Intimate Dialogues with Celia Craig & Michael Ierace

Intimate Dialogues: A Weekend Residency with Celia Craig and Michael Ierace at Tutan Skyline Performance Hall

Supported by Create South Australia through Biennial Artist status, oboist Celia Craig BA Hons LRAM ARAM EMCC, presents a special weekend residency alongside pianist and arranger Michael Ierace, marking a decade of artistic partnership between the two musicians.

The residency also brings together two cities within the global UNESCO Creative Cities Network: Adelaide, Australian UNESCO City of Music, and Kuala Lumpur, UNESCO City of Design, celebrating creativity, culture and cross-cultural exchange as drivers of connection.

At the heart of the residency is Craig's own experience of synaesthesia, a connection she shares with pioneering Australian pianist and composer Dr Miriam Hyde (1913–2005). As Creative Arts Fellow at the National Library of Australia in 2024, Craig read all 166 of Hyde's vivid, handwritten letters sent home from London between 1932 and 1936, intimately documenting her studies at the Royal College of Music. This research, titled Meeting Miriam, forms a central thread of the residency and underpins the duo's upcoming album, Intimate Dialogues, to be released on the Artaria label, speaking directly to the duo’s ongoing commitment to music education and to the double reed community.

The program also traces a rich lineage of oboe pedagogy connecting Adelaide to London. That thread runs from Jiří Tancibudek, former principal oboe of the Czech Philharmonic and dedicatee of Martinů's Oboe Concerto, through decades of teaching in Adelaide by his pupil, the late Rosemary Stimson. It extends further back to the celebrated oboist Leon Goossens, who sparked Miriam Hyde's own lifelong love of the oboe in London and whose pupil, Tancibudek, later premiered Hyde's prize-winning 1955 oboe work. This reflects a tradition of music education carried forward through generations of piano and oboe pedagogy and the Elder Overseas Scholarships won by Hyde and Ierace.

The residency unfolds over two days. The first is an enlightening, hands-on public talk and oboe workshop focused on synaesthesia and neurodiversity, including Hyde's own story, offering audiences and students insight into lived experience with practical guidance for recognising and supporting neurodiverse learners, and unique methods using synaesthesia to create new cognitive pathways for learning.

The second, on Sunday 25, is a vibrant World Premiere concert, showcasing brilliant new Australian oboe repertoire, including two dedicated World Premieres: Sonata by Dr Connor Fogarty and Intimate Dialogues by Carl Vine AO, written for the duo, and marking the official launch of the duo's forthcoming album of the same name. Discounted tickets are available for audiences attending both events.