Friday night’s Evening Series concert Homelands encapsulated in a single concert the wide-ranging musical styles Artistic Director Kathryn Stott has brought to this year’s Australian Festival of Chamber Music, in a program spanning 16th-century English harp music to the Australian premiere of a Chinese work for pipa and Western instruments. While the evening’s Sunset Series concert, Klezmer Connections, felt taut and contained, this was an ambitious concert that sought to capture whole worlds.

Homelands at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music. Photo © Andrew Rankin

Harpist Ruth Wall opened both halves of the concert, the first with My Lady Carey’s Dompe, dating from around 1525 in England, with the distinctive buzzing bass notes of the bray harp offsetting the instrument’s crisp high register, and the second half – on modern harp – with her arrangement of the Irish song My Lagan Love, the song delivered in clear, affecting tones by mezzo Lotte Betts-Dean.

Betts-Dean also covered the Auvergne region in France in this diverse name-check of homelands, with three of Joseph Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne. Audience members from Sydney may have heard the superlative Susan Graham sing these same three songs with the