Review Extracts

"Vocal group Halcyon, accompanied on harp, performed excerpts from Part One of O Venezia by Graham Hair, a "multi-movement 'song-cycle- in-progress'", an adventurous arrangement that left the audience breathless and most likely with goosebumps."
Kay Bel, The Epoch Times, September 2007

“This was an evening in absolute nirvana, with the audience treated to a positive feast of vocal artistry from the core members of Halcyon, soprano Alison Morgan and mezzo Jenny Duck-Chong”
David Gyger, Opera-Opera 2005

“One of Australia's most adventurous chamber groups”
Andrew Ford, The Music Show 2005

“We have nothing comparable to Halcyon in Melbourne and the group's singing proved remarkable for its urgent drive, self-motivation (no conductor) and sense of one unit emerging from four distinct vocal colours…The voices moved together and apart with masterly variety, the text given its due and remaining clear even in verbally complex passages” Clive O’Connell, The Age 2005

"Responsible for some of the most innovative and adventurous programs currently heard in Sydney" Peter McCallum, Sydney Morning Herald 2005

“More vintage Halcyon.” Peter McCallum, Sydney Morning Herald 2004

“One of the most interesting new music programs of the year.” Peter McCallum, Sydney Morning Herald 2003

“This was an exemplary concert—musically brave, thoughtful and meditative” Keith Gallasch, RealTime 2003

“New music champions” Peter McCallum, Sydney Morning Herald 2002

“Explored the link between music and words with intelligence, subtlety and sophistication” Peter McCallum, Sydney Morning Herald 2002

“Two singers who command mellifluous tone and use it with genuine insight into style and language” Fred Blanks, North Shore Times 1999

“This was a mind expanding concert” Fred Blanks, Northern Herald 1998

Audience Responses

"Synergy Percussion Group: Tehillim at Angel Place Recital Hall. This is a bit under the radar, but Synergy's performance on Saturday night was extraordinary. It's a "new music" (sort of avant classical) piece that's intellectually demanding to listen to and incredibly complex, and the musicians and singers showed mind-blowing virtuosity. It was something special." K. Webster, Redfern

“Great programming, lovely music and beautiful performances. Our friends, who are pretty uncertain about anything after Mozart, went home with their feet 3 feet off the ground.”

“Congratulations on a magnificent concert the other night here in Melbourne! It was a joy to hear such exciting programming, and such superb singing and playing. I was expecting exceptionally-high performance standards, and I was not disappointed! Fabulous singing, playing, ensemble work, communication. it is inspiring to hear such wonderful music-making.”

“Thank you all for such a thrilling performance at the Conservatorium last night. It was a splendidly structured concert, beautifully balanced, with the very thoughtful selection of works magnificently performed. It was my first experience of Halcyon and I was completely enthralled.”

“It was a wonderful concert. One of those rare events that went beyond enjoyment: all of us felt changed by the music.”

“Thank you for what ranked as one of the best contemporary music concerts I've been to in a long, long while. Not only was the repertoire interesting and engaging, but each of your performances was both riveting and highly personal.”

“Heard Halcyon for the first time today on ABC RN The Music Show and just loved everything.”

HALCYON Celebrating 10 Years

Familiar stage feels the shock of the new - TEHILLIM

TEHILLIM with Synergy Percussion, Halcyon and Ensemble Offspring From water to Psalms

Joel Crotty, The Age, Sept 2004

“Sydney-based Halcyon is a quartet of women singers featuring sopranos Alison Morgan, Belinda Montgomery, Jenny Duck-Chong and mezzo-sopranos Jo Burton. The ensemble champions new music, particularly from Australian composers.

For their Federation Hall recital the group selected pieces from Australia (Graham Hair, Dan Walker and Ruth Lee Martin), Finland (Kaija Saariaho and Kahlevi Aho) and England (Kerry Andrew).

The impressive numbers were Hair’s O Venezia, part one, Walker’s King Lugwig’s Swams and Andrew’s luna-cy.

Occasionally accompanied by harpist Genevieve Lang, the vocal ensemble expertly handled its diverse requirements.”

Review of Sirens

Reviewer Clive O'Connell September 26, 2005
Sirens: New Music for Voices and Instruments St John's Southgate, September 22

Sydney's the Halcyon ensemble is a female vocal quartet specialising in the new and the arcane. The group's two sopranos and two mezzos collaborated with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra's principal keyboard player, Josephine Allan, a local string quartet led by Miwako Abe, and the VCA's head of percussion, Peter Neville in a program featuring three motets by British composer Michael Finnissy, one of Ross Edwards' Maninyas , a soporific piece by New Zealander Ross Harris, a short work by Japanese composer Somei Satoh, and the world premiere of Five Senses by Australian composer Graham Hair.

We have nothing comparable to Halcyon in Melbourne and the group's singing proved remarkable for its urgent drive, self-motivation (no conductor) and sense of one unit emerging from four distinct vocal colours. The Finnissy motets for solo voice and one string line proved very little - ornate chants over an instrumental drone for much of their length. The Harris work, titled Sleep, O Beloved , induced you to follow directions because of its hieratic, block-like choral movement reinforced by Neville's gentle doubling vibraphone.

