Lisa Illean’s A through-wound sea for mezzo soprano, ensemble and pre-recorded sounds will premiere with Lotte Betts-Dean and Explore Ensemble on 3 January 2027 at Wigmore Hall. The piece for voice, clarinet, piano and string quartet was commissioned by Explore Ensemble with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, Hinrichsen Foundation, Marchus Trust, Radcliffe Trust, the RVW Trust, and co-commissioned by Wigmore Hall.
The 12-minute work is a setting of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘The Sea and the Skylark’ – one of his most arresting and complex evocations of the natural world, inspired by the Welsh coastline. It is a piece in two parts, contemplating the sounds of the sea and sky: boundless, reflecting each other, and converging on a wavering horizon. Lines—in image and sound—reach forwards and back: “two noises too old to end.”
To evoke the depth and luminosity of this image, the piece makes use of non-tempered tunings - sonorities that require finer gradients of pitch, unusual intervals (found in acoustics but not on the piano keys), and subtle transience.
A through-wound sea is scored for a tapestry of live ensemble and pre-recorded sounds made with Explore Ensemble in February and March 2026. Some of the pre-recorded materials resemble the live ensemble, creating sonorous layers that imitate the forming and unfolding of wave patterns. Other pre-recorded elements are presented as filtered ghostly exposures of the original, like mingled surface reflections, with each layer modifying the other’s characteristics. The coda is a double exposure, recollecting and weaving filtered and original recordings from both sections of the piece.
The piece complements A through-grown earth, created for Explore Ensemble and Juliet Fraser - a five-part setting of Hopkins for soprano and ensemble. The 15-minute work takes as its prompt the observed patterns of tapestry in the natural world — foliations in wood or stone, or the ‘lashtender combs’ of ash trees — that occur frequently Hopkins’ poems. Pre-recorded sounds – created from recordings of retuned zithers — are interwoven with lines for voice, bass flute, clarinet, violin, viola, and cello; it was released by NMC as part of the Illean portrait album arcing, stilling, bending, gathering in 2024 – the title work of which features in Limelight’s 2026 Guide to Australian Art Music.
In March 2027 the London Sinfonietta will premiere a new 25-minute ensemble work with conductor Jack Sheen at London’s Southbank Centre. Like the ensemble’s previous commission Tiding¸ the piece is inspired by collected visual representations of time such as tide cycles. “I love the organic contours, rhythms and overlaid patterns in these images”, Illean writes, “which could be an attempt to capture something just beyond grasp”.