An Australian Collection

Carl Vine

Carl Vine AO is one of Australia's best-known and most often performed composers, with an orchestral catalogue of eight symphonies and thirteen concertos. His piano music is played widely around the world, and recordings of his work appear on more than seventy albums across the major streaming services.

David Hudson

David Hudson plays didgeridoo on Nigel Westlake’s score for the IMAX film The Edge, and contributes his own short piece Gandangara Spirit. The playing answers sandstone escarpments, remnant forest and an older Aboriginal presence in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.

Victorian Philharmonic Orchestra

The Victorian Philharmonic Orchestra is an Australian orchestra, affiliated with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Its players appear on film scores and concert recordings of Australian music.

Emma Lysons

Emma Lysons is an English-born Australian lyric coloratura soprano. On Tall Poppies she is heard as soprano on the IMAX soundtrack The Edge.

Ian Munro

Ian Munro has emerged as one of Australia’s most distinguished and awarded musicians, a pianist and composer whose career has taken him to thirty countries across Europe, Asia, North America and Australasia.

Synergy Percussion

Marimbas lock and skins crackle as Synergy Percussion drives Edwards's Dragonfly Dance, Westlake's Kalabash and Malachite Glass, and Pratt's hocketing Fantasy. Australian percussion writing at full tilt.

Roland Peelman

Belgian-born conductor, pianist and artistic director Roland Peelman has shaped Australian music for more than three decades. A mentor to composers and singers, he is known especially for his long leadership of The Song Company and for championing new work.

The Song Company

The Song Company sings with bite and polish across Mozart's scatological canons, Josquin's courtly chansons, and Australian choral works that protest, dance and mourn.

David Russell

David Russell’s countertenor cuts cleanly through Mozart’s scatological canons with The Song Company, and he takes the solo line in Martin Wesley-Smith’s Who Killed Cock Robin?, turning the falsely accused caterpillar into a soft-shoe turn of real charm.

Marshall McGuire

Marshall McGuire brings the harp into contemporary Australian music with uncommon colour and nerve. He specialises in both baroque and modern repertoire, drawing out unusual sonorities and serving new works with technical sureness and interpretative sympathy.

David Pereira

David Pereira is an Australian classical cellist, teacher and composer, born in Macksville, New South Wales, in 1953. He has premiered many concertos and solo works written for him by Australian composers, and served as principal cellist of the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

Esther van Stralen

Esther van Stralen brings a nutty, assertive viola tone to solo fantasies spanning Telemann, Cage, Penderecki and Piazzolla, and darkens Australian chamber lines with grit, warmth and precision.

Georges Lentz

Georges Lentz’s music answers the starry Outback sky with brittle austerity, long silences and a shimmering sense of space. His Caeli enarrant cycle turns galaxies and nebulae into fragile string writing, cymbals and prepared piano.

John Harding

John Harding's violin brings lyric fire and chamber poise to horn trios by Brahms, Banks and Berkeley, to Carl Vine's Third Quartet, and to Arthur Benjamin's neglected sonatinas and miniatures, played with characteristic élan.

Graham Abbott

One of Australia's best-known orchestral and opera conductors, Graham Abbott is also a respected teacher, often involved in educational projects such as music camps and residencies across Australia.

Australian Youth Orchestra

The Australian Youth Orchestra brings disciplined, exuberant force to Australian orchestral writing, from Christmas carols reimagined by living composers to concertos and dance scores that sit at the heart of the national repertoire.

Geoffrey Collins

Geoffrey Collins’s flute has been the voice of much new Australian chamber music. His playing moves from buoyant Mozart quartets to driving Vine sonatas, dreamy Boyd and Westlake colours, and solo works written for him that treat the instrument without cliché.

Alice Giles

Alice Giles draws a vast spectrum of colour and attack from the harp, from Salzedo's solo fireworks to Berio's Sequenza II and the intimate chamber worlds of Boyd, Kats-Chernin and flute-and-harp repertoire.

Goldner String Quartet

The Goldner String Quartet plays Peter Sculthorpe's complete string quartets with the authority of an ensemble totally inside the music: precise, tonally varied, and alive to landscape, ritual rhythm and sudden cascades of harmonics.

Peter Jenkin

Peter Jenkin puts the clarinet through its modern paces: multiphonics, quarter-tones, glissandi and multi-tracked polyphony, equally at home in Xenakis and Berio, klezmer freylekhs, tango and electronics.

Stephanie McCallum

Stephanie McCallum brings formidable technique and real character to Alkan’s transcendental études and to the sharp edges of Boulez, Xenakis and Australian new music. Thunderous drama sits beside poised colour and clarity.

Sydney Chamber Choir

Widely recognised as one of Australia's finest choirs, the Sydney Chamber Choir marked its 25th anniversary in 2000. The Choir continues to inspire and enchant Sydney audiences with its versatility and brilliant performances.

