Always exciting, always daring, always captivating, members of ELISION Ensemble can be counted on to present a stimulating and challenging program of new music, improvisation and thought-provoking art forms. In the performing arts space of Tempo Rubato, musicians, teachers, composers, local residents, students and friends mingle with ease to support and applaud new music. Directed by Daryl Buckley, the Ensemble comprises a core of around 20 musicians whose focus is creation and performance of new works. With contemporary and new music, informative program notes on the music and composer would have greatly enhanced the audience’s insight and knowledge to complement their new aural experience.
Composer Liza Lim was present to see two of her works performed, the first, mysteriously entitled Ehwaz (2010) – a word derived or adapted from an Anglo-Saxon rune poem, meaning “horse” but not a signpost for a very different musical inspiration. Fine musicians Tristram Williams, trumpet, and Peter Neville, percussion, gave us a most colourful, energetic and wide vocabulary of new timbres. Most captivating were single trumpet notes held and manipulated with breathy added spices, split and bent notes with flutters, and varied mutes that included a CD for new and different! Neville’s energy and athleticism was shown in using a wide variety of sticks, mallets and a gorgeous vibrating bass gong, with a glass bottle and my favourite water-gong bent tones adding to a finely constructed composition using colour and space in a balanced framework of musical mosaics.
Presenting New Zealand composer Nathaniel Otley’s Phytoplankton (2022), flautist Eliza Shephard read lines from a poem describing the remarkable energy and changes of state of plankton over time. Joined by Anna Rabinowicz on bass flute, the work began with these two beautiful instruments synchronised or contrasting with simple, creative conversational shapes, expressing balanced movement, lightness, circling and connecting. As non-conventional techniques were incorporated with flutter-tonguing and breathy tones, light vocalisation and sung fragments added a fresh, almost picturesque aura to the newly coloured growth and tonal beauty of our hidden natural environment. Otley’s work focusses on ecological thinking, and how timeless were the sounds of two fine instruments portraying the spirit of nature; he explores evolving textures and timbres, and tonight there were well-timed, gently spaced moments creating anticipation and curiosity.
Luke Paulding graduated from the Victorian College of Arts in 2010 and was a promising and accomplished, award winning young composer, who sadly passed away at the age of 33. Jupiter Dreaming (2013) was written for ELISION saxophonist Joshua Hyde and percussionist Peter Neville. Tonight multi-dextrous Aditya Bhat played percussion with Hyde, whose vibrant and freely constructed patterns were scattered across the saxophone’s full register, leaping from high to low across a busy background of multi-layered percussion polyrhythms. Tone-blocks, timbales, and bamboo wind chimes added a continuous whirlwind of colour and animation.
Most fascinating was the vision of Freya Schack-Arnott showing the two bows she would be using on the solo cello – individually and together, for Lisa Lim’s Invisibility (2009). The composer wanted to experiment with changing tone and see how instruments would behave sonically, such as with speed, pressure, tension, and the unpredictable possibilities of noises and harmonics. A serrated bow produced a split personality of varied yet concurrent timbres, percussive and pitched tones, with new flavours indeed coming from experimentation with dry scraping and high level sonic dissipation from harmonics. We don’t often see two bows drawn simultaneously across a cello’s strings in contrary motion.
ELISION Ensemble has had a long working relationship with Richard Barrett’s works, and tonight his piece – instar (2015-2016) for solo soprano recorder – was magnificently performed by Ryan Williams. Opening with rapid trilled pairs of notes, fragmented and bent with slides and patterns split across leaps and extremes of high and low pitches gave the illusion that several instruments were being blown. Williams showed brilliant technical mastery and virtuosic fingerwork in this challenging and exciting piece that produced alternating tension and edginess with smooth velvety tones. The audience response was –“Wow!”
And finally, Improvisation. The almost lost art of classical improvisation is now a respected and revitalised part of a growing number of classical performances, and is a way for an ensemble like ELISION to explore and develop an intuitive and unique, never to be replicated creation! Perhaps there was a bare formula, as at first, individual instruments gently announced slowly spaced, colourful short ideas that developed with repetition and the addition of non-conventional sound effects, bowed vibes always adding connection, reverberation and mystic colour. An exploration of dry sounds and percussive pathways brought the improvisation to a warm and unified close. Not an easy task, this team showed high level musical connection and shared creativity, unity and harmony in an enjoyable and smooth close as serious concentration on faces gave way to big smiles.
Photo supplied.
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Julie McErlain reviewed ELISION live at Tempo Rubato on August 15, 2024.
