Cosmic Cycles, A Space Symphony, Henry Dehlinger's immersive concert experience inspired by the Cosmos and composed in collaboration with NASA, will make its Australian premiere in 2024, opening at The Concourse Concert Hall with Maestro Steven Hillinger conducting the North Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
When: Saturday, May 25, 2024 at 7:30 PM
Where: The Concourse Chatswood, Australia
Conductor: Steven Hillinger
Concertmaster: Adrian Keating
The North Sydney Symphony Orchestra is excited to present the Australian Premiere. This will be only the third time ever this piece has been performed live, following its world premiere in the USA in 2023.
A marriage of art and science, Cosmic Cycles showcases the Sun, Earth, Moon, Planets, and beyond with stunning new imagery from the Webb Space Telescope, this epic suite of seven symphonic poems takes audiences on a sublime voyage through the Cosmos, offering a glimpse of the beginning of time.
Commissioned by the National Philharmonic for its 2022-23 season, Cosmic Cycles was inspired by the beauty and wonder of the universe. NASA created a stunning visual canvas of astronomical images—unfathomable cosmic figures such as the Orion Nebula, Pillars of Creation and supermassive black holes captured by Webb—and visualizations representing scientific data to evoke an aesthetic response from the composer. Especially poignant is the depiction of Earth’s fragile beauty and how a century of climate change has affected the biodiversity of our home planet. These are projected in HD on a giant screen above the orchestra.
“You can have majesty, wistfulness, and ethereality coexist,” Dehlinger comments in “Looking for Art in the James Webb Telescope,” the September 2023 piece in The New Yorker that spotlights Dehlinger’s composition of Cosmic Cycles. “You know you’re dealing with wonderful material when it can elicit more than one emotion.”