Updates (other reviews)
1/3/15. Gordon Kerry has a few things to say about Australian politics & cultural insularity as well the CD. Liza Lim: Orchestral Works, The Music Trust
9/2/15. Another review of the HatArt CD: ambitious, eruptive orchestral works. Andrew Clements, The Guardian, 6 Feb 2015.
Liza Lim, Orchestral Works, Hat[now]Art CD review
Julian Cowley, The Wire, Issue 372, Feb 2015, pp. 58-59
‘Everything falling, rushing forward, ascending, disappearing, reappearing. Disintegrations, agglutinations, fragmentations, reconstitutions.’ So poet Octavio Paz summed up the visionary writings of Henri Michaux, but those words fit well the music of Australian composer Liza Lim. Her orchestral scores are concentrated energy maps. Her music suggests infinite turbulence, cosmic flux and spasm, eruptions and swirling vortices that drag you in, then abruptly spew you into another zone, no less volatile or intense. Carin Levine’s flute and William Barton’s didgeridoo heroically negotiate just such a convulsive and elemental soundworld in The Compass. Lim’s writing for full orchestra doesn’t console them with a sense of progression, but creates skewed cycles of gushing emergence, transformation, sudden decline and regeneration. Recorder soloist Jeremias Schwarzer is granted a more hospitable, less disorienting passage through the vivid orchestral textures of The Guest. A third piece, Pearl, Ochre, Hair String, is a stirring cauldron of glaring brass, gritty and frictional percussion, shrill woodwinds and vertiginous strings.
The CD was also mentioned in ‘2014 CD Picks’ by Andrew Ford and Alex Ross.
Liza Lim 