The first part of 2024 sees quite a range of my music being played in the towns where I live and work (!) Wonderful musicians from near and far will present both world and Australian premieres across the country.
James Morley kicks off this ‘Australian season’ on 13 February 2024 with a performance of an ocean beyond earth (2016), for ‘extended ‘cello’. In this work the ‘cello strings are tied with cotton string to a violin creating a symbiotic relationship between these two sounding bodies. The concert is at Phoenix Central Park in Sydney (tickets via free ballot). Check out the gorgeous video of James performing ‘Cello Playing ~ as Meteorology (2021) in one of the shells of the Sydney Opera House. (I wrote this piece for James in his final year of studies at ANAM as part of the ANAM-Set commissioning project).
I’m incredibly excited that the JACK Quartet are touring Australia with String Creatures (2022) in April. They’ve performed the work in Banff, Lucerne, Berlin, Klangspuren and New York. The Melbourne Recital Centre co-commissioned the work with Lucerne Festival and Miller Theatre New York and the JACKS will be presenting the Australian premiere in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide in their ‘modern mediaeval’ program before taking it to Wigmore Hall in London. The dates and venues are:
6 April 2024, Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House, Sydney
7 April 2024, Ukaria Arts Centre, Adelaide
10 April 2024, Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre, Melbourne
There’s also a bonus workshop concert/talk on 5 April when Jay Campbell, ‘cellist of the JACKs, will play an ocean beyond earth at the Sydney Conservatorium’s Music Workshop with pieces by Ben Carey and Fiona Hill.
I’m very privileged to have been commissioned by Musica Viva Australia to write a work for the phenomenal virtuoso pianist Kirill Gerstein who premieres my new solo piano work Transcendental Étude (2022) in 8 concerts around the country:
10 June 2024, Hobart Town Hall, Hobart
11 June 2024, Melbourne Recital Centre, Melbourne
13 June 2024, Llewellyn Hall, Canberra
14 June 2024, Newcastle Civic Theatre, Newcastle
17 June 2024, City Recital Hall, Sydney
19 June 2024, QPAC Concert Hall, Brisbane
20 June 2024, Adelaide Town Hall, Adelaide
23 June 2024, Perth Concert Hall, Perth
(tickets seem to be selling quickly so it might be worth booking soonish if you want to catch this)
On 5 July 2024, Harry Ward is the soloist in the Australian premiere of my violin concerto, Speak, Be Silent (2015) in Melbourne with the marvellous ELISION Ensemble conducted by Aaron Cassidy. This is a special occasion for Harry to be in Australia in amongst a busy Berlin Philharmonic schedule. Last April’s concert where he played with ELISION in Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus was a powerful and moving experience for musicians and audience as documented in the video released by the Melbourne Recital Centre:
ELISION musicians will be mentoring students of the Australian National Academy of Music on Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus conducted by Aaron Cassidy for a performance at the end of June at ANAM’s Abbotsford Campus in Melbourne.
I’m looking forward to concerts on 2 & 3 August 2024 when the Sydney Symphony Orchestra will premiere Salutations to the Shells (2023). This work was commissioned as part of the orchestra’s 50-Fanfares project and offers some perspectives on ‘shells’: that of the Opera House’s architecture and the massive ancient Indigenous shell monuments that once lined the harbour’s waters.
On 8 August 2024, I’ll be presenting a public lecture/concert to mark the conclusion of my 5-year tenure as Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. There’ll be more to say on that later but I’m really pleased that the event includes the premiere of Calling the Ancestral River (2024) for violin, saxophone, trumpet, trombone, double bass and film, created for the ELISION Ensemble with visiting Swedish violinist Karin Hellqvist. This chamber work is based on my large-scale piece Multispecies Knots of Ethical Time (2023) and will form the centrepiece of a discussion of ‘Multispecies Creativity in Music’.
There are other performances and premieres coming later in the year but I’ll save that for another post…
Happy new year!
Liza Lim 