IN his welcoming remarks, the Canadian high commissioner declared that the world needed more Canadas and Australias. And so he sparked “Revolution”, the theme of this year’s Canberra International Music Festival.

The opening gala concert, titled “A World of Music” was a brilliant start to that Revolution with performers and pieces as diverse as the title suggests.

Australia’s didgeridoo maestro William Barton started proceedings with authentic sounds of the bush and its animals in the world premiere of “Beaver Blaze”.

The much-loved Betty Beaver commissioned the work – a collaboration between Barton and Robert Davidson based on Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s poem “White Australia”.

Barton trekked the long aisle of the Fitters’ Workshop to the stage where he joined the Luminescence Chamber Singers and bass, Clive Birch, who picked up beautifully the impossibly deep note from the didgeridoo and vocalised the mystery with Luminescence later joining in with the words. Barton and his compositional collaborator deservedly took a bow for a piece that surely will go into the concert repertoire.

Then it was the New York-based Australian pianist Lisa Moore. She continued the diversity with beautifully played performances of JS Bach’s gentle BWV 869, Robert Schumann’s whimsical “Birds as Prophet”, and the hidden melody in the dark and foreboding rapidly repeated chords of “Piano Piece No 4” by American composer, Frederic Rzewski.

Closing the first half was the Canadian violinist Alexandre da Costa, with the irrepressible festival director, Roland Peelman, at the piano. They played works by Italian baroque composer Tomaso Antonio Vitali, Russian composers Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky and the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla, his fiery “Danse Espagnole”. Da Costa played brilliantly, if occasionally a little heavy-handedly, and could change his playing style seamlessly from one musical period to the next.

After interval, Peelman was back on stage with da Costa and an unnamed percussionist to conduct the Australian premiere of “Yangko” by Chinese composer-in-residence Chen Yi, who clearly was delighted with the performance. It’s a very rhythmic folk dance piece featuring vocalised percussive sounds from all three players, a range of percussion instruments, and the violin singing a sweet song.

Then the international flavour continued with a stunning performance by the Simón Bolívar String Quartet, from Venezuela, of Shostakovich’s Op 110.

For the closer to this very fine concert, the quartet was joined by Barton and Canberra guitarist, Minh Le Hoang. With Peelman conducting from the harpsichord, the ensemble performed another Robert Davidson work, “Landscape” written less than 20 years ago. Inspired by Queensland’s imposing but beautiful Glasshouse Mountains, “Landscape” is full of different moods and textures with a quite rhythmic foundation.

This concert did its setting-the-scene job beautifully. To paraphrase a famous saying: if this music is the stuff of revolutions, give me excess of it.