THE opening ceremony is months away, but Australia has already won a victory in the Olympics in Beijing. The Sydney Conservatorium of Music will join the world’s top music academies to perform at the Cultural Olympiad before the Games in August.

A team of 12 musicians, from the conservatorium’s students, staff and alumni, will travel to China for a series of solo and group performances, before joining the nine other selected schools for a joint show.

The academies’ performances will be among the final events in Beijing’s Cultural Olympiad - a four-year cycle of events that each Olympic city must stage before the Games.

Organised by Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music and the Yale School of Music, the two-week concert series will showcase the talents of the world’s pre-eminent music institutions, including the Royal Academy of Music, London, the Juilliard School, New York, and the Universitaet Mozarteum, Salzburg.

The Conservatorium’s dean, Kim Walker, said she was thrilled about the Australian academy’s inclusion. “This places us in a very high ranked fraternity. The voice of Australia is being brought forward as an important voice with a distinct musical sound.”

Professor Walker will travel to Beijing in July as one of the 12 performers. As well as the conservatorium’s most talented students, the group will include several well-known musicians, including the harpsichordist Neal Peres Da Costa and the string player Danny Yeadon.
“Our staff and students, past and present, are making waves on the international stage,” Professor Walker said. “This is an opportunity for us to show what’s unique about Australian music and look ahead to what’s important internationally to music in the 21st century.”

The academies first envisioned the concert series as a non-Olympic event to be held in Sydney, but the concept’s collaborative nature impressed the organisers in Beijing.

“It’s about coming together to share and applaud,” said Professor Walker. ” And about tradition. In ancient Greece they revered their musicians as much as their sporting heroes. Everyone in the music industry would love to rekindle that.”