An oceanic spirit surges through Lilburn's music for Allen Curnow's Landfall in Unknown Seas, commissioned to celebrate the tercentenary of Abel Tasman's sighting of New Zealand. From the compulsive unfurling of the opening movement, the choppiness of the second, the curvaceous swell of the third and the upward cresting of the fourth, we experience, in combination with Curnow's incantatory verse, a life-affirming endeavour.