If I say it’s an experiment, you might think me overeager to abdicate on certitude’s authority. So I won’t say that. What I will say is that a report seemed inadequate to the scale of what took place. ELISION Ensemble—Australia’s premiere new music group, ranking members alongside Austria’s Klangforum Wien, Germany’s MusikFabrik, and France’s Ensemble Intercontemporain in the international experimental circuit—turned 40 last week. The upswell in celebration was tremendous. A packed concert at the Melbourne Recital Hall marked the ruby jubilee, rung in with performances of major new works by their in-house composers Richard Barrett and Liza Lim, plus a cycle by the Mexican elder statesman Julio Estrada and a premiere by younger Aussie Kate Milligan. Then, all the fresh ink behind them, they took off for Sydney to reprise—its first outing in well-nigh 30 years—Lim’s opera “The Oresteia,” which is enjoying a new production at Carriageworks, the repurposed railway-workshop-turned-arts-precinct. And between the two they managed to squeeze in eight hours of recording to get the Barrett on disc. Not bad for middle age.
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