Internationally praised for his breathtaking virtuosity and versatile musicianship, Scottish born James Crabb is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading classical accordionists. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen with accordion pioneer Mogens Ellegaard. James became professor there from 1995 until 2010, and was awarded the prestigious Carl Nielsen Music Prize, Denmark in 1991. He also held a long-standing guest professorship at the University in Graz, Austria. James.

James has collaborated with some of the most important composers of the last 50 years including Sofia Gubaidulina, Thomas Adès, Harrison Birtwistle, Sally Beamish, Luciano Berio and has premiered countless concertos, chamber music and solo works dedicated to him. He is also recognised internationally as an authority on the music of Astor Piazzolla and was invited to curate the inaugural Piazzolla Festival in Buenos Aires in 2016. In 2019 James gave the world premiere of Brett Dean’s accordion concerto The Players in Sweden, (recorded on the BIS label). He has also featured in the on-stage role in Dean’s opera Hamlet with Cologne Opera, the Bavarian State Opera, Munich, Glyndebourne and the Adelaide Festival, a role he reprised for Opera Australia in 2024. Further projects next year will see James also return to the ACO, numerous music festivals in Australia and the UK and once again collaborate with the Australia Ensemble.

James has recorded for several labels including Chandos, EMI Classics, BIS, ABC Classics, Simax, Dacapo.

A passionate and sought-after music educator and mentor, James collaborates regularly with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Australian National Academy of Music, Freedman Fellowship Trust, Australian Youth Orchestra, Musica Viva as well as music conservatories and universities in Australia and abroad. He was Artistic Director of the Four Winds Festival in Bermagui, NSW, from 2016 – 2020 during which time he curated both the annual Easter and inaugural Youth Festivals and developed the music education programs in local schools.

Sydney/Eora-based saxophonist Alice Morgan is one of Australia's leading young saxophonists, performing regularly across Australia and New Zealand in a variety of genres.

In 2024, Alice is Ensemble Offspring’s Hatched Associate Artist and will perform in several of their concerts for their 2024 season. In November, Alice will premiere and record a new work by Holly Harrison commissioned by Ensemble Offspring to be performed in the Utzon Room at the Sydney Opera House. Earlier this year Alice performed with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra as Guest Principal Saxophone. She is also a Casual Lecturer at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and has led specialised masterclasses at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music.

Alice has been a past nominee for the Freedman Fellowship Classical Awards, and has performed as concerto soloist with Ensemble Apex for Ibert’s Concertino da Camera, as well as performing with the orchestra for Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with Simon Tedeschi and Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances. Alice performed her own transcription of Strauss' Oboe Concerto in a solo recital at the 2018 Melbourne International Saxophone Festival. Through her university years Alice performed as orchestral soloist with the Australian Youth Orchestra and Sydney Youth Orchestras. She was also selected to perform in the Estivo Chamber Music Festival in Verona, Italy, as soprano saxophonist in her saxophone quartet, Luxum.

Additional to her freelance career Alice is a keen orchestral manager and music administrator. She works at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music as an Administration Officer and assists with various administrative tasks across the university, including but not limited to liaising with academics and producing high profile events. Alice is also on the board of Ensemble Apex and has regularly assisted as their Orchestral Manager since their conception in 2016.

She is an Associate Artist of the Bowerbird Collective.

Praised as a “rockstar of nylon-acoustic music” (On Sounds), “the real deal” (Classics Today), “dazzling” (ArtsHub) and “brilliant” (Limelight Magazine), Andrew Blanch is regarded as one of Australia’s leading musicians and is at the forefront of a new wave of classical musicians internationally.   He is a prizewinner in more than ten international guitar competitions, a finalist for Performance of the Year at the 2022 Australian Art Music Awards, and has released three studio albums to critical acclaim – his latest, a collaboration with QSO principal harpist Emily Granger has been streamed more than a million times and described as “one of the most extraordinary albums to come out of Australia in a long time” (Sydney Arts Guide). 

