“Study Bach,” said Johannes Brahms. “There you will find everything.” In his program for the 2019 Canberra International Music Festival, the festival’s 25th anniversary, Artistic Director Roland Peelman seems intent not only on proving Brahms correct, but taking his dictum to lengths that neither Bach nor Brahms could have imagined. Though Bach is at the centre of the Festival, if the opening concert at Canberra’s Fitters’ Workshop is anything to go by, this is no simple trotting out of classics, but a wide-ranging exploration of Bach, his legacy and resonances, that stretches from the Thomaskirche in Leipzig to the Central Desert of Australia and beyond. From the opening work, a fusion of Bach’s melodies with ambient, humming dissonances that engulfed the audience from all sides, this concert set out Peelman’s far-ranging vision in spectacular fashion.

Loure, written by the festival’s composers’ collective-in-residence, Jess Green, Bree van Reyk and Nick Wales, for this year’s Beaver Blaze (a tradition of world premieres to open the festival, which started with Elena Kats-Chernin in 2007) saw accumulating pitches gather around the audience from Van Reyk, Green, Wales and violinist Veronique Serret – stationed around the venue – before they joined the musicians of period...