Music writer TONY MAGEE previews “Chopin’s Birthday Concert” being played in Canberra next month.

AN outstanding British-Australian pianist will be in Canberra soon to present “Chopin’s Birthday Concert” for the Friends of Chopin Australia.

Penelope Thwaites will be joined by cellist Patrick Suthers and violinist Kirsten Williams in a concert featuring “Piano Trio in B flat, K502”; Chopin’s “Ballade No 2 in F, Op.38”; a Thwaites commission and premiere performance, “Au Tombeau de Chopin” for piano trio and Chopin’s “Piano Trio in G minor, Op.8”. 

Thwaites is the daughter of poet, the late Michael Thwaites, who with his wife Honor, a long-time resident of Canberra and a well-known figure who played a leading role in the Petrov Affair in 1954. 

Michael Thwaites’ poetry is filled with images inspired not only by life in Australia as in “Canberra Autumn”, “Creation” and the delightful “Metamorphosis”, but also in Britain as in “Coming into the Clyde” and his narration of a 1940 sea battle in the North Atlantic, “The Jervis Bay”.

His hymn “For Australia”, set to a tune by Henry Purcell was sung during an Anzac Day service in Westminster Abbey, as well as at the Australia Day Bicentennial celebration at the Sydney Opera House and when the late Queen Elizabeth II officially opened the new Parliament House in May, 1988.

“Both my parents were deeply musical,” Thwaites says. 

“As children, we had very good quality music. And they had a poetic quote for every situation. I owe a lot to them. I think what children get from their parents is more what they do than what they say.”

Thwaites is a citizen of Australia and the UK and spends a great deal of her time in Canberra. Appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2001, she is a represented composer with the Australian Music Centre.

Known as an intensely communicative concert pianist and recording artist, she is also a composer, writer, editor, broadcaster (including for the BBC) and music-festival curator. She has appeared as a recitalist in more than 35 countries, and as soloist with leading orchestras in Europe, Australia, and America.

Thwaites wrote some of the first themes of her work, “Missa Brevis”, in Canberra.

“The Greek and Latin words have such power and force and I hope that people will think that they fit,” she says.

“It’s interesting to get the texture of the voices melding with the notes and words. The sentiments have been expressed in these words forever and I regard it as a privilege to have set them to music.”

She is also recognised as an international authority on the music of Percy Grainger and was artistic director of London’s first international Grainger event in 1998, also helping to instigate the monumental 19-CD Grainger recording series on Chandos, in which she was a featured soloist. 

Violinist Kirsten Williams enjoyed an international reputation before joining the Canberra Symphony Orchestra in 2019 as concertmaster, also leading the ANU’s Women in Music program in 2021.

Her music-for-healing passion led to her recording two CDs for Australian Bush Flower Essences and, in 2014, she was named Volunteer of the Year for her work playing in the Intensive Care Unit at Westmead Children’s Hospital. In the same year, she became patron of the Goulburn Strings Project, designed to bring music education to children in low-socioeconomic, regional contexts.

Patrick Suthers, a graduate of the Canberra School of Music, is the principal cellist of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra, a position he has held since 2012. He has performed frequent chamber music concerts with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra Fellowship Ensemble, including private performances for Pope Benedict XVI.

“Chopin’s Birthday Concert”, All Saints Church, Ainslie, 3pm, February 19.