Melbourne winters were made for sitting in a beautiful room while someone plays something that makes you feel things.
Hawthorn Arts Centre is leaning all the way into that this August, with Strings and Voices, a four-Saturday concert series pairing incredible vocalists with string musicians across a month of performances in Melbourne.
Presented by Boroondara Arts & Beat, Strings and Voices brings together some extraordinarily interesting combinations.
From salon-style songwriting to amplified harp landscapes, queer chamber music and cinematic folk, the series covers a lot of ground without ever feeling scattered.
Strings and Voices
- 1 August — Lior and Xani, Hawthorn Arts Centre, 7:30 pm
- 8 August — Georgia Fields with Andromeda String Quartet and Happy Axe, Hawthorn Arts Centre, 7:30 pm
- 15 August — Harpedelique Ensemble and Invenio, Hawthorn Arts Centre, 7:30 pm
- 29 August — Homophonic! RESPECT and QiQi, Hawthorn Arts Centre, 7:30 pm
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Kicking things off on 1 August is Lior, a singer-songwriter who has built one of the most devoted followings in Australian music over a career spanning multiple decades and albums. He’ll be performing in a salon-style setup alongside a string quartet led by Nigel Westlake, a composer whose fingerprints are all over Australian cultural life, from concert halls to cinema screens. It’s an intimate format that suits Lior’s songwriting well, stripping things back to voice, melody and strings.
Also on the bill that night is violinist and composer Xani Kolac, who performs alongside bassist Meg Kolac in a set called Hymns for Atheists. The project sits somewhere between contemporary classical and art song, wrestling with big themes like identity, the natural world and what it means to be human without leaning on any religious scaffolding to do it.
The second Saturday, 8 August, pairs art-pop artist Georgia Fields with the Andromeda String Quartet in what looks like one of the more unexpected combinations of the series.
Georgia Fields works with live looping and layered vocals in a way that already has a textural, almost orchestral quality, so adding a string quartet led by violinist Natasha Conrau makes a certain kind of sense. The result is something that doesn’t sit neatly in any one genre, which is exactly the point.
Happy Axe rounds out the night with ambient pop built around close harmonies and unconventional rhythms, drawing heavily on nature as both subject and atmosphere.
On 15 August, Harpedelique Ensemble brings an amplified, effects-heavy approach to the harp that owes as much to film scoring as it does to classical performance.
Led by Liana Perillo with sound design by Fabian Aravalés, the ensemble pulls from a wide pool of influences, from Hans Zimmer to Coldplay, and the result is less a traditional concert and more an immersive sonic environment.
Sharing the stage is Invenio, a vocal ensemble led by Gian Slater, who will be debuting material from their forthcoming third album, Fight Eyes, making this one of the few chances to hear that work before it’s out in the world.
Closing the series on 29 August is Homophonic!, presenting RESPECT, a suite of newly commissioned pieces built around the experiences of LGBTIQA+ elders. Artistic Director Miranda Hill has been building Homophonic! into one of the most distinctive ensembles in contemporary classical music for over a decade, consistently finding ways to bring marginalised stories into the concert hall without flattening them.
Joining them is QiQi, a Melbourne-based Chinese-Australian composer and multi-instrumentalist whose work weaves together traditional Chinese instrumentation, jazz and contemporary composition into something genuinely hard to categorise.
Their project Elysian Blues picked up several Melbourne Fringe nominations and firmly put QiQi on the map as an artist worth following closely.
All four shows are on at Hawthorn Arts Centre, which is exactly the kind of intimate room that makes this sort of programming feel special rather than perhaps a little cavernous and disconnected.
Melbourne winters are long, but this August at least, they just got a whole lot more bearable.
For more information, head here.
Beat is a proud media partner of Strings and Voices.
