Rhapsody | Mitchell Berick & Erin Sweetman

Mitchell Berick and Erin Sweetman open the 2026 Newcastle Music Festival at the Harold Lobb Concert Hall on Thursday 6 August, from 7:00pm to 8:30pm. It's the festival's opening concert, and the two of them — a clarinetist and a pianist — are the only ones on stage for the night.

The programme is built around lyrical works for clarinet and piano. They'll play Francis Poulenc's Sonata for Clarinet and Piano and Leonard Bernstein's Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, alongside Robert Muczynski's Time Pieces, Claude Debussy's Premiere Rhapsodie and Andrew Chubb's Berceuse. It's a mix of twentieth-century staples and more contemporary pieces, all written for the same two instruments.

Berick and Sweetman are described as talented Novocastrians past and present, and they're kicking off the festival's ninth season. The Newcastle Music Festival was started in 2016 by its first artistic directors, David Banney and Ross Fiddes, and has run since then, though it missed editions in 2020 and 2021. Its repertoire has always spanned from classical to jazz, and from world music to contemporary. Beyond the main stage, it's given performance opportunities to hundreds of community musicians through the Festival Choir and Festival Strings, as well as masterclasses.

The venue is the Harold Lobb Concert Hall at the Newcastle Conservatorium of Music, on the corner of Laman and Auckland Streets in Newcastle. It's known for having some of the finest acoustics in Australia, with comfortable seating and clear sightlines from every seat. The concert runs for 90 minutes, from 7:00pm to 8:30pm on Thursday 6 August.