Myer Fredman, Stuart Challender, Antony Walker, Richard Tognetti, David Stanhope, David Porcelijn - Sculthorpe: Orchestral Works (2014)

A collection of orchestral works from renowned Australian composer, Peter Sculthorpe.

Sculthorpe has devoted his music to the representation of Australia, and to the unique experience of being 'Australian': reflections on the physical and climatic characteristics of Australian outback landscapes, as well as the loneliness they can instil; and also an awareness of Australia's physical proximity to the other countries of the Pacific Basin, from Japan in the north to his own native Tasmanian in the south, from Bali in the west to Mexico in the east. This album offers a compelling insight into the work of Australia’s most respected living composer.

His Sun Music series charted new territory for Australian music and claimed it as his own, with its intensely personal approach to landscape and nature; Sun Music III, featured on this album, evokes a tropical warmth with its abundant fertility and growth. The Sonata for Strings No. 3 explores the composer’s experience of Kakadu National Park; Djilile (‘Whistling-duck on a billabong’) draws on an Indigenous melody from northern Australia. In Earth Cry we hear Sculthorpe’s passionate plea for the Australian environment.

This collection also includes works such as Small Town, a tender celebration of a seaside settler community, and Little Serenade, composed for Michael Powell’s film treatment of Norman Lindsay’s novel Age of Consent. Port Arthur: In Memoriam, one of Sculthorpe’s most heartfelt works, was ‘written for the victims of the massacre at Port Arthur, 28 April 1996, for those who died, and for those who live with the memory of it.’