For Grace-Evangeline Mason’s The Imagined Forest (2021), audience members should be instructed to close their eyes and let their imaginations wander where they will.

Mason’s 13-minute delight (commissioned for the 150th anniversary of the Royal Albert Hall) might be described as a musically-guided meditation or a kind of aural virtual reality, as it places the audience in a state of relaxed attentiveness and takes us for a walk through a wonderland of colourful forms evoked by solo instrumental passages amid vivid orchestral interplay. One can even imagine the delicate aromas of a verdant forest wafting in the air.

Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Photo supplied

There are passages that elicit memories of music that has a similar effect, such as a violin solo that recalls Vaughan Williams’s Lark Ascending. The music rises in power and then settles again in the latter stages. The composition’s lightness belies its complex and finely balanced orchestration, and the absence of rhythmic drive heightens the dreaminess. Concertmaster Kate Suthers’ violin is delightful throughout.

The Imagined Forest flavours the audience’s reception of the next item, Sergei Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major Op. 19 (1917),...