General News
21 April, 2025
Warren Chamber Music Festival back with an international twist
The unique opportunity to witness world-class musicians play in remote and regional Australia returns early next month with the 2025 Warren Chamber Music Festival (WCMF).
Frances Evans, the founder and artistic director of the festival, has put together a wonderful list of performers for this year’s four-show extravaganza. The WCMF is a biennial event, and this year will mark the third instalment of the organisation that was founded in 2021.
This year’s festival includes two performances in Warren and one each in iconic halls in Nevertire and Collie. Four spectacular concerts will be held with world-class performers from across the southern hemisphere, including the internationally acclaimed New Zealand String Quartet.
The quartet (Te Ropu Turu o Aotearoa) is the country’s longest-serving professional chamber music ensemble, being established in 1987.
Those that attend any performance get a complete visitor experience including pre-concert chats with musicians, then performances and then even some informal catchups afterwards.
The WCMF will begin with the first concert on the Thursday in the GBS Falkiner Lounge, at Warren racecourse. This is a marquee event which includes a four-course meal paired with Huntington Estate wines complimented with a full bar service, presented alongside a curated program of music to match the culinary journey.
It is also the first of three consecutive evening concerts, the next two at Nevertire Memorial Hall and Collie CWA Hall.
The festival wraps up with the fourth and final concert, a daytime event, at the Warren Museum and Art Gallery. Sunday’s final experience titled ‘Lest We Forget Commemoration Concert’ is rural Australia’s first immersive live and digital commemoration concert paying tribute to the sacrifice and service of rural men and women. The concert includes the first regional performance of F S Kelly’s Elegy: In Memoriam Rupert Brooke. Frances Evan is a violinist, educator and collaborator residing on her family’s sheep and cattle property at Warren. Alongside her, Phil Leman, Dr John Burke, Marieanne Noonan and Rod Sandell make up the brains trust behind the festival. Frances studied violin and piano from a young age, her parents travelling over 200 kilometres fortnightly for lessons. After a varied musical career taking her across Australia she returned to Warren to run her family sheep and cattle property with her parents and husband Nick, a talented clarinet player.
“Even though we left the city to move to the bush, we have brought our music with us,” Frances said in a promotional video.
“Everyone living in the bush deserves world-class music … but I also really strongly believe that metropolitan musicians, musicians in orchestras and, chamber orchestras and bands, deserve to come to the bush and perform for hungry audiences who just crave and love the music that gets made.”
“We want to enrich the lives of locals, we want to bring world-class musicians to Warren and we want to empower and enrich people in the shire,” she said. This year marks the first time international artists has been engaged with the New Zealand String Quartet. Musicians from Queensland, Melbourne and Sydney symphony orchestras will also perform across the four shows along with a few members of New Zealand’s counterpart. “This festival is really a celebration of players from right across the southern hemisphere,” she said.
Renowned Australian composer Anne Cawrse has written a new work for the festival which will have its world premiere at Nevertire. It is the first time a piece of music in Australia has been commissioned specifically for that ensemble (clarinet quartet and chamber orchestra).
The SING Warren Community Choir will perform an arrangement of the English ballad ‘Scarborough Fair’, made famous by Simon and Garfunkel, and also John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ in conjunction with the festival chamber orchestra. “One of our aims is to make classical music really enjoyable and accessible to everybody because a lot of people don’t realise … that classical music can be enjoyed all the way out here.”
