Maria Anna Mozart Concert Tour will arrive in Sydney this June, blending live orchestra, film and narration to revisit a forgotten musical legacy.
On a winter evening in Kensington, the foyer of the John Clancy Auditorium will likely fill slowly. Students carrying instrument cases will move between families and long-time concertgoers, while the low murmur of tuning strings drifts from behind closed doors. Outside, the campus will settle into the cool stillness of late June. Inside, another kind of history will begin to surface.
The Maria Anna Mozart Concert Tour is not arriving as a conventional concert series. Instead, it will unfold as something closer to a conversation across centuries – between music and memory, between the stories preserved by history and those quietly left behind.
At the centre of the tour is Maria Anna Mozart, known within her family as Nannerl: a gifted keyboard performer and composer whose talents once rivalled those of her younger brother, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. As children, the siblings toured Europe together, performing for royal courts and audiences who marvelled at their abilities. Yet while Wolfgang’s career continued into legend, Maria Anna’s opportunities narrowed as she grew older, shaped by the expectations placed upon women in the eighteenth century.
This national concert tour will revisit that silence through music, film and live narration, drawing inspiration from the AACTA Award-winning documentary Mozart’s Sister by filmmaker Madeleine Hetherton-Miau.
Maria Anna Mozart Concert Tour Will Arrive in Sydney This June
Sydney Youth Orchestras will present the Sydney performance of the Maria Anna Mozart Concert Tour on 20 June at the John Clancy Auditorium, UNSW Kensington. The evening will feature The Peter Seymour Orchestra, conducted by James Pensini, alongside The Richard Gill Chamber Orchestra under Kate Morgan.
Projected excerpts from Mozart’s Sister will accompany a live performance of the film’s original score, composed by acclaimed Australian composer Jessica Wells. Narration woven throughout the program will guide audiences through Maria Anna’s life, tracing the gradual disappearance of a musician whose brilliance was once widely recognised.
The structure of the evening appears designed less as spectacle and more as immersion. Film imagery, orchestral sound and spoken reflection will overlap rather than compete, allowing the story to emerge in fragments: candlelit European salons, long carriage journeys between performances, letters exchanged between siblings, and the quiet realities that followed when public life became inaccessible to women of the era.
The concert will also include works by diverse composers selected by the participating orchestras, extending the tour’s broader intention beyond historical retelling.
The Story Behind the Maria Anna Mozart Concert Tour
The Maria Anna Mozart Concert Tour arrives during an ongoing conversation within Australia’s classical music sector about representation on concert programs. In 2025, only 14.6 per cent of works performed by Australian orchestras were composed by female or gender-diverse composers, reflecting a longstanding imbalance in repertoire and visibility.
Rather than addressing that disparity through direct argument, the tour approaches it through narrative. Maria Anna Mozart’s story becomes both historical and contemporary: an example of how artistic legacies can vanish, not because talent was absent, but because recognition was withheld.
For Jessica Wells, whose work spans orchestral composition, ballet and film scoring, the project offers a way of introducing contemporary composition through familiar cultural terrain. Her score for Mozart’s Sister moves between restrained chamber passages and larger cinematic swells, carrying echoes of classical structures while remaining unmistakably modern in texture.
In recent years, Wells has become one of Australia’s most respected contemporary composers, premiering major works with institutions including the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and West Australian Ballet. Yet the themes running beneath this tour seem rooted less in prestige than continuity – the passing of overlooked stories to younger generations of musicians.
That idea feels especially resonant within the Sydney Youth Orchestras performance. Many of the players taking the stage in June will be close in age to Maria Anna herself when she toured Europe as a child prodigy. The symmetry is difficult to ignore.
Music, Memory and the Concert Hall
Classical concert halls can sometimes feel suspended from ordinary life, their rituals unchanged across decades. Yet productions like the Maria Anna Mozart Concert Tour suggest a subtle shift in how orchestras are choosing to engage audiences.
The evening’s combination of documentary footage, live performance and narration reflects a growing interest in interdisciplinary storytelling – concerts that invite audiences not only to listen, but to situate music within lived experience. Here, the orchestra becomes part archive, part storyteller.
There is also something distinctly Australian in the scale of the project. Performances will move from Sydney to the Central Coast and the Sunshine Coast, connecting youth ensembles and regional orchestras through a shared repertoire. Before the Sydney performance, Chatswood High Orchestra will present a special Mother’s Day concert in May, while Symphony Central Coast and the Sunshine Coast Symphony Orchestra will continue the tour later in the year.
Rather than centring solely on metropolitan stages, the Maria Anna Mozart Concert Tour appears intent on building conversation across communities – allowing audiences in different cities to encounter the same questions about history, authorship and visibility.
Event Details
Maria Anna Mozart Concert Tour – Sydney Performance
Date: Friday, 20 June 2026
Time: Evening performance (check official website for updated session times)
Location: John Clancy Auditorium
Official Website: Maria Anna Mozart Concert Tour