★★★★☆ A programme of new music with emotional punch to defy the expectations of contemporary haters.

Kew Court House, Melbourne
June 12, 2016

Poor, neglected Contemporary music. Unlike its far more popular and widely programmed brothers – Baroque, Classical and Romantic repertoire – it can all too often be absent from our concert halls. There is, of course, a glaring irony here: if audiences of the past had shown the same hostility towards the new that many of today’s music lovers exhibit, we would be without the tried and true masterpieces of the canon that now almost exclusively top the billing of our symphony orchestras and opera companies. Despite the logic of this argument, haters gonna hate (as the saying goes), and sadly, this means the classics of tomorrow rarely get the credit they deserve today. More often than not, this music is typecast as unapproachable, emotionally aloof and difficult to understand, and consequently relegated to less high-profile platforms.

In fact, the entrenched aversion to the apparently unappealing qualities of bleeding-edge modernism – dissonant harmonies; complex textures; gritty, unfamiliar orchestrations, etc. – has spurred on the success of a different breed of composer, writing for the...