Review: ENSEMBLE OFFSPRING: NIGHT SONGS - ADELAIDE FESTIVAL 2024 at Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre

Reviewed by Ray Smith, Tuesday 12th March 2024.

I arrived early at the Adelaide Festival Centre for a performance of composer Jon Rose's Night Songs, played by the fascinating outfit, Ensemble Offspring. The space was taken up with the usual tiered seating but what would normally be the performance area was taken up by a collection of bean bags scattered around, before an enormous video screen.
The bean bags were tempting, but with the prospect of getting out of one at the conclusion of the performance, and discretion being the better part of valour, I sensibly chose a front-row seat amongst the tier at stage level.

On entering the space, the screen was bearing the image of a night sky, littered with stars in that familiar southern hemisphere splendour, as other audience members of a certain age contemplated the seating choices. The musicians were placed on high balconies to our left and right, four to a side, facing each other rather than us, dimly lit by the lights of their music stands, silently waiting for the audience to settle.

The ensemble itself is a flexible one, in that it can contain a variety of instrumentation, and by necessity, a variety of musicians, depending upon the requirements of the score of that particular performance, and I could just make out in the dimmed lighting, to my left flute, cornet or trumpet, trombone, and double bass, and to my right clarinet, marimba, bassoon, and oboe. Unusually, there was not a string in sight.

While Ensemble Offering could have had any number of instruments and their players in its lineup, there was one figure who simply had to be there, either as an active player or as artistic director, and behind the marimba stood acclaimed percussionist and composer, Claire Olivia Edwardes OAM.

The premise of tonight's show was, according to the blurb, “ a remarkable sonic experience: an interspecies engagement between the 13-million-year-old music of the pied butcherbird and contemporary human musicians”, a premise that was particularly intriguing to me as I had studied natural sounds as the inspiration for musical composition in my own academic research a few decades ago.

Were we to experience something akin to the works of French composer and ornithologist Olivier Messiaen, mystical, quasi-religious compositions inspired by the songs of birds and the sounds of nature, or the more contemporary abstract works of Dr. Edward Cowie, the acclaimed English composer, painter, and scientist whose entire body of work is utterly dependant upon his deep immersion into nature itself as part of his protracted compositional process?

Neither expectation was true. This work was not just inspired by the complex night calls of the Pied Butcherbird but rather performed with them. Unlike the compositions of the two artists mentioned, this work required recordings of the calls themselves as a major element in the performance, acting as would the featured soloist in a concerto. It was mind-blowingly good.

The musicians themselves were extraordinary players, displaying extended techniques on their various instruments, bassoon harmonics, breathy whispers from the flute, and brash blats from the horns, all the while conducted by Edwardes from behind her marimba.

Their timing had to be unusually precise, in that they were playing along to a fixed temporal format in the form of the recorded bird calls, insect stridulations, and frog vocalisations and there was simply no margin for error.

The set design and layout was absolutely perfect for this work. The centre of focus was the bird on the video screen and the beautifully clean recordings of it, while the musicians were placed deep into the forest on either side, responding to the soloist as other birds might in the wild. There were protracted silences, but they were punctuated by staccato stabs from the players and the soundtrack, sometimes in isolation and, at others, overlapping in a confusion of voices, calling at the same time from different parts of the implied landscape.

This is a singular and extraordinary work, performed by a group of singular and extraordinary musicians and a singular and extraordinary small bird.

Photography, Prudence Upton.

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