Strung | AWE 2026
As we head over the hill to Queenstown, Strung welcomes a new voice into AWE's string conversations: the piano. Joining our AWE artists for this third programme of 2026 is Australian pianist David Fung, based in the United States, whose presence draws a new line through the weekend, across the keys and strings, across continents, and across time.
Time, in fact, is the thread that runs through Strung. Music has always carried ideas forward across the centuries, and this programme traces that movement, from the fairy tales that outlived their tellers to the waltzes that outlived their dancefloors.
We open with Ravel's Ma Mère l'Oye, Mother Goose, a suite drawn from stories written hundreds of years before Ravel set them. That music should reach so naturally across such a distance is testament to what fairy tales and great compositions share: the ability to travel with us and to mean something different at every stage of a life while remaining entirely familiar and intact.
Jesse Montgomery's work follows, chosen here in a spirit of admiration, a reminder that the lines we trace through musical history are still being drawn. Michael Norris, AWE's Composer in Residence, continues that thought with a set of miniatures: small, precise dedications to those who have supported and inspired him, a personal map of influence and gratitude. Together, Montgomery and Norris represent AWE's commitment to championing living composers alongside those of the past because every musical line that we follow was, once, someone's new idea.
Rebecca Clarke's Lullaby & Grotesque brings our AWE Fellows and Festival artists together, playing side by side across the lines of the programme. Clarke herself understood those lines intimately. Written in 1916, a difficult moment in history and a deeply personal one, the Sonata emerged at a time when Clarke had been cut off by her father and was navigating London alone, establishing herself as both a composer and professional violist against the backdrop of war. Doing so, with such assurance, and with such music, was a radical act and this work carries something of that complexity in its character. Moments of satire sit alongside passages of genuine darkness and stillness, not unlike a fairy tale in that respect. Personal connections shape who we are; the music that emerges from rupture and independence can travel just as far as any other.
Claude Debussy offers us something quieter: not stories, but places. Where Ravel looked to narrative for inspiration, Debussy looked to landscape, evoking and capturing the world through three miniatures that ask us not to follow a thread but rather to pause and simply inhabit a moment.
We turn next to a familiar form, with a question about what that form can hold. Ravel's late piano writing takes the waltz and removes it from the dancefloor entirely, a celebration of what the form becomes when it exists purely to be listened to. There is a nod to our earlier programmes here: Bach explored the expressive possibilities of rhythmic form long before Ravel, and in his own way arrived at the same discovery, that structure, freed from its original function, can become something richer and more adventurous. Ravel's waltz is a love letter to the piano and to the form itself.
We end with Adolfo Berio, a name that carries its own curiosity. Known today largely in the shadow of his grandson Luciano, one of the twentieth century's most trailblazing and innovative composers, Adolfo offers something different: a waltz that sits more traditionally within its form. Sharing a single piano between four hands, David Fung and AWE Pettman Scholar Matthew Seinafo bring our evening to a close with this final shared dance.