Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House
February 11, 2018

New York composer Annie Gosfield’s spiky (and delightfully titled) Cranks and Cactus Needles opened Sydney new music group Ensemble Offspring’s first concert of 2018 – and the inaugural concert of the Sydney Opera House’s new Crescendo series – Hark the Machine. Gosfield – dubbed by the BBC as “a one woman Hadron collider” – named her 2003 work for the hand cranks used to wind up ancient phonographs and the cactus spines that made for cheap needles. In the hands of Veronique Serret on violin, Blair Harris on cello, Lamorna Nightingale on flute and Jacob Abela on piano it lurched through warping pitches and crunching, driving rhythms, a visceral conjuring of the decay of now defunct technology.

Blair Harris, Lamorna Nightingale, Claire Edwardes and Jason Noble in Ensemble Offspring’s Hark the Machine. Photo © Ensemble Offspring

The tone softened with Australian composer Andrea Keller’s Love in Solitude (composed for the 2017 Merlyn Myer Composing Women’s Commission). Shimmering textures of piano, bass flute and bass clarinet (Jason Noble) were shot through with gleaming percussion from Ensemble Offspring’s Artistic Director Claire Edwardes before a voice emerged...