Chamberfest traces creation stories from Hildegard to Brett Dean

Jonathan Ware has a habit of building programs that feel like arguments rather than playlists, and Origins is the clearest example yet. The pianist has spent years threading a single idea through disparate centuries of music, and here that idea is creation itself: how cultures explain where things come from, and how music has carried those stories forward.

The first half begins as far back as you can reasonably go in Western concert music, with Hildegard von Bingen's plainchant, then moves through Fauré's La Chanson d'Ève, which retells Genesis from Eve's point of view rather than Adam's. A lesser-known Mozart work exploring faith and conviction sits alongside it. Soprano Siobhan Stagg performs throughout this stretch, and from the sound of it she's less a soloist dropping in than a narrator holding the whole sequence together.

After a 25-minute interval, the second half opens with what the program notes describe as a ghostly a cappella passage before edging toward Haydn's Creation, the granddaddy of the genre. Brett Dean's In This Brief Moment, a compact evolution cantata, responds directly to Haydn's 18th-century vision of how the world came to be, which is the kind of pairing that makes a program like this worth attending rather than just admiring on paper. Sibelius's Luonnotar follows, drawing on Finnish mythology and its primordial waters, before two songs by Nikolai Medtner close the arc.

Ware developed Origins during lockdown, which tracks. It's the sort of program you build when you have time to sit with an idea rather than assemble a season in a hurry. It's already been performed at Berlin's Pierre Boulez Saal and London's Wigmore Hall, so Adelaide isn't getting a workshop version.

The staging leans into atmosphere: candlelight, music boxes, layered vocal textures. That's a reasonable set of tools for a program that's fundamentally about how music marks time and passes understanding between generations, rather than one built around virtuosic display for its own sake.

Tickets run $80 adult, $75 concession and $40 for under-40s, for a 1 hour 45 minute performance. Chamberfest audiences who like their chamber music with a genuine intellectual throughline should find plenty here. This isn't background listening; it's a program that wants you to follow its logic from Hildegard to Medtner and see the pattern.