Victoria Kelly: a composer responds to the Antarctic, Vivaldi and an alien ocean

Composer Victoria Kelly

Image credit: Amanda Billings

When composer Victoria Kelly went to Scott Base in November 2024, she found herself sitting alone in the middle of the ice-covered Ross Sea, looking out across the Antarctic continent, “as if staring into the abyss”. Going to the frozen continent, through Antarctica New Zealand’s Community Engagement Programme, has, she told me recently, changed her forever.

“It has found its way, and will find its way, into everything I compose going forward. I couldn’t believe the amazement and gratitude I felt that my life had taken me there.”

This weekend, Kelly’s latest composition, Season Creep, will have its premiere at the Martinborough Music Festival (MMF), a boutique chamber music event in the small and charming South Wairarapa town. How did her Antarctic experience feed into this work?

Composer Victoria Kelly on the frozen Ross Sea

“…the only time in my life that I’d felt a sense of what geological time might be.”

Image credit: Megan Nicholl

“Sitting there in that moment, it was the only time in my life I’d felt a sense of what geological time might be,” she says. “The Antarctic continent used to be green about 90 million years ago, and it’s a very profound experience to have an inkling of a landscape changing over time, what it means when seasons change, and seasonal cycles change, on a scale human beings can’t imagine.”

Being in the Antarctic heightened Kelly’s consciousness of the climate crisis facing the world. “The climate is an urgent issue for everybody, and I don’t know an artist who’s not contemplating it in their work,” she explains. “My sense of the crisis and the unknown nature of it is absolutely throughout Season Creep – my own existential sense of it and my own wondering what on earth an individual can do. I’m trying to explore that idea in a way that might relate to other people. 

Her composition was commissioned by MMF as a response to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. The two movements of Season Creep will book-end Vivaldi’s four concertos by the ensemble of eleven musicians, including, as soloist, violinist Kana Ohashi, Associate Concertmaster in the famous Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. Vivaldi’s continuo part will be played on classical guitar by Slava Grigoryan in an arrangement by Australian composer Lee Bradshaw 

Kelly was asked to respond not only to Vivaldi’s work but to the virtuosity of the individual musicians in the ensemble. One of them is her husband, cellist Ashley Brown, and she admits she’s given him “a couple of solos”.

As a composer, Kelly often brings an emotional personal dimension to her music. Her deeply moving Requiem setting New Zealand poetry, premiered in the Auckland Arts Festival in 2023 and performed last year by Orchestra Wellington, has an autobiographical essence related to the deaths of her parents.  The movements of Season Creep are dedicated to her sister, who has always loved The Four Seasons and her husband’s brother, who loves the sea and the murmuration of birds.

Season Creep, she tells me, borrows heavily from Vivaldi’s language, motives and melodies. “But there’s also this idea of migrating birds. My family – and so, my sister’s – are from the Faroe Islands, and there’s an oystercatcher there, called the Tjaldur, the national bird of the Faroes, which migrates to the Faroes in spring from Moray in Scotland – which is where my husband’s family originates. So, a migratory pattern links these two sides of my family and that’s part of the work as well.”

Are there challenges in writing music to respond to such a well-known work? Kelly remembers a time when The Four Seasons was heard on bank and soap commercials. “It felt so obvious and so hackneyed. I went through a stage of considering it something from the past – until Nigel Kennedy revealed it could be contemporary. But the real discovery for me was when I heard a “period performance” of it by Il Giardino Armonica, which made The Four Seasons sound like a different work altogether. It’s transcended western cultural boundaries and time, it’s been interpreted in Hindi dance, on steel drums, on Chinese instruments. It captures a global imagination, and that must surely be about our relationship with nature and how we are all dependent on it.”

She encountered another challenge in the reimagining of Vivaldi’s work by other composers, including Max Richter and Astor Piazzolla. “Because of the success of Richter’s recomposing of The Four Seasons, it’s hard not to feel a deep terror of imitation, to ‘unhear’ what he did, what Piazzolla did,” Kelly says. “But hopefully it’s come into me through one lens and left me through another.”

