2025 Big Sky Tour
Wiradjuri | Ngemba | Barkindji | Wilyakali
June 28 - July 8 2025
Building on the success and partnerships established in 2023, SYO will once again travel across the state performing and collaborating with regional communities and artists.
Seeking to build a dynamic musical conversation the talented young musicians of Sydney Youth Orchestras will join forces with James Pensini and Benjamin Northey to perform Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Meet the Orchestra concerts for schools and extend the partnership with musicians of the far west through the orchestration of their original works.
The Big Sky Tour will celebrate the unique perspectives of Australian and First Nations voices through orchestral music.
Performances by SYO of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (arr. Ravel) is supported by Susie Dickson and the late Martin Dickson AM
Highlights from The Big West Tour 2023:
Saturday, 28 June 2025 - Gulgong
Sunday, 29 June 2025 - Warren
Tuesday, 1 July 2025 7pm Cobar
Friday, 4 July 2025 - Broken Hill
Monday, 30 June 2025 - Bourke
Tuesday, 1 July 2025 - Cobar
Wednesday, 2 July 2025 - Wilcannia
Thursday, 3 July 2025 - Broken Hill
Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition
Original singer-songwriters with new orchestral arrangements
Conductor, Benjamin Northey
Meet the Orchestra Concerts Conductor, James Pensini
Musicians from the Far West to be announced.
The Big Sky Tour is Supported by:
Meet the painter behind our Big Sky Art works - Joshua De Gruachy
Joshua de Gruchy (b. 1999) is an early-career artist from Western Australia. Choosing an alternative to formal fine arts education, de Gruchy travelled east in search of a new place to develop his painting practice. This decision led him, unexpectedly, to Wilyakali and Barkindji Country in far western New South Wales, where he spent three years working in the arid landscape surrounding Broken Hill and the old port towns of Wilcannia and Menindee on the Darling (Baaka) River.
During this period, plein air painting became central to de Gruchy’s process, as he worked to observe the ever-changing colours of the bush and to expand his studio practice beyond earlier concerns with line, form, and compositional harmony. It became a matter of finding common ground between abstraction and figuration, and of capturing—with vitality—the intensity of solitude within the landscape.
Joshua now finds himself on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in Central Victoria, where he has relocated to continue his studies and explore the role that travel plays in the evolution of his work.
Find out more at West Darling Arts
