Christmas under Capricorn

Australian Youth Orchestra

The Australian Youth Orchestra brings disciplined, exuberant force to Australian orchestral writing, from Christmas carols reimagined by living composers to concertos and dance scores that sit at the heart of the national repertoire.

Graham Abbott

One of Australia's best-known orchestral and opera conductors, Graham Abbott is also a respected teacher, often involved in educational projects such as music camps and residencies across Australia.

Anne Boyd

Anne Boyd enjoys a distinguished career as a composer and music educator. A graduate of the University of Sydney (BA Hons in Music, 1967) and the University of York (PhD in composition, 1972), she has shaped Australian musical life through both her writing and her teaching.

Brenton Broadstock

Brenton Broadstock is one of Australia’s most established, respected and successful mid-generation composers. Over several decades he has built a substantial, varied catalogue distinguished by expressive range, structural assurance and strong engagement with performers and audiences, nationally and internationally.

Nigel Butterley

Nigel Butterley (1935–2022) was an Australian composer and pianist. His catalogue ranges from radiophonic and choral scores to chamber, vocal and orchestral works, and as a pianist he was closely identified with contemporary music and the prepared piano.

Barry Conyngham

Barry Conyngham, born in Sydney, has received numerous awards and fellowships for composition, among them Churchill, Harkness, Australia Council and Senior Fulbright grants. He holds an ARIA, two Sounds Australian Critics Awards and two Maggs Awards.

Ross Edwards

One of Australia's best known and most performed composers, Ross Edwards lives and works in Sydney. His commitment to music as a positive and regenerative force has led him to explore beyond the confines of Western art music.

Andrew Ford

Andrew Ford is an Australian composer, writer and broadcaster whose work ranges from chamber and vocal scores to opera and piano cycles. He has won the Paul Lowin Prize for the song cycle Learning to Howl and a Green Room Award for the opera Rembrandt’s Wife.

Don Kay

Don Kay (born 1933) is a Tasmanian classical composer whose work ranges from symphony, opera and concerto to chamber, choral, vocal and piano music, often shaped by the island’s landscape, ecology and history.

Gordon Kerry

Gordon Kerry's music ranges from the symphonic through chamber music to choral music and opera. Australian orchestras, chamber ensembles, festivals and soloists commission him regularly, as do ensembles in the USA and Europe.

Andrew Schultz

Andrew Schultz, a graduate of the Universities of Queensland and London, has received numerous awards and commissions for chamber, orchestral and vocal works, and is Emeritus Professor of Music at UNSW Sydney.

Peter Sculthorpe

Peter Sculthorpe (1929–2014) was a Tasmanian-born composer whose orchestral and chamber music drew the Australian landscape, neighbouring Asian traditions and Indigenous materials into a clear, personal language. He wrote extensively for strings, piano and voice.

Larry Sitsky

Larry Sitsky's activities as a composer, pianist, writer, broadcaster and teacher place him among the foremost ambassadors of contemporary Australian piano music. His work has made a lasting contribution to the Australian musical tradition.

Carl Vine

Carl Vine AO is one of Australia's best-known and most often performed composers, with an orchestral catalogue of eight symphonies and thirteen concertos. His piano music is played widely around the world, and recordings of his work appear on more than seventy albums across the major streaming services.

Tristram Cary

Tristram Cary's electroacoustic music spans half a century of tape and computer invention, from dense analogue microcosms built for radio and film to sharp, playful late works for digital machines.

Judith Clingan

Moya Henderson

Moya Henderson's music is warm, sincere and distinctively Australian: chamber works such as G'Day Africa and Cross Hatching, art songs and carols, and scores that remember Gallipoli and the land with directness.

Donald Hollier

Donald Hollier is a Sydney-born Australian composer, organist and choral director whose work spans opera, choral and orchestral music, chamber works and solo keyboard pieces.

Richard Mills

Richard Mills composes opera, song and solo instrumental music with a practical lyric ear. His Judith Wright cycle Woman to Man and his Pastoral and Six Preludes for solo oboe give singers and players clear lines and room to breathe.

Trevor Pearce

Gillian Whitehead

Gillian Whitehead writes chamber, vocal and orchestral music that can feel like weather over land and water: atmospheric, dreamy, and rooted in the sounds and seasonal cycles of Aotearoa. Manutaki and The Journey of Matuku Moana show how fully she can hold a landscape in instrumental colour.

Cover art

Bill Leak

Bill Leak supplied cover art and illustrations across Tall Poppies chamber, piano and song discs, from an irreverent Mozart cartoon to quieter painted sleeves that sit beside Australian and classical programmes without drowning them out.