Arcadia Winds

Carl Nielsen, the father of the modern wind quintet, famously said ‘you can take the flute out of Arcadia but you can never take Arcadia out of the flute’. Arcadia Winds was founded on the idea that the sounds of the wind quintet evoke the idea of Arcadia, that mythical heaven-on-earth, where birds and beasts live wild and free, where fauns and satyrs run carouse with nymphs and nature spirits, where Pan plays his pipes then dozes off in the summer sun.

‘Evocations’ is a truly Arcadian concert. In Music for Fleeting Birds, Vasks gives nature a musical voice, through freely-notated, improvisational textures that capture the rhapsodic and ephemeral nature of birdsong. Anne Cawrse’s Honeybee describes the lives of bees in a completely different but equally evocative way, juxtaposing harmonic buzzing with gorgeous, wistful melodies. And the fabulous wind quintet arrangement of The Rite of Spring captures Stravinsky’s classic in all its raw, paganistic glory.

Arcadia Winds are trailblazers for Australian wind music.

Awarded a fellowship at the Australian National Academy of Music upon their formation in late 2013, they became Musica Viva Australia’s inaugural FutureMakers musicians from 2015–17. They have brought their brand of energetic, joyful and spontaneous performance to festival stages in almost every state and territory in the country; concert halls across mainland China; and listeners around the world through broadcasts of the BBC Proms Australia chamber music series. And they have revelled in musical partnerships with internationally renowned performers including the Australian String Quartet; piano virtuosi Lambert Orkis, Paavali Jumppanen and Anna Goldsworthy; and woodwind masters Ole Kristian Dahl and Thorsten Johanns.

A desire to celebrate and promote Australian music has led Arcadia Winds to commission and perform works by composers such as Elliott Gyger, Natalie Williams, Andrew Ford, Lachlan Skipworth, Kate Neal, Peter de Jager, Sam Smith and Elizabeth Younan. In 2017, they recorded Lachlan Skipworth’s Echoes and Lines on their debut self-titled EP, released in partnership with ABC Classics and Musica Viva. Equally focused on inspiring a love of, and participation in, wind music in the next generation, Arcadia Winds developed an hour-long show for the Musica Viva In Schools (MVIS) program. Entitled The Air I Breathe, it showcased the magical transformation of breath into music to thousands of school children from 2017–20.

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