Session 3
Meet @ the Market
The final Meet @ the Market concert for 2026, conducted by Norwegian Maestro Eivind Aadland, features a program of profound feeling. The music we’ll explore conveys the darkest shades of grief and nostalgia, but moves towards hope, joy and renewal.
Program
Felix Mendelssohn Selections from Symphony No. 3, Op. 56, “Scottish”
Missy Mazzoli These Worlds in Us for Chamber Orchestra
Richard Strauss Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings
Book now
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Melbourne / Naarm
Friday 4 December 2026, 7:00pm
Blackwood Box
Meat Market
Corner of Blackwood Street and Tyrone Street, North Melbourne
Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung Country
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Ticket Price Range
Adult: $45
Concession: $35
Under 35: $35
3-Concert Season Pass: $120
We’ll hear Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, written at the end of the Second World War for 23 solo strings. The piece feels like a single, flowing breath, at once tender, haunting, and heartbreakingly human. Its plangent emotion vibrates in the intimate proximity of the Meat Market.
We’ll also explore These Worlds in Us by American composer Missy Mazzoli, a modern reflection on love and memory written in response to conversations with her father, who was a soldier in the Vietnam war. Her sound world glows with slow-building intensity and quiet beauty.
Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony begins with solemn passages evoking the history-haunted ruins of Holyrood Chapel, then bursts with freshness and movement, inspired by the exhilaration of windswept landscapes.
Together, these works create a journey that feels personal, uplifting and deeply human.
About the Works
Richard Strauss - Metamorphosen
This unique work for 23 solo string instruments is music built in layers: each instrument an individual voice, each line of counterpoint a strand of grief. Written in 1945 as Europe lay in ruins, the work entwines multiple references: Goethe’s poetry, the collapse of German cultural life, Strauss’s private ‘In Memoriam’, and his dedication to Paul Sacher. Its textures carry quotations from Beethoven’s Eroica funeral march, interwoven with Strauss’s own themes, as if voices of past and present mourn together. Strauss gives grief architectural form: a lament of memory, devastation and fragile hope.
Missy Mazzoli – These Worlds in Us
Composed in 2006, These Worlds in Us was the piece that first brought American composer Missy Mazzoli to international attention. Dedicated to her father, a Vietnam veteran, the work explores how memory and love survive the distances created by war. Shimmering harmonies, slow-building waves of sound and a sense of suspended time make it a powerful contemporary counterpart to Strauss’s meditation on destruction and rebirth. Mazzoli describes the piece as “a song for those who remain,” and its tone is both elegiac and luminous.
Felix Mendelssohn – Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 56 “Scottish”
After such introspection comes release: Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony captures the spirit and grandeur of the Highlands in music that is atmospheric, rhythmically alive and ultimately exultant. Completed in 1842 after a long gestation, the symphony blends classical balance with Romantic colour, its final movement transforming minor-key struggle into radiant triumph. It is one of Mendelssohn’s most beloved works, uniting architectural clarity with heartfelt expression.
About the Artists
Eivind Aadland, Conductor
We are delighted to welcome Eivind Aadland to conduct this program. Born in Bergen, Norway, Aadland began his career as concertmaster of the Bergen Philharmonic before studying conducting with Jorna Panula and receiving early support from Maris Jansons. He later served as Chief Conductor and Artistic Leader of the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra, where he led acclaimed Beethoven and Mahler cycles. Since 2020 he has been Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. Aadland is a passionate advocate of Norwegian music, and his extensive discography highlights composers from his homeland while his career continues to span Europe, Australia and beyond.
Stéphanie Kabanyana Kanyandekwe
Stéphanie Kabanyana Kanyandekwe is a Rwandan-British composer, arts and culture strategist and broadcaster working between Narrm/Melbourne and Rwanda. Her research-based practice explores how culture is constructed and archived through experiential narratives, shaped by her tertiary training in composition and performance practice. Multiple forms of synaesthesia—sound/colour/texture, auditory-tactile, and spatial sequence—add a neurodiverse dimension to her polycultured identity. Stéphanie’s ongoing research on the global history of art music, which began in 1999, underpins her work in graphic scores, artworks, and a musical conversation series where audiences become active participants in a multisensory live space. This scholarly curiosity also drives Passenger, her weekly show on ABC Classic and the Listen app, inviting national and international listeners on an audio voyage matching storytelling with art music from around the world—particularly highlighting non-Western expressions of people and place.
Food & Beverage Partner
Concert Partners
Supporters
Thank you to our Southbank Circle members Lady Southey AC, John & Gaye Gaylard, Peter Griffin AM & Terry Swann, and Dr Karen Wayne OAM & Dr Victor Wayne, whose generosity and leadership has enabled Southbank Series to take place.
These programs were developed in a studio managed by the City of Melbourne’s Meat Market tenancy program.