Our biggest and boldest program of the season is also our most subtle and surreal, with music that will overwhelm you with its delicate beauty and luminous sonorities. 

Christopher Cerrone’s ethereal quartet, How to Breathe Underwater leads into the resonant dreamworld of Tobias Broström – haunting music featuring an uncharacteristically tender trumpet. Kate Moore holds a mirror to 13th-century Spain with a modern-day cantiga, Rose of roses, flower of flowers. In its unsung tale, the nightingale, pierced by a rose thorn, sings itself to death.

Two large-scale works receive their Australian premieres. English composer Tansy Davies has written Lost Science as an imaginary journey into the Earth’s interior. She evokes ancient spaces that ‘speak to us in moans, groans, echoes and whispers’, summoning visions of the Divine Feminine, from Isis to Joan of Arc. And Kate Moore’s new percussion concerto, written for her long-time friend Claire Edwardes and co-commissioned with Amsterdam’s Het…