Music Festival at Christ Church

A Music Festival will be held at Christ Church in Daylesford on Saturday 18 March.

Four separate concerts will present some of the finest chamber music and showcase both leading and emerging musicians from our local region, Melbourne, interstate and overseas. They will be performing music composed over a 500 year period, including some contemporary music, composed by the musicians themselves.

The Artists include Hepburn Players, The Recorder Co-op, Auncient Hermony and soloist Sergio Ercole.

Hepburn Players are a community orchestra based in Victoria’s Central Highlands. Originally formed as Newlyn Players during the pandemic to find joy in local music making, the group comprises a happy mix of professional musicians and enthusiastic amateur players. Recent performances in Creswick and Newlyn have featured concertos and sonatas drawn from the incredibly rich and varied repertoire of music for Baroque string orchestra. Their program to be performed in the Church, ranges from late Renaissance, through Baroque to the Classical period with works by Dowland, Monteverdi, Handel, Haydn and Telemann. The Telemann Viola Concerto and Haydn Concerto for Violin and Harpsichord will be highlights along with local tenor, Tim Drylie’s two songs by Dowland and Monteverdi.

The first concert in Stanbridge Hall will feature The Recorder Co-op a quartet made up of some of Australia’s most well-known recorder players. With matched recorder consorts built by recorder makers, Denmark’s Ture Bergstrøm and New Zealand’s David Coomber, this ensemble brings back the authentic sounds of the Renaissance era.

Comfortable with many musical styles they have a passion for commissioning new works for Renaissance style recorders, drawing from the deep past these special instruments speak to contemporary Australia. In this vein their program includes works by Benjamin Thorn, Miggs Coggan, Rachel Cogan and Ryan Williams heard with the ensemble Saltbush at last year’s Christ Church Concerts. Renaissance composers represented include Byrd, Palestrina, Gervaise, Cabezon, Isaac and Verdelot.

The afternoon concerts will commence with the intimate early music ensemble Auncient Hermony in the Church. Performing together for over 25 years they have established an enviable reputation for graceful, nuanced, historically informed and dramatic  performance style.

They bring a wealth of experience as well as academic scholarship. Auncient Hermony [“awn- shunt-hehr-moh-nee”] is the lowland Scots translation of the English term “Ancient Harmony”. Mezzo soprano Vivien Hamilton is accompanied by baroque guitar, theorbo, recorder, viola da gamba, organ and harpsichord. The musical and cultural friendship between singer and instrumentalist is the nuanced fabric which binds the group’s exploration of early music encompassing English, Scottish, French, Spanish, Italian and German Renaissance and Baroque repertoire. Their program Paradiso presents a selection of elegant yet virtuoso masterpieces for these periods.

The afternoon concert in the Hall will feature solo Florentine born Latin Classical guitarist, Sergio Ercole. With a Masters of Music from Melbourne University, Sergio has studied classical guitar with many master guitarists and worked in diverse musical fields, including Orchestra Victoria, New Zealand Symphony, The Cat Empire and ABC TV. He is also a founding member of original Latin/Pop group The Reg Cole Quartet. He has also appeared in many local and overseas guitar festivals. He is active in guitar education through his role as Head of Guitar at Haileybury in which he has collaborated with many guitarists and composers, including Tommy Emmanuel, the Grigoryan Brothers, Karin Schaupp and Paul Svoboda. Sergio’s program includes works by Vivaldi and Handel, 3 Latin Dances by Sergio, some works from Brasil and Argentina and by Heitor Villa-Lobos and Isaac Albéniz.

Bookings can be made at https://www.trybooking.com/events/landing?eid=1012489&