The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s She Speaks concert series, co-curated by composers Anne Cawrse and Belinda Gehlert, showcases a wondrous selection of compositions by women in four concerts culminating in the ASO’s Discover concert. The 2024 season is a welcome return of the She Speaks series which was not staged in 2023.

This Discover concert comprised works by living composers, and all but one piece was written in the 21st century, providing an instructive sample of current compositional ideas, themes and directions.

Most appropriately, the concert opened with US composer Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No.1 (1987), an orchestral work of great power. Tower has composed six ‘versions’ of the fanfare, the initial Fanfare being a response to Aaron Copland’s 1942 Fanfare for the Common Man. Tower describes these fanfares as a tribute to ‘women who take risks and are adventurous.’

A member for 15 years of Adelaide’s renowned Zephyr string quartet, which championed new music and pioneered radically new musical forms and instrumentation, She Speaks co-curator Belinda Gehlert is also an ASO violinist and has performed with various popular music ensembles. Her new work, the ASO-commissioned Diving into the Wreck, was eagerly anticipated.

The title Diving into the Wreck is drawn...