Music / Resonant Spaces. Sophie Hutchings. At Canberra Museum and Gallery, April 4. Reviewed by ALANNA MACLEAN.

Composer, pianist and ARIA-award winner Sophie Hutchings brought thoughtfully sensitive performance to this intimate concert in a warm performance space cleverly created by CMAG in the main gallery.

Red light washed the walls and cooler light picked out the pianist as she took a small but appreciative audience through some of her musical evocations of landscape.

With the addition of electronic music, the evening became an hypnotic nod to some of her travels in Australia’s desert places and the relationships between desert and water and moonlight and long roads travelled.

She plays the piano barefoot and that’s an image for the stress she places on connectedness to the landscapes that fuel her work. She talks to her audience in a casual but perceptive way, bringing in thoughts of time and place, and the experience of being on desert roads and in eerie moonlit canyons.

Links were made with the current Sidney Nolan exhibition upstairs at CMAG with its acute awareness of image and landscape and the especial expression of this in Nolan’s theatre designs for ballet.  Curator Ross Heathcote joined Hutchings for a gentle post-concert analysis and discussion that reinforced these connections.

It was an unusual and rewarding evening.