Vincent Plush’s new orchestral work for the Canberra Symphony celebrates the vision of Walter Burley Griffin.

This year’s Canberra Centenary celebrations are a good excuse for quite a number of extracurricular musical events, but none perhaps are as intriguing as the Canberra Symphony’s latest commission. March 27 sees a world premiere from one of Australia’s most intriguing composers, Vincent Plush. His latest work, and his first major orchestral piece in nearly 20 years, is Secret Geometries: a musical reflection on the aspirations of architect Walter Burley Griffin for Australia’s national capital.

Limelight caught up with London based conductor, Geoffrey Simon, one of Plush’s long-time collaborators, who will introduce the new work to Australian audiences. “Vincent is very iconoclastic”, he enthuses. “He’s very much heard his own voice and beaten his own trail.”

So how did the two of them meet? “We were invited by Queen Elizabeth to put on a performance around the time of the millennium”, says Simon. “It was a piece we called ‘Symphony 2000’ for an invited audience of all the commonwealth high commissioners. The Queen was there with the Duke of Edinburgh and it went very well – a spectacular thing. The orchestra was my orchestra...