After a surprise storm in Melbourne on Thursday afternoon, the audience at Hamer Hall is ready for an evening of drama. The program unfolds as a kind of musical lineage, each work echoing its compositional forebears while refracting familiar sounds through new, unexpected lenses.

The concert opens with a new work by Andrew Aronowicz, the Cybec Young Composer in Residence. Aronowicz’s writing proves confident and imaginative. The piece, based on Angela Carter’s short story The Erl-King is cinematic and compelling, with interesting explorations of texture used to tell the story of a young soul preyed upon by a forest spirit. Much like the Mahler we will hear later, Aronowicz depicts the sounds of the forest – rustling leaves and excited birds – and borrows from Romantic song, such as Schubert.

The spotlight then shifts to trumpeter Sergei Nakariakov, who performs his own arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme for flugelhorn. Originally composed for cello, the work takes on a new character in Nakariakov’s hands. His technical precision and lyrical phrasing bring a vocal quality to the flugelhorn, navigating the intricate variations and partnering with the orchestra in a...