Deep, tenebrous piano dissonances set the scene for the first movement of Ross Edwards’ new (or at least newly expanded) piano quartet, the centrepiece of the Australia Piano Quartet’s Mystic Voyage programme. Emerald Crossing, which dates back to 1999, has an evocative programme: “a waking dream in which a canoe was being propelled slowly across calm green water, possibly a lagoon, towards an island,” he wrote in Limelight. The right hand of the piano – sparkling notes dispatched by Daniel de Borah – flickers and flashes, accented shards of light thrown up from the surface of the water before Thomas Rann’s husky cello emerges from the darkness. The harmony is drone-like, hovering around a deep-rooted pitch-centre, the strings weaving – Anna Da Silva Chen’s violin lustrous over James Wannan’s mellow viola. Awash with a sense of ritual and meditative contemplation, the piece stood alone when it was commissioned by the (unrelated) Perth-based Australian Piano Quartet.

Pianist Daniel de Borah. Photo © Eamonn McLoughlin.

The Australia Piano Quartet, however, commissioned a sequel – a second movement to expand the work. Sea Star Dances “celebrates landfall on the seemingly utopian island in a series of...