Multiple award-winning composer Elena Kats-Chernin has long been a luminous figure in Australia’s musical pantheon. Her uniquely eclectic and original music embodies an acute awareness of musical culture and history. She has written in almost every genre — operas, piano concerti, film scores, choral works, and orchestral, chamber and solo instrumental works of a seemingly endless variety and in highly innovative styles.

But until now she has not written a violin concerto.

Emily Sun and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Photo © Claudio Raschella

Violinist Emily Sun, the ASO’s Artist-in-Association, invited Kats-Chernin to compose a violin concerto and, with the support of an ASO commission and philanthropist Mary Lou Simpson, Sun and Kats-Chernin worked together to develop it.

As Kats-Chernin has explained in Limelight: “the solo violin part is multifaceted — virtuosic, poetic and sometimes surreal… I designed the concerto as if it was a fantasy on those themes from a place called the Wintergarten in Berlin where variety shows were performed.” The story, says the composer, is from a German silent film about love and betrayal.

The result is entitled Fantasie im Wintergarten, Concerto for violin and orchestra. It’s in three movements and,...