A bit of historical detective work was needed to prepare The Raven for the stage.

The work by the Pearl and Dagger Company features music and melodrama from the turn of the 20th century.

However, these pieces hadn't been performed for a long time, so co-artistic directors Tara Hashambhoy and Imogen Granwal had to do a lot of research to work out how the music was played and the performances were staged.

"We've only found one recording of two of the pieces," Hashambhoy says. "They're very unknown. They're things you find stuck away in shelves in libraries.

"What we do is kind of like archaeology in a way. We have to figure out by looking at old books and reviews from the times to see exactly where and how it would be performed and looking at spaces where people said it had been performed.

"So it's a little like detective work, which is really fun."

Hashambhoy, a viola player, says Pearl and Dagger was set up last year with the aim of performing "a slightly more accessible classical music concert" and bringing to life works that hadn't been performed in Australia.

It's very much a hobby. The company plans to do one show a year, which is probably just as well, because all that background research does take time.

As well as the advantage that works more than a century old are out of copyright, it is the research component that Hashambhoy and Granwal enjoy.

"The other appeal is that Imogen and I both study historical performance practice through university and so do most of the people we've worked with," Hashambhoy says.

"The last one we did was working with the Early Dance Consort from Sydney. They know how to do all those old-fashioned dances and have all those beautiful costumes."

While today the word melodrama contains negative connotations, Hashambhoy says it was used to refer to performances that were spoken word pieces over music - melody and drama.

"It's got that atmospheric sound of the piano and something that's dramatic on top of it," she says.

"We found two of those pieces and they're so rarely performed now that we wanted to create a program that felt like a Victorian or Edwardian parlour ... a period experience we don't get now.

"If at that time you were to go to a performance in someone's home, this is possibly what you might have experienced."