Carl Vine’s Intimate Dialogues, a 16-minute work for oboe and piano written for Celia Craig and Michael Ierace, will premiere on 25 October at the Tutan Skyline, Kuala Lumpur. The piece was commissioned through Create SA and the Australian Cultural Fund and dedicated to the duo.
The piece comprises five studies that examine what kind of musical and sonic ground might be shared by two instruments whose modus operandi is so radically contrary. As Vine writes,
Oboe and piano have almost no acoustic characteristics in common. The oboe can only play one note at a time but with enormous subtlety and delicate shades of colour, pitch and dynamic contour that can change expressively at will within each note. The piano can play fistfuls of notes at once but every one of them, once struck, will only ever get softer. The player has no control over the pitch or tone colour of each note, only over the number played at once and the volume with which they commence.
In October the West Australian Symphony and Queensland Symphony orchestras announced the premiere of Vine’s Piano Concerto No.3 for May 2027, debuting at the University of Western Australia and QPAC Concert Hall. The work, which will last between 25 and 30 minutes, has been written for Vadym Kholodenko and was commissioned for the West Australian Symphony Orchestra and the Queensland Symphony Orchestra by Geoff Stearn, Dr Lesa Melnyczuk Morgan and Michael Katz AM & Frédérique Katz. In June 2027 Vine’s Piano Concerto No.2 will make its national debut with Poom Prommachart – who premiered Vine’s Three Fantasies in 2025 – with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra and Nathanaël Iselin.