Peter Sculthorpe’s music will feature in the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s tour of Mountain, celebrating their 50^th anniversary in 2025.  The 80-minute documentary is an epic cinematic and musical collaboration between the ACO and BAFTA-nominated Sherpa director, Jennifer Peedom, narrated by two-time Academy Award nominated actor Willem Dafoe. It appears at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Syndey Opera House, Canberra’s Llewellyn Hall, and Melbourne Arts Centre from 27-30 October. Watch a trailer here.

Shot by the world’s leading high-altitude cinematographers, with narration written by Robert Macfarlane, this film explores the nature of our modern fascination with mountains, and is accompanied live by the ACO. Djilile and the fourth movement of the First Sonata for Strings feature in the list of cues curated by Richard Tognetti and Peedom, part of a stunning soundscape that mirrors the serenity, magnitude and terror of the landscapes filmed.

Djilile is a 5-minute work based upon an indigenous chant from Arnhem Land, in northern Australia. Its title translates as ‘whistling-duck on a billabong.’ The chant is ubiquitous in Sculthorpe’s work, and his setting of it exists in arrangements for string quartet, two guitars, piano, cello and piano, viol consort, chamber orchestra, and percussion quartet. The version for string orchestra was created for Australian Chamber Orchestra for a disc of Sculthorpe’s music for strings in 2001. It consists in four statements of the chant, separated by interludes, with a brief coda.

String Sonata No.1 is a version for string orchestra of music from Sculthorpe’s 1983 String Quartet No.10. Its penultimate movement, ‘Chorale (Con pietà)’, lasts around three minutes, and sees an eerie sequence of spare harmonies tread over intermittent injections from the bass; they suggest the starkness of the Australian landscape.

The appearance of Sculthorpe’s music in Mountain reflects the composer’s deep relationship with the ACO, who have given nearly three hundred performances of his work since the late 1980s. In 1989 they gave the world premiere of Nourlangie – a work inspired by the music and landscape of the Kakadu national park – with guitarist John Williams, along with its national debuts at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Concertgebouw. In 1994 they premiered String Sonata No.3 – a string orchestra version of his Eleventh String Quartet – at the Adelaide Festival, as well as Rockpool Dreaming for soprano saxophone and strings in 1999, as well as 2009’s Chaconne, with Richard Tognetti as soloist.