On 24 and 25 July the Queensland Symphony Orchestra present music by Jessica Curry from her acclaimed video game scores as part of their celebration of the art of video game music at QPAC, with Leonard Weiss conducting cues from Dear Esther, So Let Us Melt, and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.
I Have Begun My Ascent/The Leaving is taken from Curry’s celebrated music for Dear Esther – a score which was the climax of the first-ever concert of videogame soundtracks presented at the BBC Proms in 2022, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Robert Ames. The Telegraph described “two lush major chords, rocking back and forth, with a big melody over the top; it could hardly have been simpler. Like gaming itself, it delivered the kind of massive sugar rush that stills all criticism, and it drove the audience wild.”
An Early Harvest is a 5 ½ -minute excerpt from Curry’s BAFTA-award winning music for Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, the elegiac, haunting adventure game set rural Shropshire. Her music for it draws on the pastoral, nostalgic ideal of an England that never existed, playing on the Englishness of Vaughan Williams and Elgar. Curry described her process of composing the soundtrack to the game in the Guardian in 2015; listen to An Early Harvest here.
The piece previously appeared in 2025 with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra at the Adelaide Festival, conducted by Jessica Gethin, as part of the Press Play programme – a showcase of iconic videogame soundtracks performed for the first time by the ASO. Curry’s celebrated videogame scores have also been taken up in recent seasons by the London Mozart Players and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
So Let us Melt was conceived for Google Daydream’s VR software, and garnered three prizes at the Game Audio Network Guild awards in San Francisco in 2018. Curry’s original score perfectly blends choir, strings and electronics to create a new aural world that complements the breath-taking worlds being created on the screen during the course of the game. A choral version of the music appeared on her 2025 album Shielding Songs, performed by London Voices and Ben Parry.