Now in its third year, The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s Meditation series has been curated by its former Managing Director, Rainer Jozeps who explained that meditation relied on the breath as a means to calm the mind. The musical program consisted of nine short pieces from across the centuries, which can aid this process. Primarily chosen from music for string orchestra by composers well known and less so, the hour-long musical voyage was presented with pauses in between the selections and with the request for no applause throughout, even at the end of the performance.

The program differed somewhat from the announced selection. There was no Graeme Koehne or Dvořák, and the advertised Meditation for Orchestra by Peggy Glanville-Hicks was replaced by a movement from her popular Sinfonia da Pacifica: II. Recitativo. However, the music presented, which ranged from Arvo Pärt to Max Richter to even very early Schoenberg both soothed and transported. All performances were sympathetically conducted by Andrew Groch, who also dictated the length of the pauses between the selections.

The opening choice, the Deutero-medievalist Arvo Pärt’s familiar Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten with its tolling bell – indeed a lament...