It is not every day that Sydney audiences witness the première of a composition by a major twentieth-century composer, yet this is what happened on 30 June in the Opera House: one of Igor Stravinsky’s earliest works, the Funeral Song, op.5, received its first performance on Australian soil.

As has been widely reported in the media, this short work was written in memory of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who was not only Stravinsky’s much-admired composition teacher, but also someone personally very close to the young composer. Upon Rimsky-Korsakov’s death in 1908, the Funeral Song, Stravinsky’s farewell message to him, was first performed. It was not heard again until the score’s miraculous rediscovery on the back shelves of the library in the St Petersburg Conservatory in 2015. Valery Gergiev and his Mariinsky Orchestra played it in December 2016; since then orchestras around the world have vied to perform it. Charles Dutoit, the conductor of this concert, conducted it in early 2017 with another SSO, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.