This Is Canberra

6 days ago | thisiscanberra.com | Ian Bushnell

This year’s Canberra International Music Festival will start with a bang as a new Australian work makes its world premiere at the opening concert on 30 April. The opening night at the Snow Concert Hall will be an all-strings affair called Fantasia, and the work is a violin concerto – Violin Concerto Sinfonia Sacra. Four Portraits of the Blessed Virgin – conceived by one of Australia’s most renowned composers, Richard Mills.

1 week ago | thisiscanberra.com | Sasha Grishin

Thom Roberts is an artist who has to transform the world around him into his own terms to make sense of it. He then proceeds to paint this transformed world. On encountering people, trains, buildings or cities, he has to give each of them his own nickname and then endows them with peculiar conceptual and visual attributes. For example, Shane Simpson is a high-profile, Sydney-based, art-loving lawyer who is on the board of many cultural institutions.

1 week ago | thisiscanberra.com | Morgan Kenyon

The largest Anzac Day crowd in Canberra is, of course, found at the Australian War Memorial. Thousands come together at the national institution every year for its annual dawn service and veterans’ march. But there’s another venue holding space for Australian and New Zealand military personnel this 25 April, set on the beautiful Kingston foreshore. Popular watering hole The Dock has proudly broadcast the Anzac Day dawn service since 2020 when COVID lockdown prevented in-person gatherings.

2 weeks ago | thisiscanberra.com | Sasha Grishin

Fifty years ago, three circumstances came together that led to Sidney Nolan’s gift to the nation. Nolan (1917-1992), who was then aged in his late 50s and had spent the preceding couple of decades living in England, was homesick and wanted to leave a major legacy for the country of his birth. For artists, the arts climate in Australia changed with the election of the Gough Whitlam federal Labor government in 1972 and Nolan felt that the time was right to support the arts in Australia.

1 month ago | thisiscanberra.com | Ian Bushnell

The Snow Concert Hall at Canberra Grammar School will host the first Australian appearance by the legendary Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, alongside acclaimed Australian-born pianist Kristian Bezuidenhout, this Saturday (29 March) in a night of Mozart and Bach. The Orchestra will open with J C Bach’s Symphony No. 6 and then treat the audience to a string of Mozart’s greatest hits.