The trial material of 15th-century saint Joan of Arc will serve as the inspiration for a new work of music and the centrepiece of the 2027 Melbourne Symphony Orchestra program.

Composer Mary Finsterer, together with librettist Tom Wright, has created a new work, Joan of Arc, which will make its world premiere with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and the MSO Chorus in October next year, conducted by Benjamin Northey.

It’s one of 13 world premieres in the orchestra’s 2027 season, which includes 12 works from Australians, including two by Indigenous composers. More than 40 Australian soloists will appear with the state orchestra across the year.

Joan of Arc, a 16-year-old peasant, helped fight for France’s freedom against the English, believing she was acting under divine guidance. Now regarded as a heroine, she was tried by an ecclesiastical court that eventually condemned her as a heretic. At age 19 she was burnt to death at the stake.

Finsterer says Joan of Arc is at once medieval and completely contemporary. “Joan is an outsider who refuses to allow powerful institutions to define her,” the former MSO composer-in-residence says, adding that she is a figure of resistance. “Resistance in a broad sense – she resists political power, she resists institutional authority, and ultimately the attempt to make her deny her own conscience.

“We’re living at a time when questions of power and authority and individual conscience feel particularly acute,” she adds.

MSO’s program announcement comes after a tumultuous few years for the orchestra, involving the high-profile suit brought by pianist Jayson Gillham. The London-based, Queensland-born pianist had sued the MSO for unfair dismissal for expressing political beliefs, after he spoke about journalists killed in Gaza before playing a piece at the MSO’s Iwaki Auditorium in August 2024. He had not sought permission from management to make the remarks. Gillham lost the three-week case in June this year, when it was heard in the Federal Court.

“We constantly ask ourselves what a living Australian orchestra must aspire to be,” says MSO CEO Richard Wigley. He says a big part of that is commitment to new music and Australian artistry.

The free concerts at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl will return in summer, the opening of which will be curated by Noongar man and local artist Aaron Wyatt and feature a new work written by William Barton. First Look Seats, which allow people to see shows for $20 a ticket will be back for 2027, as will a program that brings performances to neighbourhoods around Victoria.

Next year’s program also celebrates the traditional, showcasing Beethoven, in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the German composer’s death. In February, chief conductor Jaime Martín opens the season with a program of three works including Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, featuring the MSO choir with Ode to Joy. He will also lead the MSO in performances of Schubert and Mahler, Mozart and Brahms, Rachmaninov and Dvořák, Mozart and the Mendelssohns and Sibelius and Shostakovich.

Martín described next year’s program – his sixth as chief conductor – as “a celebration of the spirit of discovery”, adding that the MSO is a “wonderful group of supremely talented musicians whose every turn of a musical phrase is pure poetry”.

Making their Australian debuts with the orchestra are conductors Yutaka Sado (Japan) and Eva Ollikainen (Finland), soprano Claire Booth (UK), violinist Inmo Yang (South Korea) and mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron (UK/Singapore).

International artists on the slate next year include conductors Chloé van Soeterstède (France) and Rodolfo Barráez (Venezuela), acclaimed British pianist Paul Lewis, and MSO’s 2027 featured artist, Romanian pianist Alexandra Dariescu, who will perform across four events.

Valley of the Dry Bones, composed by Yitzhak Yedid and narrated by Stan Grant, makes its world premiere, unveiled in June. Featuring the MSO chorus, it is described as a biblical, universal story about conflict.

Brett Dean’s The World’s Wife makes its Australian premiere in November, after its first airing at the 2026 BBC Proms. Dean sets Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry to music and reimagines the famous stories of men through a feminine perspective, including figures like Mrs Darwin, Frau Freud, Queen Herod and Anne Hathaway.

Melbourne-born conductor Nicholas Carter, who has made his name in Europe, will return as chief guest conductor with the MSO next year. General music director of the Staatsoper and Staatsorchester Stuttgart, he will lead the orchestra in two concerts, Strauss & Schumann in August, and Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony later that month.

Carter is looking forward to conducting the monumental Bruckner work. “In our fragmented, anxious and increasingly digital world, this music offers us a rare opportunity to reconnect with the magnificence of the human mind and spirit,” he said. “At times meditative, at others terrifying and intensely dramatic, the symphony gives us the time and space simply to be with ourselves, and to focus on what is beautiful, profound and enriching in our lives.”

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