening concerts on the Saturday and Sunday were the larger programs, the short morning concerts were just as stimulating. Visual Polyphony on the Sunday saw two dancers from Australian Dance Theatre joining Altstaedt for athletic performances centred around Bach’s Cello Suites, in remarkably natural duets between instrument and body. Zoë Dunwoodie found a writhing dynamism in the famous first suite, while Matte Roffe’s performances was more liquid, though no less athletic, his choreography to the fifth suite evoking...