2026 Chamber Music Festival – Triptych of Shadows: Satie, Ullmann, Kouvaras

Meditations on love, death, memory, and what remains

Erik Satie’s luminous Socrate, performed by soprano Lily Flynn and pianist Coady Green, offers a serene, translucent meditation on the philosopher’s final hours, a work the composer called a “symphony in white.” Viktor Ullmann’s Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke, with actor Paul English and Green, transforms Rilke’s prose poem into a hallucinatory wartime monodrama composed in Theresienstadt before Ullmann’s death in Auschwitz. The program concludes with a world-premiere preview of Linda Kouvaras’s The Boarding House, Carlton, 1972: Those that Remain, narrated by Tiriki Onus and featuring baritone Alex Owens, with text by Richard Ward, a searing reimagining of memory, violence, and 1970s Melbourne.