Felicity Wilcox has long been one of Australia’s most versatile and prolific composers, and, as Senior Lecturer in Music and Sound Design at Sydney’s University of Technology, one of its most innovative academics. Those two areas combine in Threading the Light, a “chamber opera” for voice, string ensemble and electronics. Composed for Wilcox’s PhD between 2008 and 2012 (when this performance was recorded), it was belatedly premiered in Sydney late last year.

For all its admirable qualities, it isn’t an opera, at least if a discernible narrative – conspicuous here by its absence – is any qualification of such. Consider it more a meditation on timeless rituals, and on grieving, its composition informed by the death of the composer’s brother. Employing a polyglottal libretto – texts drawn from and sung in Hebrew, Vedic Sanskrit, Spanish and English – it is accented by Andalusian saeta (an ancient a cappella form particular to the region), glancing echoes of flamenco, Tibetan singing bowls and shimmering electronics that hint at worlds elsewhere outside of language’s limited domain.