Lisa Illean’s ever-weaver (2022 rev. 2024) for cello and piano makes its UK debut at the Norfolk & Norwich Festival on 20 May from Deni Teo and Joseph Havlat at the Octagon Chapel.
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. Havlat and Teo later present the piece at Kettle’s Yard on 29 May and at London’s 1901 Arts Club on 10 June, where Havlat will also perform Illean’s 19-minute piano work Sonata in ten parts - a 19-minute companion work to the Diabelli Variations premiered in October 2024 by Cédric Tiberghien at Wigmore Hall.
The programme in Norwich also features Illean’s clarinet trio février. It is “a winter piece, introspective” – a 13-minute work whose subtle and unusual tunings are, in Illean’s imagination, “like cracks of muted light between the suspended piano chords.” février was premiered by Trio Catch at Festival Présences.
ever-weaver receives its premiere in Illean’s native Australia from Aura Go and Timo-Veikko Valve on 10 August at Hunters Hill Music; they then present the piece at the Tasmanian Chamber Music Festival in Hobart (19 August) and The Concourse, Sydney (31 October).