Two young Australian composers, Kirsten Milenko and Alex Vaughan, will premiere new works at the Lucerne Festival next week, both inspired by rich and varied interactions between music and science.

Since 2003, the Lucerne Festival has had a partnership with Swiss multinational pharmaceutical company Roche. Known as the Roche Commissions, every other year a composer is commissioned to write an orchestral work “which provide a source of intellectual stimulation and challenge”. A unique aspect of these commissions is that over the course of the two years, the composers are paired with two Roche scientists to ” inspire the dialogue between science and art”.

With composers handpicked by the Lucerne Festival’s Artistic Director Wolfgang Rihm, and a guaranteed premiere by the the Lucerne Festival Academy, the commissions are a significant project that have been awarded to some major names, including Unsuk Chin, Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Eötvös and the 2021 recipient Rebecca Saunders.

In 2013, this program was expanded to include the Roche Young Commissions, which focuses on composers under the age of 30. The 2019 the Roche Young Commissions were awarded to Milenko and Vaughan. With the premieres of their...