In each year’s Adelaide Festival, the UKARIA Cultural Centre in the Adelaide Hills stages a series of chamber music concerts entitled Chamber Landscapes, and the invited curator for this year’s series was Kim Williams AM, media executive and composer, whose program, entitled Incredible Floridas, demonstrates his acute awareness and profound appreciation of music generally and Australian music in particular. As well as music, the Incredible Floridas series involved poetry readings, film and conversations with composers to create an immersive and informative experience, and especially emphasised past and present Australian composers who have shaped Australian musical culture.

UKARIA Cultural Centre. Photo © Randy Larcombe

The theme for the opening concert was ‘Transfigured Night’ and, as with all Kim Williams’ Incredible Floridas programs, the juxtaposition of the selected works made for a whole much greater than the sum of the parts. In his opening remarks, Williams revealed that, at the behest of the musicians involved, the sequence of this particular evening’s performances was to be changed to emphasise the cohesion of the works, thus revealing the musicians’ high level of engagement with Williams’s concept. Instead of opening with New Zealand-Australian composer Alfred Hill’s String...