Step into a world where dreams blur with nightmares and the line between reality and imagination dissolves. The Queensland Youth Symphony, under the direction of Simon Hewett, invites you on a journey through love, longing, and delirious joy – a concert that explores the extremes of human emotion in sound. 

The evening begins with Schubert’s haunting Der Doppelgänger. Composed only months before Schubert’s death, this eerie reflection on identity and mortality captures the horror of confronting one’s ghostly double – a moment suspended between life and death. 

Schumann’s Konzertstück for Four Horns and Orchestra is a dazzling display of romantic exuberance and technical brilliance. Written in 1849 to showcase the revolutionary new valved horn, this work pushes the instrument, and its players, to the edge of possibility. 

The stage then transforms for one of the most intoxicating works in the orchestral repertoire – Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Long before rock and roll or psychedelic art, Berlioz chronicled his opium-fuelled visions in this feverish masterpiece: a hallucinatory tale of obsessive love, despair, and death. Across five movements, he leads us through a dreamscape of passion, execution, and the grotesque dance of witches, where his own musical alter ego meets both ecstasy and oblivion.