This program invites us to engage the mind and the heart, exploring joy, love, loss and longing.

Achingly beautiful, Ella Macens’ string quartet A Love Worth Fighting For creates space for love, grief and longing: ‘the multitude of different emotions and sensations that come up into the heart-space and the head-space’ when we experience change. Macens invites us to reflect not only on the love we experience with others, but our relationship to self and our capacity for compassion.

The creative influences of Yuwaalaraay, Gamilaraay, Yorta Yorta and Yuin composer and sound designer James Henry range from traditional Aboriginal art forms to the 1960s pop, folk and rock sounds of The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel. Heart Like Snow is an earnest, folk-infused string quartet in a single movement.

Lacuna is based on a fragment of text from the ancient Greek poet Sappho, translated and set to music by Peggy Polias. The composer embraces the incomplete state of the text, exploring the poet’s musings on beauty and holding space for the absence of lines lost to history. Originally commissioned for the CSO’s 2021 Australian Series, Lacuna receives its long-awaited premiere in 2024.

We close with a new commission from Michael Bakrnčev, whose creative interests range from folklore and Eastern philosophy to the nexus between technology and human consciousness.