On 1 April Ensemble Apex perform Lisa Illean’s Januaries at Sydney’s Pier 2/3, The Neilson, conducted by Sam Weller. The 11-minute work is for a chamber ensemble of 12 players – flute, clarinet, horn, trumpet, percussion, harp, piano, and single strings. Conductor Sam Weller discusses the programme in Limelight here.
Januaries is shaped by Illean’s recollections of the Australian landscape, especially her childhood holidays in Queensland with her grandmother, which are imbued with a dreamlike quality, summoned in its fragile sound world; like many of her works, it is preoccupied by acts of remembrance and subtle experiences of perceptual phenomena. Illean recalls a quotation from Simon Leys, the Belgian-Australian writer, essayist and literary critic, translator, and art historian:
Australian scenery is of inexpressible beauty, it is true, but it is also utterly inconspicuous and non-spectacular—and impossible to capture with a camera: this worn-down immensity, with its half-erased profiles constitutes a magic space entirely devoid of focal point; like ghosts, mirages, and supernatural visions, it escapes the photographer, it does not leave any impression on film.
It was premiered by members of the Philharmonia Orchestra and Patrick Bailey in 2017 and made its Australian debut in 2020, performed by Benjamin Northey and Members of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. The work has appeared in the United Kingdom with Ensemble 10:10 – the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s new music group – Psappha, the London Sinfonietta at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and most recently in 2023 with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and Kazuki Yamada.
On 13 March guitarist Sam Cave performed Illean’s Tiding at Wigmore Hall as part of a programme celebrating the 80th birthday of Michael Finnissy, recorded for later broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show.
The 7-minute work sees guitar string is retuned to an overtone of an 11 hertz ground fundamental. It was the first in a series of pieces partly inspired by Christiane Baumgartner’s 2013 woodcut Deep Water. Illean has described her admiration for the way the “image evokes the perception of a liquid form through very precise means…The woodcut images approach abstraction – appearing endless – but bear the personal traces of an assiduous, intimate working method.”
Tiding was premiered online in 2021 by Huw Davies; it was commissioned by the London Sinfonietta. Yaron Deutsch has performed the work at TIME:SPANS – listen to his recording here – and the 2022 Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik. The piece has also been taken up by Sean Shibe for the 2022 Norwich and Norfolk Festival, and in December 2025 by Ruben Mattia Santorsa at the Unerhörte Musik Festival in Berlin.