It’s now four years since Cat Hope’s opera Speechless premiered to critical and audience acclaim at the Perth International Arts Festival.

Hope is an internationally renowned award-winning Australian composer, bass player and flautist whose practice focuses on bass frequencies, textual nuance and sonic extremes, from ear-splitting feedback and distortion to barely audible ephemeral resonances.

Speechless was written in response to the 2014 Australian Human Rights Commission report The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention. “When the Forgotten Children report was tabled and rejected in Australian Parliament, I was overcome by a feeling of voicelessness,” says Hope. “Speechless is my response to the plight of refugees world wide—my protest and plea to citizens of democratic nations to maintain humanitarian values in the face of a changing world.”

Speechless. Hochschule für Musik und Theater, Hamburg, Germany. Photo © Claudia Höhne

Hope is a great lover of opera, particularly core Italian repertoire, and Speechless is recognisably an opera, with an overture, acts, recitatives, arias and interludes. But Speechless engages with these structures in innovative ways to convey meaning in the abstract, rather than with a specific narrative, and this is key to...