On 23 April Genevieve Lacey and members of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Haveron, premiered Lisa Illean’s Swellsong for bass recorded, strings, and pre-recorded sounds. The 8-minute work was commissioned for Genevieve Lacey by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Britten Pears Arts.
The work is inspired equally by early music and photography. It draws on the plainchant Fulcíte me Flóribus (Strengthen me with flowers), a liturgical text recollecting love and grief transfigured through faith. Illean images the chant slowed and diffracted: a phenomenon associated with light, water and time. The recorder part reads: “As keen, clear and tender as grief, at times enveloped by the strings”.
The pre-recorded strings, placed behind the eleven musicians, provide ‘exposures’ of musical material in the piece, somewhat analogous to the process of overlaying successive, often filtered exposures of the same photographic image. Illean asks the musicians to perform their lines “as if suspended, in waves”.
…a mournful, solemn plainchant on recorder against wispy string textures that evoked high swirling birds and shifting clouds of delicate density…a meditative bracket in which time seemed to be drawn out.
Sydney Morning Herald (Peter McCallum) 24 April 2026
Illean’s Chansons also appeared as part of the programme’s dialogue of new and early music. Reworkings of two songs by Gilles Binchois for 12 strings – Amours merchi and Adieu, adieu, mon joileux souvenir – Illean’s arrangement diffracts and collages Binchois’ exquisite descending lines in cascades, creating a sonorous recollection (a literal ‘re-membering’) of the songs. The string ensemble for her adaptation is dispersed into three string quartets that augment and illuminate one another.
The effect was beautiful, the superbly controlled pianissimo playing sounding as if it came from a distance.
Limelight (Steve Moffat) 25 April 2026
Illean’s arrangements...bathed the forms of the past in a sense of mystery, spirituality and loss…Illean treated the first chanson…with delicate softness. In the second…the lower textures were taken even further into hushed meditative stasis, while high solo violin phrases cut through with penetrating sweetness…
Sydney Morning Herald (Peter McCallum) 24 April 2026
Since premiering with Britten Sinfonia in 2024, they have appeared with Scottish Ensemble, and in September 2025 were choreographed choreographed by Raewyn Hill as part of IN THE SHADOW OF TIME, a collaboration with Australian Chamber Orchestra and Co3 contemporary dance company, which toured Australia and Japan. Both the Chansons and Swellsong will appear at the 2026 Aldeburgh Festival on 17 June, with Lacey giving the UK premiere of the latter with Britten Sinfonia and Gemma New.
The orchestra also performed Tom Coult’s Prelude (after Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe). The 5½-minute piece for lower strings is a reworking of the Prelude from the E minor suite for Viol by the celebrated 17th-century composer and violist Jean de Sainte-Colombe, whose life was dramatized by Alain Corneau in his 1991 film Tous les matins du monde.
Coult refracts the spare lines for solo viol through a dark-hued ensemble of five lower strings (2 violas, 2 cellos, and double bass): implied harmonies are made audible, new ones added, and everything is made thicker and richer; it received its Australian premiere from the ACO, and has also been performed by 12 Ensemble and Scottish Ensemble.
Thomas Adès’ Shanty – Over the Sea also featured. Premiered by Australian Chamber Orchestra, the 8-minute was the composer’s first-ever original work for strings. He calls it “a repetitive, communal ritual thing…designed to create a kind of protective mantra around people who are embarking on great peril…Embarkation…It is one of the most human desires: to go somewhere.” In 2025 Adès released his own account of the work with the Hallé Orchestra.