program note

The drama takes centre stage in J. S. Bach’s powerful and richly layered St John Passion, composed for Good Friday in 1724. Read more.

Aaron Wyatt has been a participant in the Ngarra-Burria First Peoples Composers program, writing for Ensemble Offspring. He has also written a number of electro-acoustic works, using a mix of traditional and animated graphic notation, for Decibel, GreyWing Ensemble and Ensemble Dutala.

Composer Katy Abbott is forensically curious about what makes us tick. Her music explores our passions, fears and motivations using contemporary musical flavours in traditional musical settings.

Sculthorpe composed over 350 works, almost all influenced by the social climate and physical characteristics of Australia. He had a deep love for his country and for its landscape, which he regarded as sacred.

Dr Ros Bandt SoundingSpaces is an internationally acclaimed sound artist, composer, performer and scholar. She is a pioneering designer of new forms of musical art, sound sculptures, interactive music, sound installations and spatial electroacoustic symphonies.

William Barton is Australia’s leading didgeridoo player as well as a composer, instrumentalist and vocalist.

Kinds of Blue bathes in a palette of blue sonorities and bluesy, suspended textures, drawing inspiration from works by Mark Rothko and also from the blue renderings in Derek Jarman’s ‘Chroma’.

Beyond the ridge, the ranges far is a tone poem composed by Harry Sdraulig for cello and orchestra and inspired by mountain landscapes. It was commissioned by Gisela Püllen and Karl Gordon, and is dedicated to Gisela.

Rimsky-Korsakov had taken the idea of Scheherazade and the Arabian Nights as his starting point…the end result, he said, was a ‘kaleidoscope of fairytale images and designs of Eastern character’, more concerned with the connotations of the East it brings to mind than with literal storytelling.

Scriabin’s Piano Concerto, which he composed in 1896, follows in the footsteps of Chopin rather than Tchaikovsky.