1:1 Concert Musicians
Sally Walker, Curator
Rachael Thoms
Rachael Thoms is a Canberra-based vocalist, composer, and researcher whose work moves fluidly across jazz, contemporary, and classical practice. Her performance is shaped by expressive versatility, improvisation, and deep collaboration, with a strong focus on live, responsive music-making across genres and disciplines.
She appears regularly as a soloist at many major Australian cultural institutions, with broadcast credits on ABC Television and ABC Classic. Performance highlights include appearances with George Benson, Vince Jones, Steve Barry, Lior, The Song Company, Lisa Moore, Erin Helyard, and the late Rob Guest.
Her recording work spans original and improvisation-led projects, including The Great Unknown with Luke Sweeting, Nothing But Blue Skies with Lachlan Coventry, and a recent appearance on Andrea Keller’s Flicker & Polar Bird.
Alongside her performance practice, Rachael is a passionate educator with over fifteen years’ experience in higher music education. She holds a PhD in vocal pedagogy and improvisation, and her teaching and research inform a deeply embodied, responsive approach to performance and collaboration.
Sally Walker’s repertoire ranges from early music to works composed especially for her – notably concerti by Elena Kats-Chernin, Christopher Sainsbury and Alex Turley. She has appeared as a concerto soloist in Europe, following prize-winning success in numerous competitions, including the Friedrich Kuhlau International Flute Competition (Germany), as well as with many Australian orchestras and has performed in the Salzburg, Lucerne, Tanglewood, Edinburgh and Prague Spring festivals, BBC Proms and all major Australian music festivals.
As an orchestral musician, she has toured with the Berlin Philharmonic and Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestras, was Principal Flute of the Deutsche Kammerakademie Neuss, and enjoys a long-standing association as Guest Principal Flute with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, with whom she has played modern, Baroque and Classical flutes, recorders and piccolo.
Sally regularly collaborates with pianist Simon Tedeschi and harpist Emily Granger (with whom she recorded the critically acclaimed album Something Like This) and her recording of Boccherini: Chamber Works for Flute received a 5-star review in BBC Music Magazine. She was a runner-up in both the 2024 and 2025 Limelight magazine’s Artist of the Year Award and has been nominated for APRA–AMCOS awards for both Arts Excellence and Outstanding Contribution by an Individual. For her teaching, she was awarded the Vice-Chancellor’s Award in Teaching Excellence by the University of Newcastle.
She regularly contributes to socially driven projects such Equal Music (Illumina Festival) and she is also an ambassador for the Symphony for Life Foundation. As the 1:1 CONCERTS international initiative Australian organiser, she oversaw 456 1:1 CONCERTS in 7 Australian cities - including the 2021 Adelaide Festival series - received a 5-star ‘Limelight’ review and raised $25,000 for out of work musicians.
Photo: Keith Saunders
Harold Gretton
Classical guitarist Harold Gretton brings a diverse mix of masterpieces to life with an interpretive approach founded as much on raw passion as on thorough research. During studies at the Canberra School of Music and postgraduate studies in Canberra and Strasbourg, he won first prizes in 7 International guitar competitions, and major prizes in many others. He has recorded five albums, and has appeared as a soloist in Concerto performances in Australia, Portugal and Greece.
For his PhD, Harold’s research interest is historically-informed interpretation. This interest led him to perform numerous concerts on original early guitars in Sydney and Canberra as well as at the International Condrongianos Festival. Instruments have included those by Guadagnini, Lacotte, Panormo and Soriot (from the collection of Carlo Barone). Harold has been invited to present lectures at the ANU on the topics of musical form, Haydn and the London fortepiano school, Composing for the Guitar, and essay-writing. He has also presented papers at the ANU Post-Graduate Symposium, and was employed by the ANU as a tutor in music history for undergraduate music students.
Harold is a passionate educator for students of all levels. He has given masterclasses at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, the Victorian College of the Arts, the University of Queensland, at numerous guitar festivals, and at the Conservatoire de Strasbourg. He is currently employed at the Riverina Conservatorium of Music and has also held posts at the Stuttgarter Musikschule, the Clara Schumann Musikschule, the Rheinperle Mandolinenverein as conductor and artistic director of a mandolin orchestra, and worked for six years at Music Colombo, a private music school in Saint-Louis (France).
Larissa Kovalchuk
Larissa Kovalchuk is a soprano and bandura player whose performances combine classical vocal artistry with the rich traditions of Ukrainian music. Accompanying herself on the bandura, Ukraine’s national string instrument, she creates an intimate and atmospheric sound world where voice and resonant strings intertwine. Her repertoire features works from classical, baroque, and world music traditions arranged for bandura and voice, alongside traditional Ukrainian songs and lyrical folk ballads, offering audiences a deeply evocative and meditative listening experience.
