On 2 February Cédric Tiberghien gives the Australian premiere of Lisa Illean’s Sonata in ten parts at the UKARIA Cultural Centre, alongside Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Commissioned by Wigmore Hall, the 19-minute work premiered on 25 October in London. It is the composer’s first work for solo piano.
Sonata in ten parts sits alongside and speaks to Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Each of its sections began as an improvisation on a pattern derived from a moment – often little more than a bar – in Beethoven’s set of 33 variations. Following the spirit of this form, Illean transformed the patterns while also drawing disparate starting points into a common nocturnal atmosphere. This mood is explored in movements of preternatural stillness and delicacy, while others feature darting, quicksilver figuration with a more animated character.
Each of the ten parts belongs to and illuminates the others; there are explicit recollections of material but also recurring sound images that are continuously renewed and reimagined - patterns often reaching or grasping, cascades like sudden vistas of light, and sonorities grounded in major and minor seconds. Occasionally direct allusions to the Beethoven surface like an iceberg, but mostly these partially dissolved, “coiling and uncoiling, altering, aqueous, lightening”, as Illean puts it.
Illean’s Cantor, a 15-minute work for soprano and ensemble, returns to Australian audiences in July 2025, with performances from Ensemble Offspring and Jane Sheldon conducted by Jack Symonds at the Sydney Opera House and Street Theatre, Canberra. Premiered in 2017 by the same group, with Jessica Aszodi and Roland Peelman, at Sydney’s Carriageworks, Cantor was named Instrumental Work of the Year at the 2018 Australian Art Music Awards.
Like Sonata in ten parts its setting of Willa Cather’s April Twilights has a crepuscular feel. The soprano line is embedded in a string quartet made up from violin, viola, cello, bass, joined by piano – played also with soft mallets and toothbrush – percussion, flute, and clarinet. Illean writes,
Breathing sounds and gestures permeate Cantor, and recurring flaring patterns evoke glowing shafts of light. Cantor superimposes cycles of lines, waves or impulses…musically, the texture is like a tableau upon which the voice carves its line...Bearing solitude gracefully is a recurring theme: in atmosphere, Cantor is by turns desolate and intimate.