For three decades Genevieve Lacey has been acknowledged as Australia’s “queen of the recorder”,  but despite playing for Queen Elizabeth at Westminster Abbey, featuring in a London Prom concert and collaborating with multiple orchestras and ensembles at home and abroad, she has only now made her debut with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in an intriguing recital at Sydney’s City Recital Hall.

Genevieve Lacey

Curated by the Melbourne-based musician and led by SSO Concertmaster Andrew Haveron, the one-hour program featured six contemporary composers – three Australians, two Brits and an American – and their takes on the Baroque and the Renaissance alongside a scintillating performance of Giuseppe Sammartini’s Recorder Concerto in F, in what Lacey describes as “a labyrinth of contemplation on time’s infinitely beautiful haze”.

Several composers, most notably Benjamin Britten, have raided John Playford’s The Dancing Master, a 17th century collection of English country dances and folk tunes, and former ACO violinist Erkki Veltheim’s A Playford Maze is a montage of intercut tunes, featuring Lacey’s recorder and short orchestral links.

This 11-minute patchwork showed the small string ensemble in various combinations as the...