With its 2021 performance cancelled just days before it was to go on, Peggy Polias’s Lacuna will finally receive its premiere with the Canberra Symphony Orchestra (CSO) next week.

“It feels like closure, in a way, to see the hard work come to fruition and to have some certainty after the upheaval of the pandemic,” Polias tells Limelight. “On the other hand, there is the feeling that a door is opening, that the sounds will get their first airing and the score will finally exist in the wider world as music.”

Peggy Polias

Peggy Polias. Photo supplied

Polias’s work is one of two world premieres to be presented in Heart-space on 16 May, performed by the CSO Chamber Ensemble and soprano Amy Moore. With Ella Macens’ A Love Worth Fighting For, James Henry’s Heart Like Snow and a new work from Michael Bakrnč​ev, the program is an all-Australian exploration of “love, loss and longing”.