In April 2026 the Brodsky Quartet toured Peter Sculthorpe’s String Quartet No.11 (Jabiru Dreaming) to Austria, Germany, and the United Kingdom, presenting the work at venues including the Elbphilharmonie, Temple Church, the Howard Assembly Room (Leeds), and St. George’s Bristol.
They were joined by William Barton for the work’s optional didjeridu part – a celebrated exponent of the instrument and longstanding champion of Sculthorpe’s music. The programme saw Barton present his own improvisations and compositions alongside works by Janáček, Stravinsky (augmented with Barton’s instrument), Robert Davidson, and Andrew Ford. As an encore, they performed Sculthorpe’s From Nourlangie - a piece they have previously recorded alongside the 11th quartet and 8th quartet.
Sculthorpe’s Jabiru Dreaming was a highlight here, its restless propulsion subtly emphasised and deepened by Barton’s contributions…The encore was a return to Sculthorpe…ethereal swoops with which Sculthorpe so vividly evokes bird cries, wheeling around the violin melody: brief, breezy and beautiful.
The Guardian (Erica Jeal) 15 April 2026
The international tour followed several February performances of the piece in Australia in Abbotsford, at the Melbourne Recital Centre, Sydney’s Pier 2/3 The Neilson, Queensland Performance Arts Centre in Brisbane, and Adelaide Town Hall. Barton and the Brodskys previously collaborated on a New Zealand tour of the work in 2024.
The 15-minute piece was commissioned by Musica Viva Australia and premiered with the Kronos Quartet in 1990 at the Adelaide Festival. It is cast in two movements, whose language is suffused by the living, indigenous musical traditions of the Kakadu National Park in northern Australia. The first, marked Deciso, contains rhythmic patterns found in the indigenous music of the Kakadu area, some of which also suggest the gait of the jabiru, a species of stork.
The second movement is based upon an Aboriginal chant transcribed by a member of the Baudin exploratory expedition in 1802. This is the first such music committed to Western notation. Its subtitle Jabiru Dreaming takes its name from a famous rock formation in the National Park. “This rock is regarded as sacred, but there is nothing forbidding about it”, Sculthorpe notes, “on the contrary, it seems to beckon and welcome”.
The Brodsky String Quartet have been performing Sculthorpe’s chamber music since the early 1990s. In 1993, whilst Sculthorpe was Featured Composer at Dartington International Summer School they gave the world premiere of his Lament for String Sextet (which they later recorded on Silva Classics), and, in 1994, the world premiere of From Nourlangie at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival, in a performance with the 8th and 11th quartets. In 1996 they premiered his String Quartet No.13 at the Cité de la musique, Paris, with the mezzo-soprano part sung by Anne Sofie von Otter.