This performance of the Flinders Quartet’s new program, Voices between Worlds, features two extraordinary works: Ravel’s groundbreaking string quartet, written in 1903, and Sacred Medicines, a collaboration with guest artist Eric Avery.

The Ravel is magical; they play with flair and spontaneity. The balance they achieve is exceptional; individual parts appear and recede seamlessly, bringing out the subtle harmonic shifts and colours embedded in Ravel’s brilliant score. 

Eric Avery with the Flinders Quartet. Photo © Joshua Scott

Sacred Medicines begins with Eric Avery poised for meditation: cross-legged, barefoot, head bowed. The silence is broken by bush sounds, followed by the soothing strains of Bach. The Quartet plays an arrangement of the Bach – the Adagio to his first solo violin sonata, while Avery stands on his head, his long limbs beginning to unfurl as if he were physically tracing Bach’s sinuous melody. 

Avery dances, his bow pointed like a spear, until finally his left hand folds around a small electric violin and he starts to play, seamlessly continuing a phrase begun by the Quartet, reading from a well-thumbed Bach score on his music stand. 

In the space of a few...