Hamer Hall, Melbourne
September 1, 2018

It is a brave thing to commission and perform an entirely new symphony, but the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra ensured a receptive and full audience by combining composer-in-residence Carl Vine’s latest large-scale orchestral work with Holst’s popular The Planets for an absorbing concert of music both known and unknown, exploring worlds from the interior of the human mind to the vast galactic realms beyond our world.

Vine’s Symphony No 8 is his first in a decade and is an uncharacteristically programmatic work – his interests have, up until this point, eschewed extra-musical elements, and this is his first symphony to carry an evocative title: The Enchanted Loom. The term was coined in the 1930s by Sir Charles Sherrington, a British neuroscientist, who used it to describe neurological functions as they were understood at the time. Vine writes that “the enchanted loom”, referring to the Jacquard loom – a sophisticated machine in its time – evokes “the function of the brain as it weaves together our personal impressions of the outside world, our internal sense of location, identity, and mind.”

Musically, Vine’s Symphony No 8 is a dynamic, kinetic, ever-evolving journey – complex rhythms play off rich textures...