Curated by Finnish cellist Timo-Veikko Valve for ACO’s 50th anniversary season, Musical Awakenings was a program that seemed designed to regulate both body and mind — guiding listeners through states of stillness, movement, and release. Valve curated an arc that moved through different registers of light and movement, each piece carrying its own human pulse: some slow and meditative, others urgent and narrative, all deeply embodied. The small but powerful ensemble — violins, violas, cellos, bass — played with the close attunement of musicians who are travelling together across Australia for thirteen performances. Joining this ensemble was soloist Simon Martyn-Ellis playing the Theorbo (a very large lute with an extra long neck) and recorder virtuoso Genevieve Lacey, who brought a sense of breath and intimacy to the night, switching between a number of exquisitely crafted handmade recorders with effortless artistry.
The journey began in semi-darkness with an atmospheric opener inspired by Hildegard von Bingen — a work for electronics, recorder, and strings that felt like stepping beneath the shadowed arches of a sonic cathedral. From this sacred stillness, the program moved seamlessly into Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight — a slow-building meditation for strings, its layered repetitions and gradual harmonic shifts creating a quiet gravitational pull. Its emotional weight, recalling Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings (both pieces often chosen in film to underscore grief or transcendence), held the audience in collective suspension. The spell was finally broken by Jaakko Kuusisto’s Wiima — narrative and sweeping, its lively string textures and sudden dynamic turns carrying the sense that the story had taken a decisive new direction.
After the interval, the audience returned for David Lang’s Flute and Echo — a hypnotic study in layered minimal textures, each transformation sparked by Genevieve Lacey’s recorder as the ensemble wove a shimmering, ever-evolving web of sound. Peter Eötvös’s Meraki followed — a contemporary tone poem, at once delicate and incisive, with Timo-Veikko Valve’s cello line holding the music in a taut, expressive tension. The mood then shifted to the playfully evocative Imaginary Cities: A Baroque Fantasy, where Monteverdi, Vivaldi, and Strozzi were reimagined into a homage to Venice – the soundscape and its rhythmic vitality conjuring the bustle of piazzas and the shimmer of harbour light.
The evening closed with Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132, with the Heiliger Dankgesang (“Holy Song of Thanksgiving”) at its heart. Under Valve’s direction, its glowing restraint and hymn-like serenity felt like the program’s spiritual resolution — a quiet, hard-won awakening. In a moving gesture, the ACO dedicated this performance of the Heiliger Dankgesang to the late John G. Painter, the ACO’s founder, honouring his vision and lifelong commitment to chamber music in Australia.
Photography by Charlie Kinross
