When composer Chloé Charody steps onto the stage of the Melbourne Recital Centre this August, she brings with her more than just her music. With it she brings testimony. Most powerfully, perhaps, she brings her refusal to remain silent.

Stories That Must Be Heard, the concert series Charody created in 2023, comes to Melbourne for the first time with two works: Truth in the Cage and Limbo. Though differing in form – Truth in the Cage is a soprano-piano song cycle, while Limbo fuses violin sonata with circus arts – both are, at their core, acts of artistic resistance, she tells Limelight.

“These are stories that have been silenced. If no one is going to bring those responsible to justice, then the responsibility falls to us, in the arts.”

Chloé Charody. Portrait supplied

Truth in the Cage is Charody’s stark and intimate setting of poetry by Iranian refugee and writer Mohammad Ali Maleki, who was incarcerated for nearly a decade in Australia’s offshore immigration system, with seven years on Manus Island. He wrote poems as a self-preservation strategy, a means of hanging on to his sanity.

Instead of translating Maleki’s poems into...