Haunting cinematic wildernesses at New Music Festival conclusion.

Metropolis New Music Festival 2015
Melbourne Recital Centre, Elizabeth Murdoch Hall
May 16, 2015

Breaking with the geographical theme of previous years, the most recent Metropolis New Music Festival offered a fresh artistic focus: the world of film. For the third time in two weeks, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of German conductor André de Ridder, graced the luminous Elizabeth Murdoch Hall stage on Saturday night with a programme of music inspired by cinema.

The festival has seen an extensive array of new music, much of it Australian and world premieres of works by local and international composers, performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and various chamber ensembles and soloists. Saturday night’s concert was brilliantly curated, and just as eclectic, offering works for subsections of the MSO, as well as its full compliment.

To begin the evening, the MSO Strings took to the stage for a performance of a suite from Radiohead frontman Jonny Greenwood’s visceral soundtrack to There Will Be Blood. The score embodied the characters and forbidding landscapes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 feature, presenting variegated sound-worlds coloured by the use of an Ondes Martenot,...