Experience an intimate performance celebrating our 25th birthday featuring an array of original chamber works by nature’s own composers – butcherbirds, blackbirds, lorikeets and leafcutter ants, frogs and flamingos – as the sun goes down.

With a little help from eight Australian composers and three of our very own instrumentalists, their familiar calls and songs morph into surprising and beguiling chamber jewels for flute, clarinet and vibraphone. All seven works have been written by some of Australia’s leading composers especially for the members of Ensemble Offspring.

After many seasons spent listening and recording in Central Australia, Hollis Taylor brings us the song of the pied butcher bird in Bitter Springs Creek 2014, while Kate Moore takes the liquid melodies of the European blackbird and intertwines alto flute, bass clarinet and vibraphone in an intricate counterpoint. Fiona Loader’s Lorikeet Corroboree is an upbeat, punchy work which weaves the crazy chatter of Australia’s rainbow lorikeets in with some older, ground-dwelling composers, with fragments from Papageno’s magic flute, Vaughan Williams’ the Lark Ascending and the scintillating sound world of Messiaen. Meanwhile Gerard Brophy makes flamingos dance and humming birds buzz in his brand new 3 movement tour-de-force Beautiful Birds. 

And don’t miss the return of the otherworldly sounds of the waterphone, live, in its natural habitat. 

Creative Director (Sydney Festival)
Michelle St Anne – The Living Room Theatre

“Ensemble Offspring played Gerard Brophy’s rhythmically demanding Beautiful Birds with precision and élan.” 

4 STARS – Sydney Morning Herald