With 14 world premieres in store, no one is doing 2027 quite like Ensemble Offspring.

Next year, the new music ensemble performs six programs and travels to three states. There are acoustic and electronic threads, returning friends, fresh faces and works both grand and unapologetically playful.

Ensemble Offspring’s Larmorna Nightingale. Photo supplied

“Our 2027 Season is built on the radical curiosity and bold artistic vision that is the hallmark of Ensemble Offspring,” says percussionist and Artistic Director Claire Edwardes, adding that EO’s 2027 Season is one that places original living music at its forefront – “exactly where it belongs!”

Bringing art music into the intimacy of a private home, EO brings back its beloved Avant Gardens series in 2027 in two different programs. Featuring saxophonist Alice Morgan, Escapades travels between Glebe and Melbourne (20–21 February & 7 March). Borrowing its title from a work from John Williams’ score for Catch Me If You Can, the program includes works from Australian composers Holly Harrison, Thomas Meadowcroft, Ben Robinson, Andrew Howes and Elizabeth Jigalin.

In Stanmore and Alexandria across 19–20 June, A Dusk Chorus is the next chapter of EO’s Songbirds program. All bird-inspired, all-Aussie and all-female, the program features world premieres from Georgia Scott, Hollis Taylor and Hilary Kleinig alongside works by Caitlin Yeo, Nardi Simpson, Felicity Wilcox (an Aussie premiere) and Alice Humphries.

Ensemble Offspring’s Ronan Apcar. Photo supplied

In the electronically-infused Pure Bliss (named after a work by Sara Glojnarić) on 10 April, EO showcases the talent of its newest member– pianist Ronan Apcar – in Glücklich, Glücklich, Freude, Freude (Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy), a piano concerto from Adelaide-born, London-based composer Matthew Shlomowitz.

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Elizabeth Jigalin performs as a movement artist in Mark Applebaum’s Aphasia, which pairs warped vocal samples with a complicated web of hand gestures, while Ben Nobuto’s SERENITY 2.0 lays down a guided meditation that begins to spiral into something much more kooky. Australian-British maestro Toby Thatcher conducts.

Pure Bliss also marks the EO debut of the ensemble’s 2027 Hatched Emerging Performer, violinist Sola Hughes.

Djeera Gadhu (Ocean Stories) celebrates the music of EO’s First Nations Composer in Residence, Warrimay musician Nicole Smede, on 6 July at Camperdown’s Church Street Studios.

Originally composed for the Ngarra Burria: First People Composers program in 2024, Smede’s titular work is inspired by the role of the ocean in Dreaming stories and connection to Country in Dharawal Wodi Wodi Country, where she was born. The program also features Garan (Wings Of Birds), exploring the physicality of flight through scored and improvised sections, a world premiere work and an after-concert panel looking at First Nations perspectives on music and culture.

Ensemble Offspring and Zubin Kanga. Photo © Oliver Miller

London-based Aussie pianist (and former EO member) Zubin Kanga returns for Ghost in the Machine on 13 August, a sequel to the 2025 program Lumen Machine. Here, also, are another four world premieres: yet-to-be-titled works from Australian composer Fiona Hill and British composer Laurence Osborn, Ciaran Frame’s Conditions of Stillness and Linda Buckley’s Ghost in the Machine.

Closing out the year is Future Classics (Sydney and Canberra on 11–12 December), a program stuffed with six world premiere works – four from the emerging composers selected for EO’s Hatched Academy in 2027; a brand new work from Tristan Coelho, and another from a yet-to-be-announced alumnus from the Academy.

Alongside its mainstage program, EO is also set to offer a series of collaborations and co-presentations across 2027, including a performance of Stories of Water and Earth at Bondi Pavilion and two Avant Gardens programs in Elizabeth Bay House and Vaucluse House.

EO will also perform in two “exclusive opera premieres” at Carriageworks and Sydney Theatre Company, with details yet to be revealed.

More about Ensemble Offspring’s 2027 season can be found here.