A NEW chamber opera created through internet exchanges between Australia and Iceland is coming to Canberra on Friday.

“Traversing the Void” will be performed in Canberra by the augmented Kanimbla Quartet from the Blue Mountains and as soloist, visiting soprano Hallveig Rúnarsdóttir, named classical singer of the year in the Icelandic Music Awards in 2013 and again in 2018.

Conceived after a chance meeting between Wentworth Falls singer-composer-performer Josephine Truman and Icelandic composer Hildigunnur Rúnarsdóttir, who was visiting Australia at the time, the work had its first Australian airing in Springwood on March 11, but it had previously been performed in Reykjavik and was rebroadcast by Iceland Radio.

The 42-minute opera for soprano and small ensemble is written in in eight contrasting movements.

Truman, with a background as a published poet and a writer of scripts for radio, centred the work around themes of the Blue Mountains as seen through the eyes of a cockatoo, with references to bushfires, climate-change and human existential anxiety.

In seeming preparation for “Traversing the Void”, Truman’s radiophonic commission “The Bridge to Otherness”, was broadcast in 2012 by  WDR3 Germany Broadcasting. That work focused on the region of the Blue Mountains and featured interviews with locals, including Gundungarra Trial elders, anthropologists, writers and artists and immigrants, also using  native birdsong and local environmental sounds recorded by Truman.

“Traversing the Void” was conceived when Hildigunnur and her partner Jon Stefansson turned up at  a small choral festival in Glenbrook and started chatting with Truman about bushwalks in the Blue Mountains.

Virtual conversations followed and they both decided to embark on a new contemporary chamber opera, with Truman writing the libretto and Hildigunnur the music. In 2014 Truman received a “new work” grant from the Australia Council to collaborate as librettist and eventually in in February 2021, “Traversing the Void” was born.

“The idea was floated I might like to sing the work in Iceland but covid intervened,” Truman says.

Instead, it was Hildigunnur’s sister Hallveig who sang the work with the Camerartica Quartet at the Harpa theatre in Reyjkavic, where it received a standing ovation.

Here in Canberra, the program will be expanded will be backed by a recital from the ANU Choral Society of three songs by Hildigunnur.

As well, there will be performances of works connected thematically to the opera, “Blue Mountains Suite” by Kanimbla director Rebecca Daniels, the Gloria from “Missa Brevis” by Penelope Thwaites and “Requiem” by New Mexico musician Eliza Gilkyson.

“Traversing the Void”, Wesley Music Centre, March 17.