The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s First Voices Showcase is not your typical concert, with the program giving equal time to the music (three short Australian works) and onstage conversations with the composers. The Showcase focusses the spotlight on the different ways in which these emerging composers are forging their identity through their music.  

Aaron Wyatt and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in the MSO’s First Voices Showcase 2026. Photo © Laura Manariti

The Showcase is an annual event initiated by the MSO to present works commissioned under the orchestra’s First Voices Composer Program. This year, it presents two works from the 2025 Program, one of which is a world premiere. 

First Nations conductor Aaron Wyatt has hosted and conducted every Showcase so far. Wyatt’s engaging manner creates a supportive mood and his graceful conducting is a joy to watch. 

James Howard is a Jaadwa composer, producer and sound artist, currently undertaking post-doctoral studies at the University of Melbourne. Nyirrimarr Ngamatyata /To Lose Yourself at Sea was written after the Voice Referendum, and it has an autobiographical spin. The protagonist is thrown overboard in a storm and clings to flotsam in waves that “threaten all sense of direction and hope”. 

Howard wanted the bass drum to be ‘hit so hard it breaks’ at the height of the storm. That was never going to happen … but Wyatt then asks Howard how he feels now, after the storm. Howard says that although the protagonist manages to reach their destination, he isn’t sure where that is; and although the final scene is calm, he doesn’t how to answer the question: ‘where do we go from here?’

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in the MSO’s First Voices Showcase 2026. Photo © Laura Manariti

Next comes Wyatt’s own work – a short, cheerful fanfare commissioned by the Bob Hawke College (WA), which Wyatt introduces with self-deprecating humour. The title, The Things Which Are Most Important Don’t Always Scream the Loudest, is a quote attributed (correctly, Wyatt hopes) to Hawke that underscores values such as equality and quiet confidence. 

The program closes with the world premiere of Mutations by Gamilaraay composer Nicholas Astill, a PhD student at Sydney Conservatorium. Astill values complexity; he likes it when you find you’ve been “looking for carrots in a cabbage patch”, or things get “twisted and weird”.

In Mutations he transformed two musical ideas – the tango and the minor scale – by applying mathematical/computing models to create a series of ‘mutations’ in different styles, such as Baroque, big band and blues. Mathematically, his goal is “to quantify how similar a tango is to the minor scale”; musically the themes could be described as twisted, but not weird.