Mezzo soprano Jill Sullivan chose the repertoire for this recital with violist Robert Harris and pianist Alan Hicks to reflect the many subtleties of music written about night: its beauty and mysteries, its links with sleep, rest, dreams and even death.

"And I've chosen works that I really love to sing with the beautiful poetry of the words," she says.

"My favourite composers are Gluck, Brahms, Berlioz, Wagner and Poulenc and I've included quite a section of Brahms in the first half of this program."

Sullivan turned to singing after a childhood when she studied violin and piano and her extensive experience includes concert, chamber and recital performances as well as singing with opera companies: the former Victoria State Opera, West Australian Opera, Opera Queensland and Opera Australia. This season she sang in Opera Australia's chorus in La Boheme, Tosca, La Traviata and King Roger – "a wonderful production, sung in Polish," she says. In August she performed in the company's concert version of Wagner's Parsifal which featured German operatic tenor Jonas Kaufmann – "an honour to be included in a performance with such a renowned singer".

Appropriately this recital will begin with Handel's O Sleep. In this aria Semele awakes and regrets that the dream she was having of being with her lover has ended.

"I think that this is a nice piece to introduce the program," Sullivan says.

The journey continues through the romantic Viennese world of Schubert and Brahms.

Schubert's Wanderer's Nachtlied is a setting of a poem by Goethe and Nacht und Traume, composed in 1825 with text by Matthaus von Collin, muses about sleep and dreams.

Brahms' Opus 91 was written for his friends Joseph and Amalie Joachim. The two songs, Gestillte Sehnsucht (Longing at rest) and Geistliches Wiegenlied (Sacred lullaby) were written for contralto, viola and piano.

"The mezzo voice and the viola blend so well together," Sullivan says, "as do the cello and the mezzo voice."

Schubert's Winterreise is a cycle of 24 songs with settings of the poems of Wilhelm Muller. In this concert, however, the audience will hear something entirely different: Harris and Hicks joining together on viola and piano to play just two songs in a transcription written by the Sydney Symphony violist, Roger Benedict. No human voice, the viola taking its place.

The first half of the recital moves on to three songs by Hugo Wolf and to Mahler's Um Mitternacht (At midnight) written in 1901.

The second half of the recital begins with songs by three French composers, Cesar Franck, Claude Debussy and Alfred Bachalet and with two songs by the Venezuelan-born, French-naturalised composer Reynaldo Hahn.

There will then be another instrumental interlude with Harris and Hicks presenting two songs, Triste and La Luna Lunaca, from Alberto Ginastera's Five Popular Argentinian Songs transcribed for viola by Kim Kashkashian. Like Brahms and Mahler, Ginastera draws on folk tunes to evoke local colour and atmosphere.

There will be two songs, Notte and Nebbie by the Italian violinist, composer and musicologist Ottorino Respighi and the recital will end with a touch of cabaret: a song by the Russian-born composer Mischa Spoliansky, who spent a large part of his life in Britain and was mainly associated with the composition of film music for classics such as The Happiest Days of your Life and King Solomon's Mines. Where Flamingoes Fly uses simple, romantic lyrics with a fitting line to end this recital about night: "Where a million stars light the velvet sky."

Violist Robert Harris is very familiar to Canberra audiences, particularly from the stage at Llewellyn Hall as the guest principal viola in many Canberra Symphony concerts. He has performed in recitals with many vocal soloists, including Lauris Elms, Merlyn Quaife and Christina Wilson whose husband, Alan Hicks, will be the pianist at this recital.

Hicks says, "This program includes many of my favourites and there's a lot of repertoire that I've done with Christina, who is also a mezzo, but there's a lot that's new to me too. It's all beautiful music with many familiar pieces but some quite unusual and little-known pieces as well. It's a beautifully constructed program."