Australia's Top Arts & Musical Festivals

Australia reinforced its position as a major emerging arts center with the launch of the 16th Biennale of Sydney, a 12-week showcase of some of the world's best contemporary art. More than 200 leading artists from 36 countries exhibited works in galleries, museums and outdoor venues to create one of the biggest events of its kind ever staged in Australia. The 2008 Biennale's artistic director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who is chief curator at Italy's Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, chose Revolutions: Forms That Turn as the central theme gathering a collection of art that explores the concept of movement and change—revolving, rotating, mirroring, reversing and turning upside down or inside out. Yoko Ono, satirical Italian sculptor Maurizio Cattelan and American photographer, sculptor and videographer Paul Pfeiffer were among the stellar line-up of artists, and Sydney was the first Biennale worldwide to launch a unique online venue for cutting-edge digital artists.

While Australian opera is best seen and heard under the gleaming white "sails" of the Sydney Opera House, the annual Opera in the Vineyards offers two wonderful opportunities to enjoy it in a picturesque vineyard setting. Every October, some of the best Australian and international opera singers and thousands of opera lovers head for the beautiful winelands of the Yarra Valley (about an hour's drive north of Melbourne), and the Hunter Valley (two hours north-west of Sydney), for an afternoon of gourmet food and great wines followed by a concert as the sun sets over the vines. Balgownie Estate is the venue for the 2008 Yarra event—a Food and Wine Fair starts at 4pm and the concert is from 6.30pm. Historic Wyndham Estate hosts the Hunter bash, with food and wine served from 2pm and the concert from 6.30pm. This year's singers included soprano Deborah Riedel, mezzo Milijana Nikolic, tenor Rosario Spina and baritone Andrew Jones who will perform classics from La Boheme, Madama Butterfly, Pearl Fishers, Carmen, Tosca and Turandot. Tickets from about $70.

What began as an attempt to fill a cultural void—the high-summer month of January when most Sydneysiders are on vacation at the beach—has now become Australia's largest public event. Thirty-one years after its launch in 1977, the Sydney Festival attracts audiences of more than a million people who flock to the city to enjoy an outstanding three-week program of international and Australian theater, music, dance, and an array of free events, concerts and firework displays in some of Sydney's most spectacular settings. While some of the performances are for a sophisticated adult audience, the main emphasis of the festival is very firmly on family and friends—to encourage as many people as possible to get out on the streets and party (as only the Aussies know how). While the 2009 line-up hasn't been announced yet, dates for two of the festival's most popular free and outdoor events—Jazz in the Domain and Symphony in the Domain—are set for Saturday, January 17 and Saturday, January 24 respectively (both from 8pm), when more than 100,000 people will pack a picnic and enjoy live music at sunset in one of the city's major parks. What was once a quiet month is now one of the best times to be in Sydney. The Sydney Festival runs from January 10-31, 2009.

While the Sydney Festival sparkles in January, arch-rival Melbourne hosts its own International Arts Festival every October—a 17-day celebration of dance, theater, music, visual arts and fun outdoor events that attract audiences of more than half a million to the city's top arts and entertainment venues. The fact that Melbourne is a quarter the size of Sydney means nothing to the festival organizers, who each year create a critically acclaimed program brimming with international and home-grown talent—more than a thousand artists from 13 countries and almost 600 performances and events, many of them free. Highlights of the 2008 program included the world premiere of an intriguing new Australian opera The Navigator, and performances by the young and exuberant Jerusalem Quartet.

Tickets to this hugely popular concert series usually sell out within a day or two of going on sale, and it's not hard to see why. Some of the biggest names in showbiz are invited to perform each year in the grounds of Leeuwin Estate—a leading winery in the Margaret River region of Western Australia (about three hours' drive south of Perth)—and people travel from far and wide to enjoy an evening of music, food and wine. Leeuwin Estate is a long-time and passionate supporter of the arts—it even has its own Art Series collection of wines and an art gallery on the estate—and launched the Concert Series in 1985 with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Since then, the likes of Ray Charles, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Diana Ross, Tom Jones, Michael Crawford, kd lang and James Taylor have all performed to enthusiastic crowds of up to 30,000, who dress up in anything from tuxedos to t-shirts and enjoy a picnic in the estate gardens before the sunset concert performed on an eye-catching "shell" stage. The annual Concert Series is held each February.

It may not have the glamor or cachet of Venice or Cannes, but the Sydney Film Festival has been a permanent fixture on the international movie calendar since 1954. With some of Hollywood's A-List among its patrons—Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett and George Miller, to name a few—the annual festival is a launching pad for major films and actors, and in 2008 inaugurated a Cannes-style Official Competition with a prize of $60,000 up for grabs. While Sydney hosts the festival with a star-studded gala opening night followed by 18 days of back-to-back screenings—all open to the public—15 regional cities and towns around Australia also benefit from a unique traveling roadshow taking the festival's best movies to a much wider audience. The 2008 line-up included top British director Mike Leigh's new bittersweet feature film Happy-Go-Lucky, and a collection of new-release documentaries, short cuts and digital features.

Australian Aboriginal art exploded onto the international art scene in the 1970s and has been a hot-ticket item ever since. While quality varies dramatically from the cheap, mass-produced tourist trade to authentic and highly-prized canvases which can fetch tens—and sometimes hundreds—of thousands of dollars, one of the best ways to view and buy pieces is through one of the many reputable art galleries specializing in top-quality indigenous art. Director of Aboriginal Art at Sotheby's in Sydney, Tim Klingender recommends Alcaston Gallery, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, William Mora Galleries and Art Place in Melbourne; Aboriginal and Pacific Art, Utopia Art Gallery and Hogarth Gallery in Sydney; Raft Gallery in Darwin and Short Street Gallery in Broome. If you're a serious collector, four of Australia's leading auction houses—Sotheby's, Lawson-Menzies, Bonhams and Goodman, and Joel Fine Art—specialize in Aboriginal art, hold occasional auctions, and do appraisals. Most major Australian art galleries have permanent collections and special exhibitions, the best being at the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.