Freedom and Wanderlust

A compelling encounter between English and contemporary Australian art song, ACOCO’s second concert in the 2026 Mietta Foundation Song Series pairs Ralph Vaughan Williams’s beloved Songs of Travel, with the Australian premiere of Kate Moore’s The Open Road.

American-born, Melbourne-based mezzo-soprano Margaret Trubiano premieres Australian/Dutch composer Kate Moore’s cycle The Open Road, bringing Walt Whitman’s stirring celebration in casting off constraint in pursuit of freedom and self-discovery into the 21st century. Margaret Trubiano is joined by harpist Tijana Kozarcic, Coady Green on keyboard, and Mat Jodrell on flugelhorn.

Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Songs of Travel takes poems by Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson to follow a wanderer through freedom, longing, love, memory and homecoming. Enduring melodies give intimate voice to the exhilaration - and solitude - of a life lived on the move. Performed as a split cycle, led by baritone Darcy Carroll with ACOCO Rising Artists, and pianist Sangmi Kim making her ACOCO debut.

Together, these entrancing song cycles bridge twentieth-century English music and twenty-first-century Australian wanderlust, inviting us to leave, journey, seek - and find beauty in the road itself.