Explore the Sydney Conservatorium of Music's Semester 1, 2026 Greenway Series, featuring orchestral concerts, early music, contemporary works and music theatre.
Across venues including the University of Sydney Great Hall, Verbrugghen Hall and the Footbridge Theatre, Conservatorium students and staff present a diverse program spanning classical masterworks to Australian composition.
Browse the program highlights below and secure your tickets now.
Program highlights
Location: Great Hall
Performing in the grandeur of the University of Sydney Great Hall, the Sydney Conservatorium of Music Symphony Orchestra launches the 2026 Greenway Series under the baton of Associate Professor Roger Benedict.
Featuring String Concerto Competition winner William Thorpe, this special concert showcases the colour and spectacle of orchestral music from the 18th and 19th centuries to today.
Location: Verbrugghen Hall
The SCM Early Music Ensemble presents a vibrant concert of Baroque period repertoire. Associate Professor Erin Helyard leads a program of Telemann, Wassenaer and Vivaldi with SCM string students performing on period instruments and Historical Performance specialist students on harpsichord.
Location: Verbrugghen Hall
The SCM Orchestra, conducted by Associate Professor Roger Benedict, presents a program that bridges Classical elegance and modern imagination.
Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite playfully reworks music of the past with sharp wit and neoclassical flair, while Judith Weir’s Still, Glowing brings a luminous contemporary atmosphere to the stage. The concert concludes with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1, a landmark debut that signals the arrival of a bold new symphonic voice.
Location: Verbrugghen Hall
The SCM Early Music Ensemble, conducted by Associate Professor Erin Helyard, presents a concert of excerpts from Niccolò Piccinni’s eighteenth-century opera La buona figliuola.
Featuring singers from the SCM Opera School alongside students performing on period instruments under the guidance of Historical Performance specialists, this performance brings the wit and elegance of Piccinni’s beloved opera to life in Verbrugghen Hall.
Location: Verbrugghen Hall
The SCM Wind Symphony presents their first concert for 2026, under the baton of Stephen Williams. Highlights include the Australian premiere of Viet Cuong’s Vital Sines, featuring a sextet of student soloists, alongside the world premiere of Concrete Shadows by SCM recent graduate Paul Nicolaou.
The program also includes the luminous atmosphere of Jennifer Higdon’s blue cathedral and culminates with the theatrical intensity of Béla Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin.
Location: Verbrugghen Hall
The SCM String Orchestra, conducted by Associate Professor Roger Benedict, presents a richly expressive program for strings spanning pastoral lyricism and contemporary Australian voices.
Featuring works by Edward Elgar, Gerald Finzi, Ella Macens and Paul Stanhope in collaboration with Molly Jalakbiya. The concert culminates in Vaughan Williams’ radiant and timeless Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.
Location: Music Workshop
The SCM New Music Ensemble presents their first concert for 2026 collaborating with Switzerland’s Ensemble Contrechamps.
This adventurous program features works by two SCM alumnae – Beth Roche’s Refraction, Reflection and Katia Geha’s and they leave me in the dark – alongside excerpts from Gérard Grisey’s landmark spectral work Vortex Temporum.
The concert concludes by bringing both ensembles together in an immersive and interactive performance of Jessie Cox’s Enter The Impossible.
Location: Footbridge Theatre
THE DROWSY CHAPERONE
Music and Lyrics: by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison
Book: by Bob Martin and Don McKellar
Original Broadway production of The Drowsy Chaperone produced by Kevin McCollum, Roy Miller, Bob Boyett, Stephanie McClelland, Barbara Freitag and Jill Furman.
Winner of five Tony Awards, including Best Book and Best Original Score, The Drowsy Chaperone is a loving send-up of the 1920's Broadway musical comedies, featuring one show-stopping song and dance number after another. With the houselights down, a lonely theatre fan plays his favourite record: the cast recording of the 1928 musical The Drowsy Chaperone. As he guides us through the recording with his exceptional knowledge of the show, this fictitious musical comes to life around him. Mix in two lovers on the day of their wedding, a bumbling best man, a confused hostess, a desperate theatre producer, two gangsters posing as pastry chefs, a misguided Don Juan and an intoxicated chaperone, and you have the ingredients for an evening of madcap delight
Join us and experience The Sydney Conservatorium of Music’s third year Musical Theatre cohort as they present The Drowsy Chaperone accompanied by an orchestra of students from the classical and jazz performance streams!
Licensed exclusively by Music Theatre International (Australasia).
All authorised performance materials are also supplied by Music Theatre International (Australasia). www.mtishows.com.au
Location: Verbrugghen Hall
The SCM Wind Symphony, conducted by Stephen Williams, presents an exhilarating program of wind repertoire. Featuring Catherine Likhuta’s Storm Chasers, a virtuosic concerto for timpani and wind symphony with SCM staff member Kevin Man, alongside classics by Percy Grainger and Johannes Hanssen. The performance concludes with Bernstein’s dynamic Symphonic Dances from West Side Story.
Mountains, Seas, and All Living Things: Music in Dialogue with Nature
Location: Verbrugghen Hall
Celebrating 10 years since the establishment of the Chinese Music Ensemble (CME), this anniversary concert reflects on the profound and enduring relationship between Chinese music and the natural world. Across centuries, Chinese musical traditions have not only depicted landscapes and seasons but have also embodied philosophical understandings of harmony between humans and nature.
Under the theme Mountains, Seas, and All Living Things, this concert explores how sound can evoke ecological imagination — from musical gestures that imitate wind, water, and birdsong to works that reflect on environmental consciousness and cultural memory. Bringing together the intermediate advanced instrumentalists and choristers, this program marks a milestone in CME’s development while looking towards the future: reaffirming music as a living cultural practice that nurtures environmental awareness and sustains our connection to the natural world.
Location: Verbrugghen Hall
Bringing together orchestra and choir, this series presents large-scale works from the choral symphonic repertoire, offering powerful performances of music written for voices and orchestra.
Led by Roger Benedict and Elizabeth Scott, the SCM Symphony Orchestra and Choir will combine to perform Haydn’s Te Deum for the Empress Marie Therese and Stavinsky’s Symphony of Psalms.
Phone: +61 2 9351 1222
Email: con.boxoffice@sydney.edu.au
Phone: +61 2 9351 1222
Email: con.reception@sydney.edu.au