Nicholas Routley

Nicholas Routley is a conductor, pianist and composer who founded the Sydney Chamber Choir in 1975 and has shaped its work in Renaissance polyphony and new Australian choral music.

Larry Sitsky

Larry Sitsky's activities as a composer, pianist, writer, broadcaster and teacher place him among the foremost ambassadors of contemporary Australian piano music. His work has made a lasting contribution to the Australian musical tradition.

Stephen Bowden

Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Queensland Symphony Orchestra is the professional symphony orchestra of Queensland, based in Brisbane. It gave its first concert in 1947 and has become a central voice for orchestral music in the state.

Dene Olding

Australian violinist Dene Olding brings refined, expressive tone and sure intonation to chamber music that ranges from Schubert’s great C major Quintet to the full span of Peter Sculthorpe’s string quartets and new Australian scores.

Australia Ensemble

The Australia Ensemble, resident at the University of New South Wales since its founding in 1980, is widely recognised as Australia’s leading chamber music ensemble. Seven principal instrumentalists form its core, joined by guests for standard repertoire and unusual combinations.

Colin Brumby

Colin Brumby (1933–2018) was an Australian composer and conductor whose prolific catalogue ranges across opera, concertos, chamber music, choral works and songs.

Nigel Butterley

Nigel Butterley (1935–2022) was an Australian composer and pianist. His catalogue ranges from radiophonic and choral scores to chamber, vocal and orchestral works, and as a pianist he was closely identified with contemporary music and the prepared piano.

Ross Edwards

One of Australia's best known and most performed composers, Ross Edwards lives and works in Sydney. His commitment to music as a positive and regenerative force has led him to explore beyond the confines of Western art music.

Andrew Ford

Andrew Ford is an Australian composer, writer and broadcaster whose work ranges from chamber and vocal scores to opera and piano cycles. He has won the Paul Lowin Prize for the song cycle Learning to Howl and a Green Room Award for the opera Rembrandt’s Wife.

Peggy Glanville-Hicks

Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912–1990) was an Australian composer, born in Melbourne, whose career carried her through London, New York and Greece. She wrote operas, chamber music, song cycles and a concise Sonata for Harp that remains widely played.

Percy Grainger

Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882–1961) was an Australian-born composer, arranger and pianist. A brilliant folk-song collector and arranger, he was also a restless experimenter whose work ranged from tuneful percussion to Free Music machines that foreshadowed electronic synthesis.

Elena Kats-Chernin

Elena Kats-Chernin AO (born 1957) is an Australian composer whose piano rags, chamber miniatures, ballet and stage scores have become central to contemporary Australian repertoire.

Graeme Koehne

Graeme Koehne (born 1956) is an Australian composer and music educator, known for orchestral and ballet scores of direct, communicative style. His solo, ensemble and orchestral music is widely performed.

Richard Meale

Richard Meale (1932–2009) was a leading Australian composer of instrumental works and operas, and an influential teacher. Early scores introduced international avant-garde methods to Australian audiences; later music turned toward a frank lyric tonality.

Peter Sculthorpe

Peter Sculthorpe (1929–2014) was a Tasmanian-born composer whose orchestral and chamber music drew the Australian landscape, neighbouring Asian traditions and Indigenous materials into a clear, personal language. He wrote extensively for strings, piano and voice.

Roger Smalley

Roger Smalley AM (1943–2015) was an English-born composer and pianist who made Australia his home from the mid 1970s. Composition and a distinguished life at the keyboard ran together throughout his career.

Nigel Westlake

Westlake has played in fusion bands and soundtrack sessions, with Australia’s leading instrumental groups, and as a soloist with orchestras and classical ensembles in Australia and in major cities worldwide, from London and Paris to Tokyo, Beijing and New York.

Chris Dench

Chris Dench is an Australian composer of contemporary classical music. His two-movement piano work Two Phase Portraits pairs Helical (1976) with Esperance (1985/86).

David Lumsdaine

David Lumsdaine’s music binds serial craft to Australian landscape and birdsong, from the Bach-haunted piano meditation Ruhe sanfte, sanfte ruh’ to the dense cello concerto A Garden of Earthly Delights and pure field recordings of bush dawn choruses.

Claire Maclean

Martin Wesley-Smith

Martin Wesley-Smith wrote music audiences actually like: electronic pieces that stay human, choral parables that turn nursery rhymes into environmental inquests, and chamber scores laced with Lewis Carroll fantasy and hard political irony.

Liner Notes

Belinda Webster

Belinda Webster is the founder of Tall Poppies Records and a leading Australian producer and recording engineer whose work has documented classical, contemporary and jazz performance across decades of catalogue releases.

Cover photography

Geoffrey Tozer

Geoffrey Tozer (1954–2009) was an Australian concert pianist and composer of the first rank, gifted with perfect pitch, a boundless musical memory, and the ability to improvise, transpose instantly into any key, or reduce an orchestral score at sight.