We tend to think of concertos as bravura showpieces for a soloist, but Brett Dean’s new Cello Concerto for Alban Gerhardt, which had its world premiere with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra conducted by SSO Chief David Robertson, invited the audience into a more intimate sonic world of mingling voices. Drawn in part from Dean’s solo work Oblique Strategies – which was written for the 2014 Emanuel Feuermann cello competition (and which Gerhardt workshopped with the composer) – the Cello Concerto requires large forces (and a large percussion section) but they’re arrayed not so much for power as a mesmerising depth of colour.

Alban Gerhardt and David Robertson with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Photo © Daniela Testa

Unlike Dean’s other concerti, the Cello Concerto has no extra-musical title or program – the music itself, however, is vivid and evocative. Gerhardt, who performed from memory with focussed intensity and a deliciously mellow timbre, opened with soft, distant bird-call gestures, the Concerto unfolding less through a traditional soloist-ensemble relationship than with the cello’s sound augmented by the orchestra, smearing and radiating out from the centre of the stage. Gerhardt was haloed by winds, echoed in...