Following on from our performance of Requiem in November 2025, we are delighted to be involved in another premiere by Orchestra Wellington’s 2026 Composer-in-Residence, Victoria Kelly. Kelly made a transformative journey to the Antarctic as part of Antarctica New Zealand’s Community Engagement Programme. She was moved by the experience of living in an unimaginably beautiful and mysterious place, within a community of people who collaborate peacefully to better understand the world.
The result is an opera adapted from the 1961 novel Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. Ocean explores the limits of human knowledge as a group of scientists try to understand the nature of a vast, sentient ocean on the surface of an alien planet. In Lem’s novel, the ocean of Solaris holds up an indifferent mirror to the people who are studying it – and they struggle to cope with what is reflected back to them.