Festival Program

10:00 am The Pavilion, The Ville Resort-Casino

Concert Conversations

CONCERT CONVERSATIONS NUMBER ONE

These highly entertaining morning concerts begin with Artistic Director Jack Liebeck chatting to visiting Festival musicians about all sorts of fascinating personal and professional aspects of their lives. This is followed by a 45-minute performance. Includes light refreshments beforehand.

Jack Liebeck and Damien Beaumont interview Lotte Betts Dean, Emmanual Cassimatis, Alice Giles and Paul Dean.

2:30 pm Townsville Civic Theatre - C2

AFCM Illuminates

AFCM ILLUMINATES I - EINSTEIN'S UNIVERSE

Presented by Brian Foster with Jack Liebeck on violin.

Professor Brian Foster OBE FRS of Oxford University and Jack Liebeck collaborate to highlight Einstein’s science and his love of music, and in particular, the violin. Einstein’s Universe explores his scientific work on quantum mechanics with an introduction to his life and involvement with music and how his ideas have shaped our concepts of space, time, and the evolution of the Universe. Musical accompaniment is from J.S. Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, some of Einstein’s favourite music and punctuated by other musical interludes.

5:00 pm Townsville Civic Theatre

Sunset Series

EINSTEIN'S MUSIC

Named after the founder of the Festival, these one-hour concerts are a terrific starting point for newcomers as well as a chance for those who know their music well to hear favourite works. There are five Sunset Series concerts over the Festival period. 

Albert Einstein was, as you may have discovered in the inaugural AFCM Illuminates lecture earlier in the day, a keen amateur violinist and lover of the music of Bach and Mozart. Tonight we hear pieces of music that Einstein undoubtedly played himself (often dragging students in Princeton off the street to play duets) as well as music that is dedicated to or inspired by his physics. Paul Dean’s A Brief History was written for Jack Liebeck to perform with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2019, here specially arranged for AFCM, it is dedicated to perhaps one of Einstein’s only real intellectual peers, Professor Stephen Hawkings.

8:00 pm Townsville Civic Theatre

Governor's Gala A Joyful Fantasy!

The musical fantasy has always been a way for a composer to have free reign to express themselves without the structure that many other styles of music require. Here we discover six wonderful Fantasies and then finally have the chance to celebrate the 25th anniversary of our resident Goldner String Quartet with their special commission featuring 25 fantastical variations on Ode to Joy, The Goldner Variations.