ABC Classic FM Features: Elision Ensemble

ABC Classic FM Features: Elision Ensemble - 20 years young

> Listen to the 20th anniversary concert

This anniversary concert by Elision Ensemble was recorded at the Sydney Conservatorium on Sunday 11 June by ABC Classic FM.

The concert celebrates the 20th birthday of Elision Ensemble, a group of musicians founded by artistic director and sometime electric guitarist Daryl Buckley, initially from among fellow students and young musicians associated with the Victorian College of the Arts in the mid 1980s. Over the past 20 years Elision has developed from an eclectic but committed young contemporary music ensemble to an organisation presenting diverse large-scale chamber work and cross-artform collaborative projects around the globe.

The Elision "family", as director Buckley likes to call the musicians who make up the group, work with Elision on a project-by-project basis as needed, with Elision also fostering strong on-going collaborations with a number of composers. Buckley states that the group is "constantly challenging the boundaries of art music through the technical challenges of our repertoire and the diversity of our international collaborators." One of those new collaborators is young French conductor Jean Deroyer, working with Elision for the first time following two years working as assistant conductor with Ensemble Intercontemporain.

To mark this significant anniversary, ABC Classic FM and the ABC Regional Production Fund commissioned a new work for the group from Newcastle-based composer Chris Dench entitled 'Agnî, Prometheus, Lucifer' (2006). Speaking about the work Dench said the piece had a major idea of fire or light-bringer that held together the three threads (gods) in the title. "Each thread has its own instrumentation. Agnî or Agony is represented with quite earthy music, Prometheus has a more sophisticated sound with strings and harp and Lucifer is represented with brighter, busy music,' Dench explained. The work strongly features the talents of Elision founding member percussionist Peter Neville.

Also featured on the program and taking pride of place at 38 minutes duration is the Australian premiere presentation of Liza Lim's new large-scale work for soprano and ensemble, titled 'Mother Tongue' (2005). This work was commissioned by the Festival d'Automne Paris, the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Music Board of the Australia Council, and features the poetry of Patricia Sykes, and the extraordinary soprano Piia Komsi from Finland as the soloist.

Lim says, "The original inspiration for Mother Tongue came from a list of 92 Australian Aboriginal (Yorta-Yorta) words that a linguist friend Stephen Morey was involved in compiling. This was a list of the few words recalled by an elderly woman, one of the last speakers of Yorta-Yorta for whom this language was her mother tongue. So it was a very poignant document that recorded impending loss, the extinction of a language, the disappearance of a whole world view with its particular knowledge systems, registers of feeling and expression. What also interested me about this list was the actual words themselves: what words does one retain at the end of one's life? In fact they were very fundamental words terms of endearment, of kinship, mother, father, basic nouns and expressions. And it was doubly moving for me since these are the words that I know from my own lost mother tongue of Hokkien Chinese dialect as well as the kinds of words that my young son was acquiring in his first speech. A circle of life and of death was present in that list of words. Lim commissioned Australian poet Patricia Sykes to create a text responding to the themes of "language formation, language loss and ... of language as one's most intimate possession" arising from these ruminations.

Between these two World and Australian premieres we hear 'Gravity'(2002-6) by Timothy O'Dwyer, featuring UK improvising saxophonist extraordinaire John Butcher alongside an Elision mixed quartet of oboe, trumpet, percussion and viola; and John Rodgers 'Amor' (extracted from his 'Inferno', composed for and premiered by Elision in 1999). The program yet again confirms Elision Ensemble's commitment to making new work of breadth and ambition that pushes the limits of the musicians' capacities both collectively and as individuals.

The ABC Classic FM production team was producer Malcolm Batty and engineer Yossi Gabbay, plus executive producer Stephen Adams. Concert and broadcast presentation was by Stephen Adams, filling-in for regular ABC Classic FM presenter Julian Day who was ill.

First Broadcast:

Monday 12 June 2006

ABC Classic FM Features
> Features [Home]
> Sydney International Piano Competition 2008
> Lute Project
> Continuum Sax: Lost in Translation
> 'Keyboard Preludes' on Saturday Session with Marian Arnold
> Sydney Symphony 75th Anniversary Stuart Challender Lecture: Norman Lebrecht
> Val Camonica Pieces
> Ross Edwards
> Australian Connections
> ASO Master Series 2007 Pre-concert Talks
> The A-Z of Spiritual Music: a user's guide
> Elision Ensemble - 20 years young
> Music and Fashion
> Canberra's Calling!