Aura Go and Timmo-Veiko Valve will present Lisa Illean’s ever-weaver, a 10-minute work for cello and piano, at the SXS Chamber Music Festival in Queensland on 16 August. The pianist and cellist previously gave the Australian premiere of ever-weaver in 2025 at Hunters Hill Music with further performances of the piece at the Tasmanian Chamber Music Festival in Hobart and The Concourse, Sydney.
Illean’s 10-minute piece takes inspiration from the fragile, beautiful webs of the orb-weaver spider. Twenty-one musical ‘threads’ are woven and re-woven horizontally and vertically across chords and pleated lines through nine spiralling cycles; seven different sonorities also inform the structure of the work. At points Illean asks the pianist to reach behind the keyboard and pluck the strings, aiming for a delicate yet resonant sound. Illean calls for a second cello using a scordatura tuning, which allows the player to explore more remote partials.
Illean says of ever-weaver,
The manner of weaving is constantly evolving: presentations – for example, shifts in tempo or presence – change quickly and sometimes mid-course, as if resolving a new image in the eye, or as if skipping between glimpses of different continuously existing surfaces. In the final section, the now familiar piano sonorities are almost still-standing.
Commissioned by Ensemble intercontemporain, it was premiered by Hidéki Nagano (piano) and Renaud Déjardin (cello) in November 2022; the pair subsequently performed the piece in Lyon in March 2023. It made its UK debut at the Norfolk & Norwich Festival in 2025 from Joseph Havlat and Deni Teo. Aura Go previously premiered Illean’s arcing, stilling, bending, gathering for piano and string ensemble with the Australian National Academy of Music in 2023; listen to her world premiere recording of the work here.