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 minutes and a few metres, Avery has grounded himself in his Country and connected with the Chapel, the Flinders Quartet and one of classical music’s greatest forbears.

Sacred Medicines (2026) is the product – “finished last Friday,” Zoe Knighton tells Thursday’s audience – of a year-long collaboration between Avery and the Flinders Quartet. The music in the dramatic opening movement is the Adagio to JS Bach’s first solo violin sonata, arranged by Paul Cassidy and adapted by the Quartet. It leads into four works composed by Avery. 

In Wirraningtungiyil, a lullaby to a sick child, Avery sings and accompanies himself on the violin, with an electronic track providing the deep, sustaining droning pulse suggestive of a didgeridoo. 

Stepping back, Avery then joins the quartet for an improvisatory duo with cellist Zoe Knighton, which evolves into a flowing musical conversation for the Quartet (Sojourn of Kii). This hypnotic work revolves around an arpeggio figure, interspersed with lilting solo melodies. 

In Galinga, Avery sings a soaring vocal line in the Ngiyampaa language, as if he were a solitary figure in a vast landscape, interspersed with rhapsodic violin solos and accompanied by an electronic track. Scribbly Gum returns to the opening bush scene, followed by a deep silence … and a standing ovation. 

Flinders Quartet presents Voices Between Worlds at The Coolroom, Northern Arts Hotel, 15 May; Monsalvat Barn Gallery, 17 May; and in the Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre on 18 May.