This trio of ambitious orchestral works, composed in 2006 (The Compass), and 2010 (Pearl, Ochre, Hair String and The Guest) demonstrates the kind cultural cross-referencing that is an intrinsic part of Australian-born Liza Lim’s music. The Compass includes solo roles for William Barton (didgeridoo) and Carine Levine (flutes), and begins with an invocation in the native Australian language of Barton’s ancestors, Kalkadoon; Pearl, Ochre and Hair String grew out of Lim’s travels in the Kimberley of northern Australia, while The Guest is based upon a 13th-century Sufi text. The surfaces of these orchestral scores, though, are never anecdotal. Lim’s music can be tangled and eruptive, and push instrumental technique and sonority to the limit, but it can also generate moments of shimmering sensuality and create oases of transparency and repose, so that the chirruping solo recorder that provides the focus in The Guest is surrounded by textures of great delicacy and tact.
