Trail-blazing Australian recorder player Alicia Crossley launched her new album with Sydney’s Acacia Quartet, Muse, with a varied concert featuring no fewer than five world premieres in the Sydney Opera House’s Utzon Room. A passionate advocate for her instrument, Crossley’s remit spans Historically Informed Performance to new and experimental music, and this concert saw her shepherd a suite of new Australian works for recorder into the world.

Muse. Image © Blule

Lyle Chan’s Debussy-inspired Three Bilitis Movements opened the concert, Crossley’s tenor recorder colouring the edge of the string sound in the folky energy of The Dancers of Mytilene, a wide-ranging movement of quirky humour, crisp percussive attacks and Bluesy strings. The ensemble luxuriated in the expressive The Rains of Spring and Morning, Crossley tracing arcing melodies above the strings in the piece’s most overtly Debussyesque movement, before the finale – a brief but vibrant movement titled To invoke Pan, god of the summer wind – brought the piece home with bouncing bows and sliding, flutter-tongued recorder.

Anne Boyd’s haunting Yuya was the only work on the program that wasn’t a world premiere, having been first performed in Manchester in 2004. Here...