Douglas Lilburn’s compositional legacy is a corpus of works which has been instrumental in establishing a genuinely vernacular voice in New Zealand classical music. In a musical idiom which will be recognisable at once to listeners familiar with the music of Sibelius and Vaughan Williams, the first and second symphonies are the composer’s response to the elevating power of landscape. The third, exploring a more abrasive idiom, is an admission that the natural world is beautiful, restorative and necessary, yet also vulnerable and transient.