Astra Choir: Water is a product of burning

A new work after Balzac by Neil Kelly (2025),

Balzac’s Gambara (1837) tells of a visionary yet tormented composer, his long-suffering wife Marianna, and their calculating patron, Count Marcosini. At its heart is Gambara’s dream of a music of the future—sublime, cacophonous, and largely incomprehensible to those around him.

This new work recasts that 19th-century vision through a 21st-century lens. Conceived as a multi-media piano fantasy for Michael Kieran Harvey with electronics by Michael Hewes, Water Is a Product of Burning becomes a contemporary incarnation of the panharmonicon—a proto-synthesiser of Balzac’s era. The piano is expanded with choral textures, electronics, and video, conjuring the novella’s extremes of sound: from the “hideous cacophony” to a “sublime chorus of angels”.

Michael Kieran Harvey, piano; Michael Hewes audio processing – supported by Creative Australia