Adelaide Festival: From Town Hall to Ukaria
Mount Barker, Saturday 28th February - Sunday 1st March
Adelaide Festival, Beethoven Sonatas, Olli Mustonen, Ukaria
From Town Hall to UKARIA: Beethoven in the Hills, in the Weather, in the Sweat
The Adelaide Festival began for me with the simplest kind of pilgrimage: a brief walk from our city apartment to the Adelaide Town Hall, through an atmosphere of unaccustomed humidity and swollen, luminous cloud. The city felt momentarily tropical—grey, heavy, expectant—and then, inside the hall, that calm shift: stone and timber, grand staircase, the collective hush before music. A civic interior. A public room. A reminder that festivals, at their best, take ordinary streets and fold them into ritual.
The next day the pilgrimage lengthened and changed character. This time it was a 50-minute drive out of the CBD grid and up into the Adelaide Hills: the city loosening behind you, the road climbing, the mind adjusting. And then UKARIA—less a venue than an arrival. You climb through that glorious, curated garden, the approach designed to slow the body and sharpen the senses, so that by the time you step inside you are already listening. The hall itself is an architectural and sonic gem: rammed earth and timber, intimate and exacting, set on the slope with a glass wall that frames the bushland and the rise of Mount Barker like a quiet second stage.
From my seat—perfectly placed, keyboard in full view—the instrument was not incidental but central to the experience. UKARIA’s concert grand is a Steinway D-274, selected specifically for this room and then carefully voiced and regulated to match the hall’s clarity: a piano capable of vast power, yet built to speak in an intimate acoustic without blur. That fact mattered once Olli Mustonen sat down, because what followed wasn’t “piano playing” so much as a sustained act of physical and psychological transmission.
And outside, in place of bright summer glare, the Hills provided a different kind of light: dark, dense clouds moving up and down the slope, sometimes seeming to lower themselves toward the glass as if the weather wanted to enter the room. The backdrop was alive—energy, movement, unpredictability—dark and light reshaping the landscape minute by minute. It was an uncanny accompaniment to Mustonen’s Beethoven, which also refused steadiness, refused complacency. The clouds rose and fell; so did the phrasing, the dynamic pressure, the sense of risk.
From the first note of the opening sonata in the morning recital, Mustonen’s approach was clear: this was Beethoven as a living force, not a marble canon. The piano was attacked—and then, instantly, caressed. He pulled sound out of the Steinway as though it were multiple instruments at once: hammered, whispered, argued with. His hands moved in sweeping rises and falls that seemed to follow the music’s own architecture, and because the keyboard was visible you could watch the relationship between gesture and outcome—the way a note could be thrown like a stone or placed like a thought.
There was also the sense, throughout, that Mustonen wasn’t “interpreting” Beethoven so much as inhabiting him. Not in a theatrical, costume sense—more as though the performer had become a temporary conduit for Beethoven’s original urgency: the feeling of a composer at a desk, in a room in Vienna, making decisions that were not safe or polite, but necessary. In the Town Hall baroque concert earlier in the week I had felt the power of music as continuity, as an unbroken tradition carried by voices and discipline. At UKARIA, the power felt more elemental: creation happening now, in your presence, with all its labour exposed.
And then came the sweat. First a glint. Then the unmistakable sheen. The glasses removed. The forehead wiped. A steady flow that never interrupted the music but insisted on the reality of what was being done: the physical cost of sustaining this level of intensity across long spans. The sweat became, strangely, part of the authenticity. It didn’t reduce Beethoven to biography; it reminded you that these scores were once written by a body, by a person who also laboured and strained and persisted. Beethoven’s “blank sheets” became imaginable again—not as myth, but as work.
The morning program travelled across decades, and you could hear Beethoven’s evolution not as textbook “periods” but as a quickening of the blood: early sonatas bristling with defiant energy, then the leap into later territory—compressed, experimental, eruptive—and finally the arrival at the Appassionata, which did not feel like a famous monument being delivered but like a storm system settling over the room. In UKARIA’s acoustic, the turbulence had astonishing definition: big sound without smear, momentum without muddiness. It was Beethoven’s drama in high resolution. The audience inside, like the clouds outside, rose high.
The afternoon recital reframed the day. If the morning felt like a single, gathering weather front, the afternoon felt like a set of sharply cut portraits: grace, wit, drama, tenderness, sudden darkness. Mustonen could make Classical poise feel newly articulate, then push into something psychologically exposed. The slow movement of Op. 10 No. 3 opened a space that was not decorative but existential—Beethoven looking forward into his own depths. After the interval the shorter sonatas did not function as light relief; they became concentrated demonstrations of Beethoven’s range, and of Mustonen’s ability to switch character without losing the through-line of intensity.
And then ‘Les Adieux’. In some hands it can be “programmatic” Beethoven—an elegant narrative, well told. Here it was more visceral: farewell as tightening, absence as hollow suspension, return as release. The music behaved like speech: motifs that felt like words, silences that felt like withheld breath. With the clouds outside continuing their restless movement, the sonata’s emotional weather had a landscape to match.
I had planned to hear the final recital—Moonlight and Op. 110—and there is a particular sadness in missing the completion of a carefully shaped triptych. But perhaps it also sharpened the meaning of what I did hear. The festival gave me two different kinds of passage: the short walk into the civic interior of the Town Hall, and the longer drive into a hillside sanctuary where garden, architecture, view and acoustic conspire to make listening feel like a heightened state. And in the middle of that second pilgrimage sat a man at a Steinway, sweating, risking, insisting—making Beethoven feel not like heritage but like present tense.
If festivals are meant to do anything beyond entertainment, it is this: to reorder your sense of time and place, to show you that music is not simply performed, but made anew—sometimes in a city hall, sometimes on a mountain slope beneath moving cloud, and sometimes with such force that you leave feeling, improbably, that you have been in the room where the music was first written.
Concert 1 — Appassionata (Sat 28 Feb 2026, 11:00am)
Piano Sonata No. 1 in F minor, Op. 2 No. 1
Piano Sonata No. 2 in A major, Op. 2 No. 2
Piano Sonata No. 22 in F major, Op. 54
Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57 “Appassionata”
Concert 2 — Les Adieux (Sat 28 Feb 2026, 2:30pm)
Piano Sonata No. 9 in E major, Op. 14 No. 1
Piano Sonata No. 7 in D major, Op. 10 No. 3
Piano Sonata No. 24 in F-sharp major, Op. 78 “à Thérèse”
Piano Sonata No. 25 in G major, Op. 79 “Cuckoo”
Piano Sonata No. 26 in E-flat major, Op. 81a “Les Adieux”
Concert 3 — Moonlight (Sun 1 Mar 2026, 2:30pm)
Piano Sonata No. 12 in A-flat major, Op. 26
Piano Sonata No. 13 in E-flat major, Op. 27 No. 1 “Sonata quasi una fantasia”
Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27 No. 2 “Moonlight”
Piano Sonata No. 31 in A-flat major, Op. 110