The Oracle
EO’s biggest and boldest program of the season is also its most subtle and surreal, with music that will overwhelm you with its delicate beauty and luminous sonorities.
Christopher Cerrone’s ethereal quartet, How to Breathe Underwater is followed by Kate Moore holding a mirror to 13th-century Spain with a modern-day cantiga, Rose of Roses. In its unsung tale, the nightingale, pierced by a rose thorn, sings itself to death.
Two large-scale works receive their Australian premieres. English composer Tansy Davies has written Lost Science as an imaginary journey into the Earth’s interior. She evokes ancient spaces that ‘speak to us in moans, groans, echoes and whispers’, summoning visions of the Divine Feminine, from Isis to Joan of Arc. And Kate Moore’s new percussion concerto, written for her long-time friend Claire Edwardes and co-commissioned with Amsterdam’s Het Muziek, builds on her fascination with storms and the sensual experience of being in nature at the mercy of the elements. The result is equal parts edgy, exhilarating, transcendental, terrifying and beautiful.
