The International Akaroa Music Festival 2026

The International Akaroa Music Festival 2026 New Zealand's premiere residential Summer School and Concert Series

If you have never experienced an extended live-in music festival, be prepared to work hard, have fun, and play better than you thought you could. Our students come from all over New Zealand, Australia and from abroad, and the friendships made here are ones that last. Mix work with and pleasure in Akaroa, the gem at the heart of the remarkable Banks Peninsula.

29/04/2026
29/04/2026

This Friday, Ensemble Lumen – Elizabeth Layton (violin), Edith Salzmann (cello), Lloyd Van't Hoff (clarinet) and Anna Goldsworthy (piano) – perform Messiaen's monumental Quartet for the End of Time in our Elder Hall lunchtime concert. 🎹🎻🌈

'In 1941, in Stalag VII A, a German prisoner-of-war camp in in Görlitz, Germany, the prisoners assembled in the theatre barrack for a concert. They were a mixed bunch, of varying nationality and background, and probably very cold. It was freezing outside; the barrack was unheated. Four prisoner-musicians walked out on to the stage, dressed in rags and clogs. One of them was the composer Olivier Messiaen, and they sat down and performed a work he had composed while in captivity: his Quartet for the End of Time.

The audience was silenced by this. No-one there had ever heard anything like this before, because nothing like this had ever been written. It was war-time music that was neither protest nor propaganda but music of rapture. Perhaps all music is a type of escapism – and these prisoners certainly had more to escape from than most – but the enormous ambition of this quartet is to escape from time itself. You don’t need to understand Messiaen’s musicological theories in order to appreciate this. Playing or listening to this music is a spiritual experience, even outside a barrack. In that barrack, under those conditions, it must have been one of the most extraordinary musical experiences of all time.'

– Anna Goldsworthy

📅 Friday 1 May 1.10pm
📍 Elder Hall

Tickets 👇
https://uofa.sales.ticketsearch.com/sales/salesevent/159930

31/03/2026

A huge congratulations to Elder Conservatorium faculty member Dr Edith Salzmann, who has very recently completed her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree – one of the very last to be conferred through the University of Adelaide. A significant achievement in its own right, this news is all the more remarkable given that Edith has, for several years now, balanced the heavy workload of her PhD with an abundance of other demanding activities, including her role as Lecturer in Cello and Associate Director of the Open Music Academy (OMA); Artistic Director of the Akaroa Music Festival in New Zealand, and a busy performance schedule that has included regular performances with Ensemble Lumen.

Her PhD project, entitled 'Performing the Cello Works of Friedrich Kiel in Context and Practice: A Portfolio of Premiere Recordings and Exegesis', explores the largely forgotten cello and piano repertoire of Friedrich Kiel (1821–1885) and his students, uncovering links between this lesser-known compositional tradition and the development of nineteenth-century cello playing. Focusing on the influence of the Dresden School and advances in technique and interpretation at Berlin's Universität der Künste, the research offers new insights into the instrument's history and highlights the close collaboration between composers and performers that helped shape modern cello technique.

📸: Mike Smith

19/12/2025

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

08/12/2025
16/10/2025

✨OUT NOW✨ The Dorrit Ensemble presents a new series of William Shield's complete chamber works! The first volume features Shield's 'Six String Quartets, Op. 3', which this work is one of the richestly rewarding works of their type in 18th-century England. The transparency of parts, use of imitation, infusion of Sturm und Drang elements, as well as the bucolic and folkloric writing, all demonstrate Shield’s art, as does the progressive writing of the last of the six, in C minor.

🎶DISCOVER: https://naxos.lnk.to/8574446FA

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