About Arcadia Winds

Arcadia Winds are trailblazers for Australian wind music, known for their energetic, spontaneous and joyful style. The ensemble celebrates the plethora of compositions that exist for wind quintet from classical repertoire and new works by Australian composers to inventive arrangements of music spanning the ancient to the popular.

About the concert

Their performance in Primrose Potter Salon explores fantasy and invention. Opening with Ravel’s piano Sonatine arranged for wind quintet, this concert evokes a sense of beauty, elegance and spaciousness.

Followed by three short fantasies spanning three hundred years, the ensemble begins with Telemann’s Fantasia for solo flute in A minor, a baroque dance suite in perfect microcosm.

Oliver Knussen’s Three Little Fantasies is a set of quirky miniatures creating a whirlwind of sounds fit for the wind quintet. Followed by the World Premiere of Elizabeth Younan’s Fantasy No. 8 for solo bassoon, a tour de force written for Arcadia Winds own Matthew Kneale.

The program concludes with a spectacular arrangement of Mozart’s Variations on Ah vous dirais-je maman, which takes the familiar and reimagines it with his unrelenting genius.