You have to admire Dr Joseph Toltz. Three years in the gestation, his Out of the Shadows Festival, which aims to explore and rehabilitate works by Jewish composers and writers who fled the Nazi terror for lives in Australia, New Zealand, and in some cases even farther afield, has grown from a seed to a sapling to an entire forest of musical and dramatic presentations. It’s a fascinating project, and one that fully deserves the support it has received from the Sydney Con and the UK’s Arts & Humanities Research Council. The opening gala gave just a taster of what’s in store with a first half devoted to five orchestral works by Jewish exiles followed by a complete staging of Brecht and Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins.

Of course, the chances of anyone rediscovering a masterpiece from the 1930s or 40s is a little remote, but all of the composers whose works were on display here – some found in archives, some needing a degree of reconstruction or orchestration – merit attention, and the combined Sydney Symphony Orchestra Fellows and the Sydney Conservatorium Symphony Orchestra under the sure-footed baton of SSO Fellows Programme AD Roger Benedict gave them an ideal...