A versatile collaborator, Andrew has performed widely with various groups such as Ensemble Offspring, the New Zealand Guitar Quartet, and in smaller chamber groups with some of Australia’s leading musicians.  In addition Andrew has commissioned and premiered works by numerous leading Australian composers such as Elena Kats-Chernin and Daniel Rojas, whose Guitar Concerto No. 1 he recorded in São Paulo, Brazil in 2023.  Andrew is an associate artist of the Bowerbird Collective with whom he developed his solo multimedia concert Nocturnal, for acoustic and electric guitars and tours regularly with his partner Argentinian Mezzo-Soprano Maria Eugenia Nieva having just completed a 40 concert tour of the USA from Washington to Florida for more than 10,000 people.  

Andrew is Vice-President of the Classical Guitar Society Sydney, is managed by Tier 1 Arts, plays a 2014 Greg Smallman and Sons guitar, and is sponsored by Augustine Strings and Schertler audio equipment.  He is a founding member and co-artistic director of the Australian Guitar Quartet with Slava and Leonard Grigoryan and Vladimir Gorbach. 

María Eugenia Nieva began musical studies at the age of six at a specialist music school, the Niños Cantores de Mendoza. She soon joined the choir and by the age of nine was performing throughout Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador, and Argentina as both soloist and chorus member. She pursued Choral Conducting in Mendoza, before relocating to Buenos Aires to study musical theater, and classical singing at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes.  

She has performed as a soloist with orchestras, sung with the Bach Akademie choir in Germany, and obtained a postgraduate degree in Higher Education Pedagogy from the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo.  Passionate about education, she has worked as a vocal coach for various choirs, including a children's choir at a hospital in Mendoza, using music as a tool for community outreach. She has toured the USA, performing more than 70 concerts in 2024 and 2025 with guitarist Andrew Blanch.

Violinist and composer Simone Slattery is one of Australia’s most versatile young musicians and creators, with a passion for music from a wide range of eras. She performs across Australia and internationally as both soloist and ensemble member, holds a PhD from the University of Adelaide, and was a 2019 Churchill Fellow. Simone has collaborated with artists and ensembles in Japan, Korea, the UK, Canada, the USA and throughout Europe, and has toured extensively across regional Australia. Her performances have been reviewed as “virtuosic” and “infinitely expressive”. She has appeared with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, Australian Haydn Ensemble, Ironwood, Pinchgut Opera, Van Diemen’s Band and New Vintage Baroque.

A co-founder of the award-winning Bowerbird Collective, Simone’s compositions have been performed across the world, and her artistic creations described as “stunning”. Recent productions include Where Song Began, Invisible Connections, and the World Migratory Bird Day Virtual Choir. Simone was commissioned by the Art Gallery of South Australia to create the soundscape for ‘Clarice Beckett – The Present Moment’, an acclaimed retrospective of one of Australia’s greatest artists, in early 2021.

Emily Sheppard is a Tasmanian violinist, violist, improviser and composer who is inspired by unconventional and resonant places and spaces, as well as science and the environment. Trained at the Australian National Academy of Music in Melbourne, she is in the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and Van Diemen’s Band and has collaborated with Paul Kelly, Katie Noonan, DJ Spooky and Michael Kieran Harvey.

Emily spent four weeks in residency in Tasmanian caves in 2017, supported by Arts Tasmania funding. Throughout this period she composed several new works for solo viola/violin, incorporating extended techniques such as alternative tunings, prepared violin and singing while playing. She has curated performances in Hastings Cave, Marakoopa Cave and Mt Wellington/kunanyi observation shelter, supported by Arts Tasmania and Hobart City Council grants.

Emily has toured Europe with the Australian Youth Orchestra, and has played at festivals all over Australia, including Mona Foma, Dark Mofo, Ten Days on the Island, Darwin Festival, Brisbane Festival, Melbourne Festival, Canberra International Music Festival, Cygnet Folk Festival, Fractangular and A Festival Called Panama.

Having begun on viola in his hometown Whyalla, Neil Thompson's career has taken him all around the world, including to Europe as soloist. Neil has performed and toured with the Adelaide, Melbourne, Tasmanian and Sydney Symphony Orchestras (upon holding an SSO fellowship in 2012), as well as with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and its sister orchestra ACO2 (currently ACO Collective) with whom he was an ‘Emerging Artist’.

