The Metropolis New Music Festival has long been a high point in Melbourne’s contemporary music scene. For three days it turned the Melbourne Recital Centre into a hive of musical activity, attracting a crowd diverse in age, ethnicity and musical taste. This year’s festival celebrated the music of Dutch composer, Louis Andriessen who turns 80 this June. As part of the final day’s activities the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra gave the second of its two festival concerts, offering two premieres of works by its young composers in residence and concluding with an orchestral suite drawn from Andriessen’s opera Writing to Vermeer arranged by composer Clark Rundell who also conducted the program.

Mark Holdsworth. Photo supplied

Cri de coeur by Perth-based Mark Holdsworth, the orchestra’s 2019 Cybec Young Composer in Residence, is “a desperate plea for compassion and love in a time of prevalent discrimination, violence and loneliness”. Stylistically it draws upon various elements of 20th-century art music: the overarching lyricism and harmonic idiom resonates with mid-century America, while the jagged, rhythmically violent middle section tips its hat to Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring.

Holdsworth makes good use of his orchestral resources, holding the listener’s...