A forgotten Aussie masterpiece, devils pelting the gluttonous and a Psychosonata – not your average piano recital.

Carriageworks, Sydney, July 19

In an opinion piece for Limelight last week the pianist Michael Kieran Harvey wrote: “In my view, Raymond Hanson has the distinction of being Australia’s greatest neglected composer. Completely disinterested in fame and self-promotion, Hanson wrote over 100 opuses, but those of you reading this would probably be hard-pressed to name any. Because, statistically, you are most likely well-heeled and Eurocentric, and probably only really interested in a band of music written by dead white men from about 1700 to 1900.” Challenging words, eh?

The avowed aim of Carriageworks’s enterprising New Music Program is to refute that statement, or at least to redress the balance, and judging by the full house that crowded into one of the venue’s starker bays last Friday, contemporary music has a future, in Sydney at least.

The key work that Kieran Harvey wanted to evangelise was Raymond Hanson’s Piano Sonata, not a ‘new’ work as such (the piece occupied him from 1938 until 1963), but the music, with its echoes of Hindemith and Prokofiev, feels modern enough to...