It has been quite a week for Barry Conyngham. The composer celebrated his 75th birthday yesterday with a concert of his works at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, his home institution. Throughout this week there are performances of his opera Fly in a new chamber production mounted by Lyric Opera of Melbourne.

Barry Conyngham

The audience was welcomed by the new Director of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, as the former Faculty of Music is now styled. Richard Kurth, the American theorist recently arrived from Vancouver where he was Director of the School of Music at the University of British Columbia, paid tribute to “the many gifts Barry Conyngham has brought to the campus” and to “the creative energy to have imagined a place like this”.

That “place” is The Ian Potter Southbank Centre, the resplendent new home of the Melbourne Conservatorium, costing $109m to construct and formally opened on June 1. In a sense, the Potter Centre will stand as the permanent legacy of Barry Conyngham who over the past decade has driven this project to final completion.

This week’s birthday concert presented six pieces composed over the past decade. All drew...