Artist-run new music concert series Backstage Music kicked off its 2019 offerings last week with oboist Cathy Milliken, flautist Lamorna Nightingale and soprano Jane Sheldon, performing music by Berio, Stockhausen, and Australians Milliken and Fiona Hill (with an opening set by Lewis Mosley, Charlie Sundborn and Sam Weller). Last night’s Forbidden Things was the second of Backstage’s three 2019 concerts, which this year are in Annandale’s cosy gig venue The Newsagency – Sydney’s notorious performance space challenges resulting in Backstage Music having become something of a peripatetic series across its three-year history.

Biliana Voutchkova. Ollie Miller

A devoted audience has followed it through a string of characterful venues, however, and on Thursday their evening began with Ensemble Offspring’s Hatched Academy Fellow, violist Henry Justo, on The Newsagency’s colourfully lit stage, in keeping with Backstage’s convention of pairing an early career artist with more established musicians. He began with Melbourne composer Matthew Laing’s Liebeslied – the antithesis of Fritz Kreisler’s popular violin miniatures, Justo explained. The work’s rich, sometimes strident overtones and gritty scraping effects (amplification highlighting every detail of the sound) making for an apposite pairing with French spectral composer Tristan Murail’s C’est un jardin...