Guest artist and acclaimed Victorian contralto Liane Keegan sings Gustav Mahler’s epic song cycle Kindertotenlieder, after Friedrich Rückert’s poems of inconsolable grief yet ultimately transcendent resignation after the death of two of the poet’s children. Gernot Wolfgang’s_ Reflections_, commissioned by the Verdehr Trio, ponders what it is to be human and how significant events and the realisations that follow them affect and inform our lives as individuals, and as an evolving species. PLEXUS also presents three world premieres – Andrew Ford’s Never is a taste of his Peter Pan opera to come in 2018; Andrián Pertout invites us on his Voyage à la terre de l’enchantement; and Brigid Burke uses her cinematic landscape of coastal Victoria as a backdrop to her fantastical soundscape in A Voice is Life.