Music in the beautiful nowhere

The AWE chamber music festival takes place in some of Aotearoa's most stunning scenery.

-  RICHARD BETTS

There's camaraderie to be had in the instrument a musician plays. When Kiwi violinists Justine Cormack and Benjamin Baker got to know each other, they were Vuillaume people, and bonded over their French instruments. They turned that connection into At the World's Edge (AWE), a chamber music festival that has its third iteration in Central Otago next month.

Baker has lately defected to an Italian violin but Cormack says the pair's careers make for a complementary collaboration.

"The more we talked, the more we realised we could bring our two worlds together." Baker is based in London and works mostly in the Northern Hemisphere.

Cormack will forever be associated with Aotearoa, an important figure in our musical landscape as an orchestral player and concertmaster, then chamber musician and now arts organiser.