Brisbane Music Festival

About the Festival

Praised for its “diverse programming” (Limelight), the annual Brisbane Music Festival (BMF) curated and produced by Alex Raineri has swiftly established itself as a vibrant addition to the Australian arts scene. In 2025, BMF celebrates its eighth year of eclectic approaches to programming, a cross-cultivation of musical offerings both old and new. Each year the festival celebrates its ability to offer employment opportunities to several Australian artists and arts-workers.

Operating with inclusivity at its core, BMF delivers artistic excellence and gives voice to under-represented work. It celebrates the vibrancy of Australian artists and foregrounds diverse and distinctively homegrown cultural narratives. Despite its relatively youthful history, BMF has commissioned and presented the world premiere performances of over 80 new works by Australian and international composers. Across seven successful iterations to date, programming has traversed many genres of music; contemporary, classical, experimental, First Nations, electronic, pop, as well as film, dance, theatre and visual art.

BMF celebrates its point of difference to other arts organisations through its ambitious programming, equally balancing innovation/exploration with well-known content. A major ethos of the festival 2018-2022 was to present performances in unique and intimate spaces throughout the city of Brisbane, thereby incorporating a distinct flavour of the city itself into the festival. In 2023, BMF shifted exclusively to its new home in ‘FourthWall Arts’, an intimate black-box theatre in the heart of Brisbane’s buzzing CBD.

Artistic Director Alex Raineri was awarded an APRA/AMCOS 'Luminary' Art Music Award for his commitment to Australian music through BMF. Composer Chris Dench was awarded the APRA/AMCOS ‘Work of the Year’ award in 2020 for his stunning BMF-commissioned piano work passing bells: day. BMF has featured some of Australia’s leading artists including; Ensemble Offspring, Ensemble Q, Sara Macliver, Orava Quartet, Natusko Yoshimoto, Karin Schaupp, Amy Lehpamer, Claire Edwardes, Lisa Moore, Paul Dean, Jessica Aszodi, Jane Sheldon, Lotte Betts-Dean and many others. BMF has comissioned leading composers including; Deborah Cheetham Fraillon, Elliott Gyger, Kate Moore, Chris Dench, Paul Dean, Lyle Chan, Cat Hope, Melody Eötvös, Damien Ricketson and many others. 

In 2022, ABC Classic co-commissioned and released a commercial recording of a festival-commissioned chamber work by Erik Griswold, How Strange the Change. In 2024, ABC Classic released a feature album of Alex Raineri playing piano music of Melody Eötvös, including the 2023 BMF commission Piano Sonata No. 2, A Story from the Sand Dunes. Most recently, Parma Records (Navona) released an album featuring Lina Andonovska and Alex Raineri, including the BMF-commissioned work by Judith Ring, All You Can Do Is Hang On For Dear Life. Forthcoming BMF-commissioned works will feature on recordings released by Decca, Kammerklang, MOVE Records, and others.

While the stylistic focal point of the festival is on new classical/concert music, previous major projects have included cross-art form collaborations featuring theatre, film, visual-arts, contemporary dance and cross-genre shows traversing classical, musical theatre, jazz, folk, pop and rock. BMF has collaborated on cross-genre projects with Victorian Theatre Company, Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art and Brisbane Writers Festival. BMF has co-presented shows with Opera Queensland, Dots+Loops and Dark Unicorn Productions. BMF has toured shows to London, Helsinki, The Hague, Melbourne, Maleny, Cloncurry, Logan, Eureka, Gympie and Bundaberg.

The 2019 festival boasted an audience capacity of over 1,000 attendees over the course of its multiple events, a 300% ascension of audience statistics from its premiere iteration in 2018. The 3^rd BMF in 2020 saw a transition to the digital space, with a ten-concert entirely online festival with a global audience of patrons from over ten countries around the world. The 2021/2022 festivals saw the BMF in its most expanded format with multiple events (both live and digital) with a combined audience of over 4,000. Since shifting to ‘FourthWall Arts’, the festival has played to consistently sold-out crowds across its 2023/2024 seasons.

BMF celebrates an ongoing commitment to empower the emerging generation of artists. The festival has run an impactful Young Artist Program since 2021. This provides early-career artists with collaboration and performance opportunities, as well as mentoring and professional development seminars. Alumni of the YA program are; Francis Atkins, Jemima Drews, Michael Gibson, Drew Gilchrist, Rebekah Hall, Julia Hill, Shuhei Lawson, Camilo Lopez, Miriam Niessl, Andre Oberleuter, Laura Raineri, Dario Scalabrini, Daniel Shearer, Harrison Swainston, Donica Tran and Tarilindy String Quartet,