When young music student Ronan Apcar lifted the lid on a dusty archive box at the National Library of Australia in 2019, he could not have anticipated what he would find: an unknown handwritten Concertino by Australian composer Dulcie Holland, written in 1983. 

Nor could he have imagined where the discovery would lead – to a sell-out concert at ACO On The Pier and, ultimately, a recording for ABC Classic.

Dulcie Holland

Apcar was at the library searching for an out-of-print piano sonata for a study project when he came across the Concertino. Digging deeper, he found an American concert program from 1991 showing that the work had been performed by one of Holland’s friends. Beyond that, however, the piece had all but disappeared.

Apcar was struck by what he heard in the manuscript.

“There are really exciting and crunchy harmonies, spritzy rhythms, lots of beautiful modal melodies, and a clear sense of drama and narrative throughout,” he says.

He felt it was a travesty that a work he now considers one of Holland’s finest should be sitting unheard in an archive. So he set about bringing it back to life – first...