There was a culminative air about the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s last subscription concert for the year. Branded ‘New Worlds’ in order, no doubt, to draw attention to its inclusion of Dvořák’s beloved Symphony No.9 From the New World, at its heart was the Australian premiere of Deborah Cheetham Fraillon’s Treaty. Cheetham Fraillon’s successful five-year appointment as MSO First Nations Creative Chair draws to a close at the end of the year and Treaty appears in the shadow of the passing of the Statewide Treaty Bill 2025 (it received Royal Assent on November 13). Among other things, this bill paves the way for the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria to become a permanent, legislated body.

The performance also tops a year where the MSO’s other overt, albeit much less happy, engagement with the wider world of politics came to a head with pianist Jayson Gillham’s case against the MSO, now set to be heard in the Federal Court over three weeks in May.

The concert opened with Cheetham Fraillon’s musical Acknowledgement of Country, Long Time Living Here, here in its full orchestral version with the composer herself singing. Now a well-established ritual of MSO programming, we also learned that next year there will be a new setting for this Acknowledgment –the start, perhaps, of a growing repertoire of such works and another legacy of Cheetham Fraillon’s tenure.

This was followed by Florence Price’s Concert Overture No. 2. An American Composer, organist, pianist, and educator, Price was the first Black American female composer to have her work performed by a major symphony orchestra. The fate of this work, composed in 1943, reminds us, however, that her success was neither easily won nor assured. The score was almost lost to the world and only rediscovered after her death in 1953 among her effects in an abandoned house in Chicago.

A kind of orchestral fantasy on three spirituals (‘Go Down Moses’, ‘Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit’, and ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen’), it reveals a musical imagination of considerable skill and sensitivity; indeed, the work reminded me of similarly fine folk-song arrangements by her Australian contemporary Percy Grainger. Both composers uncover layers of harmonic and contrapuntal complexity in vernacular musical material, thus ennobling both the melodies themselves and, by implication, the social histories they represent.

The work was an especially appropriate prelude to Cheetham Fraillon’s Treaty. This sixteen-minute-long symphonic narrative, which received its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival on August 22, at the start of the MSO’s European tour, is the second movement of a projected concerto for yidaki. In both her program note and her pre-concert talk, Cheetham Fraillon revealed the generosity of vision that lies behind it; a desire not just to confront the tragedy and disaster of dispossession, but to convey a sense of our nation’s shared relationship and history, and thus explore how the interests of Australia’s ‘newcomers’ might be better reconciled with those of its First peoples. This led her to combine the sounds of the yidaki (here performed with magisterial authority by William Barton), alongside evocations of indigenous percussion, with the instruments and conventions of a Western symphony orchestra.

Jaime Martín conducts the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (photo credit Laura Manariti)

To be sure, this sonic dialogue was not always a comfortable one; perhaps, though, that is both an inevitable and appropriate outcome. I was less convinced by Cheetham’s use of traditional orchestral sounds and conventional tonality (as sincere as they seem). As its own rich signifier of historical time and place, the tonal tradition has always been ripe for dislocation and dissection. Here, however, the musical ‘heavy lifting’ was largely given over to Barton, and much of the lasting impact of Treaty relies on its commanding musical presence. His own short encore, Kalkadungu Yurdu, was an arresting musical statement from start to finish.

The second half of the evening was dedicated wholly to Dvořák’s Symphony No.9 From the New World, and this proved to be no jarring programming decision. While there is still some lingering uncertainty about the context that led to its composition, we do know that Dvořák consciously wanted the symphony to form, at least in part, some kind of engagement with an ‘American’ idiom – and that included the sound world of both its Indigenous and Black peoples. Dvořák was especially interested in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem ‘The Song of Hiawatha’, as well the peculiar melodic characteristics of spirituals, although he was later at pains to say that it ‘was my intention only to write in the spirit of these national American melodies’, and not to imitate them.

Under Jaime Martín the orchestra gave a confident and lively account, with some outstanding solo and ensemble work in evidence throughout. My only quibble is that consistency, and clarity of articulation of the work’s various pithy motives, was sometimes lacking. But Martín is excellent at drawing out subtilities of rhythmic and melodic shape, so it was not surprising that the highlight of this performance was the rendering of Dvořák’s famous second movement largo. Principal Cor Anglais Michael Pisani’s beautifully calm rendering of the opening theme was a particular highlight and the movement closed with an impeccably in-tune pianissimo Db major chord from the double bass section. All in all, the orchestra made a great case for live performances of repertoire staples.

New Worlds (Melbourne Symphony Orchestra) will be performed on November 28 at Costa Hall in Geelong and November 29 at Hamer Hall. Performance attended: 27 November 2025.