News

The First Stones performance, the culmination of our first six-month-long emerging composers project,  was on November 19. Read the wonderful Sydney Morning Herald review here. 

Preparations are now underway for our last show for 2011 - Sirens at Riversdale.  A beautiful location to end the year's hard work. 

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21/9/11  Sydney Morning Herald review of Life on Paper online here.

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Life on Paper:  We're really excited about how the pieces are coming together and really enjoying both the extraordinary sounds and textures of the pieces and the wonderful artists we are working with.  In particular we'd like to welcome our conductor David Stanhope who brings a tremendous wealth of experience to this beautiful program.  
David conducted both Sydney Alpha Ensemble and The Seymour Group, two outstanding and seminal new music groups active in Australia for many years. He has since been a guest conductor and recording artist for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Symphony Australia, including CDs, concerts and engagements with the Sydney, Melbourne, West Australian, Queensland, Adelaide and Tasmanian Symphony Orchestras. David is also a composer, especially well known in the field of wind band and brass and a pianist, with studio recordings by EMI and Tall Poppies.  

The journey to a concert is always full of interesting challenges, apart from the obvious ones of learning all those notes!  This time we have rehearsed in 8 different venues, sourced a vast array of percussion instruments from our many friends and connections and moved mountains of it for each call. And some of the instrumentalists are getting their heads around singing and playing percussion - musical multi-tasking!

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Two major events have been keeping us busy behind the scenes for the past couple of months - coordinating our new project First Stones and now gearing up for Life on Paper, our next concert on Sunday Sept 18.

Rehearsals are well underway.  We are really looking forward to this concert as it features a premiere of a new commission for Halcyon by Andrew Schultz called I have written in this book, inspired by Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, for a very rich ensemble of soprano, mezzo, cello, double bass, harp, piano and percussion.  We’ve met with Andrew a few times since our residency together at Bundanon in March and we’re looking forward to seeing it all come together in performance.

Also on the program are two sets of George Crumb’s evocative Madrigals and a beautiful work of Joseph Schwantner’s called Sparrows, which is a setting of a collection of 15 Haiku by Issa.  Both of these also exploit wonderful sonorities.  The Madrigals are respectively for voice, flutes and percussion and voice, double bass and percussion and feature fragments of Federico Garcia Lorca poetry – a major source of inspiration for Crumb.   Sparrows is the largest in scale with an instrumentation of flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, piano, harp and percussion.  It even features an instrumentalist choir.  So as usual with our programs, expect the unexpected! 

For more information and bookings, click here.

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July brought workshops for First Stones - 4 days of intensive music-making with the composers, Elliott Gyger and our fellow artists - Diana Springford (clarinets), Geoffrey Gartner (cello), Jo Allan (piano) and Genevieve Lang (harp). 

There are a now number of recent blogs about the process online at resonate by the composers Lachlan, Nicole, Pedro, Anastasia, Peggy, Owen, James and Chris as well as earlier ones by Alison and Jenny. 

In June, we were in the studio with our Sirens - Belinda Montgomery, Jo Burton and Genevieve Lang - to begin recording Dan Walker's beautiful King Ludwig's Swans, written for us in 2004/09.  We hope to have this completed in the next few months to add to our collection of studio-recorded commissions. 

May was a full month for us.  In mid May we were in Melbourne to present seminars to composers and vocal students at the University of Melbourne, Conservatorium of Music.  It was great to interact with so many students and share the music we are so passionate about.  We also gave a lunchtime concert at Melba Hall on Monday May 16. 

Then on Saturday May 28, as part of our First Stones project, we held seminars for emerging composers and singers in Sydney.  A very interactive day with Jenny, Alison and Elliott and a visit from the AMC's General Manager John Davis.  More details here.  On Sunday 29 we continued the intensive weekend with our 10 participants, Cameron introducing them to the important points of copyright permissions, before we spent the afternoon with Elliott and the composers, workshopping their overnight composition task.  Jenny and Alison had 15 new pieces each to sightread for the afternoon! A wonderfully challenging and engaging weekend!

Halcyon is very proud to have been shortlisted in this year's ART MUSIC AWARDS in the Best Performance category for Elliott Gyger's From the Hungry Waiting Country, commissioned for us by the inaugural Aurora Festival and now firmly part of our core repertoire.  A wonderful showcase of virtuosity, we are so thankful to the artists - singers Belinda Mongomery & Jo Burton, harpist Genevieve Lang and conductor Matt Coorey - for their fantastic skills, and to Elliott for the intricate, complex, diverse and evocative piece he created for us.  Our recently completed studio recording of the work will be available online soon. 

We were in Tasmania in April on another artists' retreat, this time with our Sirens - Belinda Montgomery, Jo Burton and Genevieve Lang.  It was wonderful to work in such peaceful surroundings (see photo).  We could get very used to this way of rehearsing.  We were preparing Dan Walker's beautiful King Ludwig's Swans for a recording session soon, as well as working on the final part of Gillian Whitehead's very evocative Nga Haerenga. 

We had a wonderful time at Bundanon as AIRs (Artists in Residence) in March.  A couple of days working with Andrew Schultz on his new commission (for performance in our September program) and then time together to practice, brainstorm and discuss plans for the future as well as breathe in the beauty and tranquility of the setting.  Plannings is well underway now for our 2012 series featuring a number of collaborative projects.  More news soon.

Katy Abbott's first chamber music CD, Sunburnt Aftertones, which features Halcyon's commission No Ordinary Traveller, recorded by Halcyon last year, is now available on her site as an album download or via itunes as single tracks.  The cycle consists of four songs:  No Ordinary Traveller, Ship Life, One Dark Sky and An End That Marks a Start.  It has already featured as CD of the week on 3MBS and has received substantial airplay. 

Ruth Lee Martin's self produced album, featuring the Wimmera Song Cycle, commissioned last year for our Where the Heart Is program, is now available.  Our recording of Elliott Gyger's From the Hungry Waiting Country will also be available soon.  This and other works will be online soon for purchase.  It gives us great pleasure to record these commissioned Australian works and we are looking forward to the chance to share them with a wider audience. 

  
Image: Liz Duck-Chong