Whilst the final orchestral concert in last year’s She Speaks festival was devoted to smaller pieces by Australian women composers, Saturday night’s program was on a much larger scale and included a symphonic tone poem, a concerto and a substantial symphony. Appropriately titled Epic, it proved beyond doubt that women are more than capable of creating larger-scale works of great skill and invention, and that concert programming really needs a shake-up.

Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Photo supplied

Margaret Sutherland’s Haunted Hills from 1950 is a musical evocation of Victoria’s Dandenong Ranges – “a sound picture written in contemplation of the first people who roamed the hills”. Empathetically played by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra under conductor Benjamin Northey, this rare, modern performance offered a chance to reappraise Sutherland’s post-Straussian tone poem. Its musical language is distinctly European in flavour and employs a broad and inventive palette of colours and effects to summon up the composer’s ideas. The brass and winds suggest the idyllic environment effectively, if somewhat musically wrongheadedly in the years prior to Sculthorpe’s adoption of native rhythms, melodies and fauna. It is this which makes Sutherland’s vision in a sense...