Above and featured: members of Sirius Chamber Ensemble. This concert featured: Melissa Coleman (flute), Ian Sykes (clarinet), Alison Evans (bassoon), and Clare Kahn (cello). Special guests included Keyna Wilkins (piano/composer), Raph Hatz (didjeridu), Lucy Carrigy-Ryan (viola), and Yerim Lee (piano).
Any concert in the superb Church Street Studios promises a great bespoke atmosphere complete with historic musical curiosities and musical objets d’art excitingly all around. Beside the decor, it boasts a successful intimate stage and audience space and attracts fine ensemble and musical projects to its environment.
Echoes from Home, the latest concert offering from Sirius Chamber Ensemble was a very special event. The ensemble of wind, strings and keyboard assembled a fine concert for the afternoon. A companion event to an afternoon in Picton (on March 8, blending Brahms and Mozart with New Music) the Camperdown concert featured no less than seven Australian works.
Amongst the recent local works from across the country on offer- the oldest being from 2007- was an impressive three works invented for the event, being two new commissions and a re-arrangement of an existing work also to be premiered at Echoes From Home.
The thrill of hearing an all-Australian programme, featuring a variety of ensemble line-ups from solo instruments with piano, through a work for single instruments with recorded track to First Nations musicians, composers and the addition of yidaki to the wind line-up made this a memorable, worthwhile and atypical musical event.
Above: Sydney Conservatorium staff member and collaborative pianist Yerim Lee was a special guest at this event.
As the title suggests, compositions evoking local scenes, special places, the memory of seasons, interactions with nature and snapshots of Australian society or politics were the order of the day. A highlight of writing that reached beyond the usual concert fare was the work Call From The Deep – The Whales speak To Us! from Corrina Bonshek.
This captivating soundscape pushed boundaries and redefined stillness as the triptych pitted cello then flute then piano against varied recordings of whalesong. This exquisite exercise in music enhancing nature was reflected in the opening three-movement work Colloroy Skies (from Gareth Lewis) in arrangement for Sirius Chamber Ensemble here. Street settings, nostalgia and beach vistas were indicated in this compact, well-characterised and accessible writing plus intricate and clear music making from the five instruments sans piano.
The core line-up of Sirius Ensemble were brilliantly featured in works promoting the modern sonata or solo and piano genre. The variety achieved in the new music for flute and piano (Winter Solstice by Merryl Nellie), clarinet and piano (the witty, modern life-plus caricatures of place (in Stuart Greenham’s Three Places For a New Millennium) and Natalie Williams’ The Dreaming Land (for a dip into ancient places and a solid re-performance of the 2018 Musica Viva world premiere) all were a staggeringly impressive breakdown of the Ensemble into its core elements.
Above: Yidaki player Raph Hatz was an important part of this concert and Keyna Wilkins’ new atmosphere, the commissioned work ‘Truth, Voice, Treaty’. Photo: Tawfik Elgazzar.
This intelligently paced, juxtaposed and curated mix of music was an exciting promotion of the current Australian musical and physical landscape. The guest appearance of pianist Yerim Lee and her memorable immersion into all soundscape in balanced keyboard layers for these solo sonatas was a masterstroke. Her sympathetic, stunningly articulated and nuanced keyboard part was a very special element in the environments held up for us to enjoy and examine.
The opening and final works in this event utilised the larger forces. We began in being wooed by the shapes of the Colloroy area and finished with Keyna Wilkins’ political and topical work Truth, Voice, Treaty (2026). This Wilkins work communicated with her lithe and penetrating vocabulary – a blend of improvised and scored musical moments, and a melting point of timbres, gestures and colours from modern Western Music and First Nations musical commentaries.
Above: Composer Keyna Wilkins played piano in the performance of her work ‘Truth, Voice, Treaty’ (2026) for yidaki and chamber ensemble. Photo: Tawfik Elgazzar.
Turning her commission opportunity into a restless and strong reference to the failed Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum, Wilkins produced a powerful piece with ensemble challenges, collaboration, hurt, confusion and hope to the fore. This work’s inclusion of yidaki (dijeridu) as performed by emerging crossover superstar Raph Hatz showcased this composer’s thrilling finger-on-the-humanitarian-pulse approach.
The introduction of this virtuoso’s scored and improvised mosaic with piano, strings and wind was breathtakingly thought-provoking. Hatz’ multiligual, moving Acknowledgement of Country at the event’s opening also still echoes in my memory and mind.
The second new commission in this concert was a piece by First Nations musician Troy Russell. Celebrating everyone’s fave forest songster, the bellbird, his piece Bellbirds – A Song for the Wonnara (2024) resonated tremendously well in the Church St Studios Space (the birthplace of the animated Blinky Bill film). It also reverberated so well as a Country cousin to Keyna’s powerful reaction to politics in Truth, Voice, Treaty.
Many people should discover this clever and expressive works. Our chance as audience members to hear their scenas, stillness and social predicaments chimed with such clarity by Sirius Chamber Ensemble’s members and guests in this diverse, troubled and still relatively lucky country was a fortunate part of the 2026 musical life.
I left craving a recording of this programme, or to see it being used for a documentary soundtrack, so strong was the pictorial and emotional journey.
