Since May, when Canberra International Music Festival director Roland Peelman stepped down after a whirlwind 10 years, there’s been a changing of the guard.

Incoming artistic director Eugene Ughetti is a percussionist, composer, performer and conductor with a big name in Melbourne and internationally.

But he’s not well known to Canberrans, although he’s performed here in Gandel Hall during Roland Peelman’s 2016 festival and at Llewellyn Hall, so I took the opportunity while he was in town on a working visit recently to talk to the man who will take the festival in new directions. 

With a wife and family and a busy career in Melbourne, he will not relocate to the nation’s capital, but he’s been keeping a very close eye on it.

“I’m not a Canberran but I know Canberra very well and I have done my research,” he says. 

He’s been busy looking at possible spaces, from national institutions to private ones and presenting to organisations such as embassies – “all the things that make Canberra an attractive city to the people who live here”.

The founder at age 19 of Speak Percussion, Ughetti has in the past been the recipient of a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, an MCA/Freedman Fellowship for Classical Music, an Australia Council OZCO Creative Music Fellowship, and various Art Music Awards.

His works have been played throughout Germany, in Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Britain and he has composed for the Australian Ballet, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, ABC and Bionics Institute.

Over coffee, it’s clear that he is a seasoned networker just like Peelman. 

In November, Ughetti, half-Italian in heritage, unveiled his 2025 season, another tight festival staged over five days in venues as unalike as Lake Burley Griffin, the Finnish Embassy, Canberra Glassworks, Snow Concert Hall and the National Film and Sound Archive.

Regarding his programming, he says: “I’m not sure that the job is asking me to be ‘out there’.” So although he’s chosen the theme of liberté to imply freedom of expression, the line-up of artists should satisfy even the most conservative music-lovers, opening with Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Beethoven’s Egmont Overture. 

His radicalism is seen in a day-long mini-festival that he’s cooked up with Chris Mercer from the NFSA, his decision to invite a troupe of French pipers to perform their 8 Pipers for Philip Glass project, and plans to launch a flotilla of five boats crossing the lake while Five Short Blasts by Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey is played.

Looking at his background, radicalism is implied in his collaborations with new music legends Pierre Boulez, Liza Lim, Steve Reich and John Zorn, but although he’s travelled a great deal since he was 18 years old, he’s never lived overseas.

His invention, Speak Percussion, is not an ensemble but rather a collaborative music initiative dictated by need, one which has allowed him to be a freelance musician since he was at university. 

In Polar Force, developed with sound artist, Philip Samartzis, Ughetti and Speak Percussion created a new performance work in 2021 with a focus on katabatic winds in Antarctica. They built a white inflatable structure – a cross between an igloo and a Nissan hut, he says – in which field recordings and sounds derived from ice and water were used to create new musical sounds.

Ughetti was always going to be a musician, saying: “I was surrounded by musical instruments from the beginning.”

His father, a drummer and his mother, a visual artist, owned a music store first in the Melbourne’s CBD, then moved it to Footscray.

And music carries into the next generation, with his son a choral singer and his daughter playing piano. 

Ughetti himself went to the Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School while playing bass guitar, then went on to do his degree at the grown-up VCA, majoring in percussion and composition, initially in classical music.

His Myer Foundation award was not for a project but rather encouragement for talent, giving him two years of salary, a relief, since too often musicians are hamstrung by restraints on projects.

“I’ve spent my career pushing at the boundaries, experiencing new music through collaborations, commissioning new works and composing,” he says.

Canberra International Music Festival, April 30-May 4.