Sir John Clancy Auditorium, University of New South Wales
October 13, 2018

For their final subscription concert of 2018, the Australia Ensemble (resident at the University of New South Wales) provided a typically thoughtful program. Under the title Forces of Nature, it comprised both well known and little known works, including two Australian compositions.

This ensemble not only commissions new works, but also has the good sense to program them more than once. The Australian commissions, both in the first half of the concert, were respectively premiered in 2012 and 2007. The first, by the New Zealand/Australian composer Maria Grenfell, was a piece entitled Ten Suns Ablaze (for flute, clarinet, string quartet and piano). Linked to a Chinese legend involving ten “sun birds”, the work is in three movements. The first begins in an impressionistic haze, featuring the distinctive colours of alto flute and bass clarinet. It feels like the aural equivalent of those Chinese paintings where sharp mountain peaks rise out of a mist, the mist in this case being a pentatonic string and piano wash. The bouncy second movement, Spirited, reminded me of the fast, rhythmic passages in Peter Sculthorpe’s string quartets. A soothing third movement suddenly bursts into...