'Eloquent and accurate, Sculthorpe’s music presents an image of Puccini wrestling with silence. The Japanese and Indonesian elements in this concertos the hard-edged rippling keyboard, the straight hovering reeds, the mournful repeated fall on to the tonic from a semitone above - are more than geographical accident. Melancholic brutality and opulent bleakness are Sculthorpe essences reflected more in the East than in the West … it is uncompromising, communicative and unfailingly skilful.’ The