Bang on a Can All-Stars free concert for Melbourne

The amazing Bang on a Can All-Stars are finally playing in Melbourne on 5 and 7 November at the Melbourne Recital Centre. Australia met them at the 1996 Adelaide Festival and they played in Sydney in 2000. And to welcome them to Melbourne, their first concert is free!

Bang on a Can was formed in New York by composers and musicians David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe in 1987 with the first BOAC Marathon concert. Dedicated to making new music, the marathon concerts have run annually for 25 years.

The six-piece All-Stars group was created in 1992. Freely crossing boundaries between classical,

jazz, rock, world and experimental music, they continue to shatter any category and definition of concert music.

Sydney can still catch them on Saturday 3 November at the Opera House at the John Cage celebration, while Melbourne gets two concerts next week.

First is the Australian premiere of Field Recordings, with nine new works that asked the composers to re-discover authentic American folk music and bring back sounds to challenge their own music. Using film, found sounds and archival audio and video, Field Recordings “builds a bridge between the seen and the unseen, the present and the absent, between today and the past”. This is the FREE one. Book here.

Concert two includes the Melbourne premiere of BOAC founder Julia Wolfe's Big Beautiful Dark and Scary, written after watching 9/11 attacks with her two young children, two blocks from the Twin Towers, and the Allstars unforgettable interpretation of Brian Eno's Music for Airports.