Antony Pitts is something of a musical polymath: composer, choir director, conductor, teacher and radio producer are some of the strings to his musical bow. He may be best known to Australian audiences as Artistic Director of The Song Company, a role he took up in 2016. Pitts is also a man of deep religious faith, which led him to resign as a producer at the BBC in 2005 in protest at the broadcast of Jerry Springer: The Opera, a work he believed blasphemous.

Pitts’s faith is also at the centre of Jerusalem-Yerushalayim. Textually, the work uses the Jewish (and by extension, Christian) scriptures to evoke the city regarded as holy by Jews, Christians and Muslims, beginning with the genealogy of Abraham and concluding with Isaiah’s vision of a peaceful Jerusalem. Musically, the score is thoroughly postmodern. Pitts peppers his kaleidoscopic...