His stylistic diversity allowed him to enjoy two years of touring with ‘The Cat Empire’ and features as soloist and guest artist on their DVD ‘Live at the Bowl’. Neil regularly performs at the Sydney Opera House with the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra for Opera Australia and the Australian Ballet.

Primarily involved in playing chamber-music, he has been fortunate enough to have performed many world and Australian premieres and to have shared the stage with Pekka Kuusisto, Kristian Winther, Richard Tognetti, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Simone Young, Brett Dean, Lisa Moore and others to name a few. Since 2015 Neil has been Principal Viola of the highly acclaimed Omega Ensemble, as well as co-director of 'The Nano Symphony' - www.thenanosymphony.com

With previous conducting mentors including Richard Gill, Keith Crellin, Christopher Seaman and John Hopkins, Neil is currently director-conductor of Killara High’s Orchestras with whom he frequently hosts ‘feeder’ primary school workshops and events. He has also conducted the Mosman Symphony Orchestra and the Eastern Sydney Chamber Orchestra.

A passionate advocate for music education, Neil is a tutor for the ACO Penrith Youth Strings program, The Arts Unit and Sydney Youth Orchestra. 2015 saw him tutoring School Spectacular, Mid-North Coast Strings Alliance, senior state music camp (NSW) as well as many other school and organisation’s’ orchestras and/or camps.

Neil studied on full scholarship at the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) studying under Christopher Moore and Roger Benedict, and holds a Bachelor of Music in Performance (Honours) from the Elder Conservatorium of Music, University of Adelaide having studied under Keith Crellin. 

With an international performance and production career, Anthony Albrecht has developed a reputation as an impresario of world-class events characterised by generosity, outreach and connection to issues of social justice, conservation and sustainability. He is co-founder and CEO of the Bowerbird Collective, an organisation devoted to forging stronger connections to the natural world. With a passion for making classical music accessible and relevant in the 21st century, cellist Anthony Albrecht began producing concerts shortly after graduating from The Juilliard School in 2014. Committed to musical outreach, Anthony has undertaken a self-managed solo tour of over 80 concerts in regional Australia called ‘Bach to the Bush’. He is founder and director of the Lapwing Music Festival in the UK

A musician known for his “dramatic flair” and “fluent and virtuosic” performances (Seen and Heard International, Sydney Morning Herald), he has appeared with Pinchgut Opera, Van Diemen's Band, the Australian Romantic and Classical Orchestra, the Australian Haydn Ensemble, New Vintage Baroque (NYC) and Il Pomo d’Oro. Recent solo engagements include an appearance in the woods of East Sussex as a guest of Sam Lee’s ‘Singing with Nightingales’ project, a recital at the Handel and Hendrix House in London, a performance of Haydn’s Cello Concerto in D at the Newcastle Music Festival and as concerto soloist with the Adelaide Baroque Orchestra.

Glenn A. Albrecht is an Honorary Associate in the School of Geo-sciences, The University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. He retired as Professor of Sustainability, Murdoch University, in mid-2014. He continues to work as an environmental philosopher and published a book, Earth Emotions, with Cornell University Press in 2019. Earth Emotions was published in French and Spanish in 2020.

In numerous publications and public talks over the last two decades, Dr Albrecht has developed the theme of the psychoterratic (psyche-earth), or negative and positive emotional states connected to the state of the Earth. New concepts developed by him are now becoming well established in the international scholarly literature, new research theses and as inspiration for many creative people in the arts.

He now lives on Gundungurra and Dharug country in the Blue Mountains. He describes himself as a 'farmosopher', combining thinking and writing with growing food and protecting a haven for wildlife. While he is best known for creating the concept of solastalgia, or the lived experience of negative environmental change, his most recent work develops the meme of the 'Symbiocene', a future state where humans re-integrate with the rest of nature. 

Noisy Nonna is coming to King Island with her *Kamishibai with stories for children, and big kids.

Look out for her over the Moonbird Festival and join in the fun as she tells stories about all sorts of birds, animals and fish.  Warning, there will be singing and dancing and noise.

*Kamishibai is a Japanese story telling box