The Martinborough Music Festival has been selling out its weekend of chamber music concerts since its inception a decade ago. Blessed since its third Festival in 2019 with a venue ideal for chamber music in the refurbished local Town Hall, the Festival is notable for its line-up of outstanding musicians from Aotearoa and Australia, with occasional visitors from further afield. The current Artistic Directors are violinists Wilma Smith and Donald Armstrong. (See below for a link to a 2021 Five Lines profile of Smith.)

Over the ten years of its life, the Festival has developed its activities to include community outreach to local schools and other settings, and the programming has also become more varied and exciting over the years with the inclusion of works by international contemporary star composers and some of New Zealand’s top creative artists, including Jenny McLeod, Salina Fisher, Gareth Farr, Anthony Ritchie, Tabea Squire and Louise Webster.  

While in Martinborough, Kelly is also offering a workshop for about 50 aspiring composers from local high schools. MMF Trustee Scilla Askew is delighted that Kelly is the Festival’s first composer-in-residence. “Victoria's generosity in sharing her creativity with our audiences and local students makes this first foray into a composer residency really positive for us. The support from our musicians, audience and funders in this, our tenth year, shows how valuable events like this are in small communities.”

Composer Victoria Kelly

“…generosity in sharing her creativity.”

Image credit: Abe Mora

The Festival has also programmed Kelly’s 20-year-old string quartet, Songs without words, in the Saturday afternoon concert. The lovely, gentle work was begun when Kelly was pregnant with her first child and completed after her daughter was born. How does she feel about it two decades later?

“The huge challenge for any creator is to be truthful,” she says. “I have no perspective on whether anything I’ve written is good or bad; the only way I have any perspective on it after time has passed is whether it still feels true. That piece does. I remember how I felt when I wrote it, and it is a true document of something that happened to me, a relationship with my unborn child.”

Ocean

After the premiere of Season Creep, Kelly has another major work later this year, a first outing for a project she has been developing during her tenure as Orchestra Wellington’s 2026 Composer-in-residence. Her trip to Antarctica was part of her research for Ocean, described as a “grand, existential, science-fiction opera that contemplates the limits of human knowledge.”  In late November the Orchestra Wellington audience will hear Ocean as a “work-in-progress”, with orchestral, choral and solo excerpts combined in a concert performance.

“I’ve never written an opera before,” Kelly explains. “It’s such a huge undertaking and, like Requiem, I’ve been thinking about it for years. I first read the book on which it is based – Solaris by Stanislaw Lem – in 1997. When Orchestra Wellington asked me to be their composer-in-residence, I had the idea of sharing this work before it is finished, to open up that process to the audience and say, ‘this is what I’m imagining’.

“In the concert performance, there’s an overture and soprano Madeleine Piereard will sing more than one character, including a big aria that happens near the end, in the opera’s denouement. The choir, the Tudor Consort, represents the alien ocean, a consciousness completely incomprehensible to human beings.”

Kelly is having conversations about a production of the final version of the opera but doesn’t yet know when that might be. “This is one of those pieces, like Requiem, where there’s just so much time and thought that goes into how it comes together and tells the story. To have deadline, structure and urgency around it might make it harder to write.”  

I have no doubt that an opera from this superbly communicative composer will be worth the wait!

Martinborough Music Festival 2026 concerts are on Friday 25 September at 7.30pm, Saturday 26 September at 2pm, Saturday 26 September at 7.30pm and Sunday 27 September at 2pm. More information and bookings here (be quick!)  

Orchestra Wellington OCEANS Music by Ravel, Beethoven and Victoria Kelly. Conductor Marc Taddei, soloists Amalia Hall (violin), NZTrio and Madeleine Pierard (soprano) Saturday 28 November 2026. More information and bookings here

You can read a Five Lines profile of Victoria Kelly including a preview of her work Requiem here and a profile of MMF Artistic Director Wilma Smith here