Blazing Trails

Join Percussionist Claire Edwardes and the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra for a night to celebrate composers who improved the world through music and amplified overlooked voices.

When he wasn’t composing, Vivaldi taught music at the Ospedaledella Pietà, an orphanage for the illegitimate children of Venetian noblemen and courtiers. After Beethoven lost contact with the world of physical sound, Mahler reworked the composer’s late-era scores to give them more oomph. Florence Price shattered glass ceilings as a woman of colour working in classical music. More recently, Natalie Williams’s percussion concerto ’Steeling Fire’ pays homage to the women who fought for the right to work at the Port Kembla Steelworks in Wollongong in 1980.

Settle in, as The Melbourne Chamber Orchestra teams up with percussionist Claire Edwardes—a trailblazer in her own right—to celebrate composers who’ve used music to advocate for the oppressed and overlooked. They’ll be playing selections from Florence Price’s ‘Folksongs in Counterpoint’; Natalie Williams’s ‘Steeling Fire for Percussion and Strings’, Ludwig Van Beethoven’s ‘Quartet No 11 in F minor Op 95’, and Antonio Vivaldi’s ‘Concerto in C major’ (originally composed for the young recorder players at the orphanage where he worked), which gets a fresh reveal on vibraphone.