I have been a fan of Ensemble Offspring for the entirety of my working life. I love that their mission is to program, create and educate about contemporary classical music. Their focus on under-represented musical voices, drawing inspiration from and collaborating with First Nations, female-identifying, and emerging artists has supported the blossoming of whole genres of chamber music in Australia. I have had the great privilege of working with Lamorna, their resident flautist, and I learnt so much by sitting next to her. It was a joy to hear her heavenly sound again in these magnificent compositions from the Ngarra-Burria: First Peoples Composers program.

This program is run in partnership with the Australian Music Centre and was created to ‘build bridges for First Peoples musicians to step forward, further develop their composing skills, and connect with the art music sector’. Along with the Moogahlin Performing Arts and ANU School of Music, the participants of this program also have the opportunity to work with Ensemble Offspring to create new repertoire for performance and recording, supported by respected mentors such as Dr Christopher Sainsbury of ANU and the Dharug nation.

According to the liner notes of this album, ‘Each composer brings to their music the stories of their own country and peoples.’ What I found was that each work was truly stupendous. When works have been written specifically for a musician and their ensemble, and it’s done well, you can feel it in the bones of the work itself. Every piece on this album felt like that, with soaring melodies, dissonance that resolves and crashes out again, but always beautiful. This is modern chamber music at its best. As Dr Sainsbury says, ‘We’re not new, just previously unheard,’ and I can’t wait for everyone to hear these composers.