Artistic Director, mezzo-soprano Jenny Duck-Chong, is joined in Halcyon’s final 2023 performance by two stellar performers, soprano Jane Sheldon and cellist Rosanne Hunt. Both artists work across a range of media and styles. Highly active as both a performer and composer, this year alone Jane Sheldon has won Work of the Year (Dramatic) at the 2022 Art Music Awards, performed with Sydney Chamber Opera in productions in Holland, Canberra and Sydney and released a new solo album, I am a tree, I am a mouth. Renowned Melbourne cellist Rosanne Hunt used one of the recent lockdowns to record Elliott Gyger’s virtuosic solo cello work, Shifting, for Forest Collective. She is sought after by leading state and national ensembles and orchestras on modern and period cello and was a founding member of both ELISION and the Melbourne Baroque Orchestra.
The third and final installment of Halcyon’s trilogy of voice and cello programs, Autobiochemistry features the music of Elliott Gyger, Nicola Lefanu and Madeleine Isaksson.
The centrepiece of the program is Elliott Gyger’s new work Autobiochemistry (2019). The work has just been announced as the 2022 winner of the prestigious Paul Lowin Song Cycle Prize. Completed late in 2019, the new 13-movement work is scored for voice and cello, each one named for a different chemical element. It is his seventh piece for the ensemble. Due to lockdown delays, this will be the world premiere performance.
The composer says:
“When Jenny Duck-Chong asked me to write for mezzo-soprano and cello, I had a fairly immediate idea of the kind of text I needed: something personal, intimate and conversational, and probably fairly contemporary in idiom and viewpoint. In the absence of anything to hand that quite fit the description, I visited a bookshop in Carlton and browsed the shelves of new poetry, where a slim volume entitled Autobiochemistry caught my eye. The author, Sydney poet Tricia Dearborn, was new to me, but I was immediately intrigued by the concept – a cycle of poems on the chemical elements and their intersection with human experience, both universal and particular – as well as by the clarity, freshness and honesty of Dearborn’s writing.”
Also on the program is the Australian premiere of Nicola LeFanu ‘s The Tongue and the Heart (2008), to poetry by John Fuller, and Madeleine Isaksson’s Blad över blad/Feuille sur feuille (2000/2019), which Halcyon premiered in 2019.
Program
Elliott Gyger Autobiochemistry (2019) - World Premiere
Nicola LeFanu The Tongue and the Heart (2008) - Australian Premiere
Madeleine Isaksson Blad över blad/Feuille sur feuille (2000/2019)
DATE & TIME: Thursday 8 December at 7pm
VENUE: Summer Hill Church, 2 Henson St Summer Hill
Tickets: $45/$35 Available here
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Enquiries: info@halcyonartmusic.com.au
THE ARTISTS
Jenny Duck-Chong mezzo soprano
Jane Sheldon soprano
Rosanne Hunt
Image ‘Liquid Crystal DNA’ © Linden Gledhill