The Canberra International Music Festival (CIMF) is a music festival based in Canberra

Canberra

Canberra is the capital city of Australia. With a population of over 345,000, it is Australia's largest inland city and the eighth-largest city overall. The city is located at the northern end of the Australian Capital Territory , south-west of Sydney, and north-east of Melbourne...

, Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

. It was founded by Ursula Callus (1939–2001), President of Pro Musica Incorporated.

The first Festival was originally called the Canberra International Chamber Music Festival and was held in April 1994. It won the Canberra Critics Circle Award for Music Innovation. Since 1997 the Festival has been an annual event, and in 2008 it was renamed the Canberra International Music Festival.

From 2005 to 2008 it went through a period of rapid expansion, due to the generosity of Arts patron Barbara Blackman and now is one of the leading new music festivals in Australia presenting around 30 concerts annually. Peter Sculthorpe

Peter Sculthorpe

Peter Joshua Sculthorpe AO OBE is an Australian composer. Much of his music has resulted from an interest in the music of Australia's neighbours as well as from the impulse to bring together aspects of native Australian music with that of the heritage of the West...

 is composer laureate of the festival and was the subject of a significant retrospective in 2009, where his opera/music theatre work Rites of Passage

Rites of Passage (Sculthorpe)

Rites of Passage is a music theatre work written by the Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe in 1972-73. It is often categorised as an opera, but it does not conform to the traditional concept of opera...

was remounted for the first time in 35 years. This focus was timed to coincide with his 80th birthday.

Other recent significant commissions and premieres in the CIMF include Arvo Pärt

Arvo Pärt

Arvo Pärt is an Estonian classical composer and one of the most prominent living composers of sacred music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs his self-made compositional technique, tintinnabuli. His music also finds its inspiration and influence from...

's Fourth Symphony, Henryk Górecki

Henryk Górecki

Henryk Mikołaj Górecki was a composer of contemporary classical music. He studied at the State Higher School of Music in Katowice between 1955 and 1960. In 1968, he joined the faculty and rose to provost before resigning in 1979. Górecki became a leading figure of the Polish avant-garde during...

's ...songs are sung... for string orchestra, the concert premiere of Einojuhani Rautavaara

Einojuhani Rautavaara

Einojuhani Rautavaara is a Finnish composer of contemporary classical music, and is one of the most notable Finnish composers after Jean Sibelius.-Life:...

's The Gift of the Magi and Peter Sculthorpe's "Shining Island".

Artistic Director Christopher Latham succeeded Nicole Canham in 2009.