Reviews of Annunciation Triptych CD (WDR Sinfonie Orchester, conductor Cristian Măcelaru, soprano Emily Hindrichs) & of the concert with Mary/ Transcendence after Trauma by Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (Musica Viva Munich, 12 May, 2023).
#update 10 June, a few more CD reviews (in English)
- If Liza Lim isn’t on your musical radar, I suggest you remedy that. I can’t think of many other composers today who, on a grand scale, combine her mastery of colour and form with sensitive
engagement to where we’re at ecologically. (Liam Cagney, Gramophone, 07/2023) - Lim has grown into one of the most exciting and important composers working today. This recording of her (to date) magnum opus for orchestra, her Annunciation Triptych, if anything raises the bar even higher. It also forms an ideal introduction to her extraordinary, inclusive and visionary music… This is as good a piece of music as I have heard in recent years and I can’t recommend it enough. Lim’s world is a strange, murky, glittering, gorgeous one where one never knows what one will encounter next other than that it will be unexpected and fabulous. (David McDade, MusicWeb International, June 2023)
extracts from some of the longer CD reviews (in translation via google translate):
- Sensory overload and fantasies of redemption
Dirk Wieshollek, 04/2023, Neue Musik Zeitung
The utopian potential of the spiritual runs like a thread through Liza Lim’s work, often as a glimmer of hope in the tension of a desolate global ecology. In “Annunciation Triptych” this attitude virtually takes on the mode of transfiguration in the orchestral widescreen format. Three icons of female spirituality are at the center of three movements that stand for ideas of redemption in different cultural circles. It is not uninteresting to realize that this triptych was created in 2019-2022, and so everything sounding here seems like a subsequent liberation. Liza Lim revels with astonishing intensity in the fullness of the euphony: radiant major chords, elegiac horn motifs, triadic arpeggios, the breaking in of pathetic chordal walls – as if Strauss and Wagner had been the godfathers here. But this is not the end of this audaciously strange music.
“Poetic Assemblage” is the name of Liza Lim’s program, where the speculative is supposed to grow out of the divergent. In “Sappho/Bioluminescence,” seductively luminous bodies of sound grow out of shimmering ramifications. The second movement, “Mary/Transcendence after Trauma,” begins like a sunrise (in 19th century music), the third like a Bruckner symphony. A dramatic soprano does its part in “Fatimah/Flowers of Jubilation.” The WDR Symphony Orchestra bathes with relish in Lim’s fantasies of redemption, orchestral sound as proclamation. - Liza Lim: Annunciation Triptych
Michele Palozzo, 21/03/2023, Percorsi Musicali
Also reprinted (Italian with English translation) in Esoteros
…The poetess of ancient Greece Sappho, celebrated throughout the centuries for her sublime love verses often addressed to her own sex; the virgin Mary of Nazareth, visited by the archangel Gabriel for the immaculate conception of the son of God; Fatima, Muhammad’s last-born daughter and the only one to perpetuate the Islamic prophet’s lineage. Lim transfers their elusive and hieratic gaze into orchestral pages of perturbing, unfailing vividness: mercurial kinetic thrusts – hallucinatory progressions reminiscent of Georg Friedrich Haas – pass alternately through the string, wind and percussion sections, like sudden beams of light on an iridescent weave whose surface vibrates and shudders with ever new chiaroscuro effects. - Musical Annunciations, with a woman’s face
Paco Yáñez, 30/05/2023, para El Compositor Habla
After what was, in 2020, the first monograph by Liza Lim (Perth, 1966) on Kairos (0015020KAI), under the title ‘Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus’, the Australian composer returns to release an album on the Viennese label, and she does so, once again, with levels of quality, in terms of score, interpretation and recording, that keep her as one of the most interesting composers of our time: one of those voices that must be present in all self-respecting musical programming, beyond quotas, parities or any other mathematical-sociological engineering, since what prevails in Liza Lim is a resounding musical quality that imposes itself and that transcends issues of gender or ideology...
Concert reviews
The Return of Orchestral Opulence – works by Lim, Verunelli and Dusapin at Musica Viva
Martin Blaumeiser, 15/05/2023, The New Listener
The presentation of the Happy New Ears Prizes of the Hans and Gertrud Zender Foundation for 2021, which are awarded every two years, could only now be made up for in the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts due to the corona. Wolfgang Rathert delivered the laudations and emphasized the world relevance and political commitment of the music of the prizewinner for composition, the Australian Liza Lim. The prizewinner for journalism on new music, the Italian musicologist Gianmaria Borio, was honored for his extensive work on both sides of the Atlantic – including a four-volume history of the Darmstadt Summer Courses. The short, all the more succinct thanksgiving of the recipients were in perfect German – and for the first time in this context a small musical contribution was heard: Matthew Sadler played Lim’s fascinating trumpet solo ‘Wild Winged-One’.
The symphony concert begins with Liza Lim’s 2nd part of her Annunciation triptych: ‘Mary / Transcendence after Trauma’ (2020/21), which will hopefully start the series of “missed” musica viva premieres – the triptych was instead made in Cologne in 2022 by Cristian Măcelaru from the Baptism lifted – ends. In complete contrast to Lim’s highly political performance instrumental theater ‘Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus’, which was last played in the Herkulessaal (which we reviewed). Lim deals here with the mystery of the Annunciation and makes use of an enormous palette of orchestral timbres, the opulence of which she masters with a mastery that is absolutely convincing in every detail. Almost nothing is conventional or even a fall back into the box of neo-romanticism. From the tender beginning of spring drums and strings to awe-inspiring brass glissandi – the texts that inspire the composition build a bridge from the story of the Annunciation to the reflection of Revelation – the entire, approx. 18-minute piece testifies to deep spiritual immersion, especially in rather noisy sections. The short, central moment Her wild consent is moving– only with bass drum, horn and piano and the following apocalyptic visions. Lim skillfully uses quarter-tone coloring and impressive spectral sounds, especially in the horns.
Annunciation in painful tones
Reinhard J. Brembeck, 14/05/2023, Süddeutsche Zeitung
Liza Lim, also a star of the scene, pays homage to the Mother of God and the proclamation she suffered in “Mary Transcendence after Trauma”. The radiant chords are a reference to the great Catholic composer Olivier Messiaen. Liza Lim further reimagines her role model with individuality, offering coherence, variety and a sophisticated rain of sounds.
It’s a pity that the “musica viva” didn’t bother to play the two pieces that frame the “Annunciation Triptch”, they are dedicated to the poetess Sappho and Fatimah, the daughter of the Prophet Mohammed.
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Liza Lim 