Pick of the program was the Hair work, a setting of poems by Malouf, McAuley and the famous Judith Wright lyric that gave the work its title. Here the four voices were put to brilliant use, notably in the colourful word-painting of Malouf's Harmonice Mundi, and then a series of evocative solos for soprano Alison Morgan in To the Holy Spirit by Tasmania's noted Catholic poet.

But for an ideal illustration of Hair's insight into setting texts, the Wright poem proved the most engaging and gripping. The voices moved together and apart with masterly variety, the text given its due and remaining clear even in verbally complex passages, the accompanying string quartet shimmering with excitement and providing a vivid commentary on the verbal content, separate but equal with the Halcyon voices and having the last say in a postlude of unabashed euphony and humanity: a most moving work, that we could easily have heard again.

Review of Floof!

Sydney Conservatorium Reviewed by Peter McCallum July 5, 2005
Floof!, Ensemble Offspring and Halcyon, Music Workshop, Sydney Conservatorium, July 1

You could say it was a concert of uneasy relationships between the vulnerable human voice and the more mechanised certainty of instrumental sound. Michael Finnissy's Springtime wove fragments of intermingling melody on flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano. Each proceeded independently and the first half proceeded like five love songs, each undisturbed by the other, followed by a second part of more focused and assertive energy.

Nigel Butterley's Carmina: Four Latin Poems of Spring brought instruments and sung words into a more formal elegiac relationship, wiath the soprano Jenny Duck-Chong singing in Latin, and the instruments gesturing supportively, as though of like mind. Its final song, By the River, breathed the sounds of sultry warmth and halcyon days.

Esa-Pekka Salonen's Floof: Songs of a Homeostatic Homer is built from words rather like the junk email many of us receive with text drawn from God knows where to evade the radars of spam filters. Starting with monosyllabic groans from the soprano Alison Morgan against heavily amplified instruments, the voice part progressed like one intimidated to random nonsense like "I see the eigenvalue in thine eye" against assertive wildness in the instrumental parts which always threatened to overwhelm it.

In Simone East's The Voice of the Shuttle, the voice in fact did end up symbolically defeated in the last piece, Cage, with the singer, increasingly hesitant and fragmented, enclosed within a circle of firm, domineering instrumental parts. The work explored the relationship of sound and space with each of its four movements involving a different player layout, producing textures evocative of a broad spatial canvas. In the last work the voice (Alison Morgan), singing in an invented language, was reborn in a pulsating, quivering iridescent texture of slow-moving intensity like a long hymn of love from a distant world. Duck-Chong and Morgan sang throughout as intelligent and able servants of the new.

Halcyon and Ensemble Offspring, conducted here by Roland Peelman, are responsible for some of the most innovative and adventurous programs currently heard in Sydney and this concert was a cogent show- case of some of the most original musical thought of our age.

Earth Jewels, Halcyon

By Peter McCallum September 9, 2003
Sung by Halcyon, St Aidan's Church, Annandale, September 6

The program notes said the pieces had been brought together to tell of our earthly existence. In the first half this provoked, at times, sombre and despondent music, but the second half cheered up, with dance-like rhythms which were earthy as well as earthly.

Halcyon for voice and guitar (Jenny Duck-Chong, Janet Agostino) by Queensland-based composer Christine McCombe, was named not after this ensemble but after a line by Christina Rossetti: "My heart is like a rainbow shell that paddles in a halcyon sea."

The first song, with a haunting modal melody over a serenade-style accompaniment, was particularly effective. Sun, Moon and Stars, by 20th-century English composer Elizabeth Maconchy (and sung by Alison Morgan with Sally Whitwell playing the beautiful light-wooded Stuart piano loaned for the occasion), set poetry by Thomas Traherne in lines which were often angular and sometimes heavily laden with deliberation - as though a little bit too carefully worked out.

The Hermit of Green Light, by Ross Edwards, uses texts by the brilliant Sydney poet Michael Dransfield, who tragically self-destructed in 1973, aged 24. Edwards's accompaniments, in contrast to Maconchy's, were gently stirring in the first song, flowing in the second, unfolding and exploratory in the third and still in the last.

In this work, and in Maninya V in the second half, also by Edwards, Duck-Chong sang with a lower register, dark and firm, while the top range glowed with palpability and presence, ringing brightly in the resonant room of wood and gloss-painted brick.

After interval an offering of Whitman Settings by English composer/conductor Oliver Knussen brought the first sense of swirling rhapsody to the evening, reaching fantastically to the clouds and plunging to the depths in sweeps of imagery and movement, as though the voice part were poised against the swirling gusts of the piano like an eagle on some great air current which was about to carry it long distances. Sally Whitwell's pianism here was coloured, vivid and bold.

Wit broke through in Kerry Andrew's Fruit Songs, which were playful, punning and admirably concise - not unlike a musical equivalent of the visual puns of the poetry of e.e. cummings.

Finally, Somei Satoh's The Heavenly Spheres Are Illuminated by Lights took leave of earthly existence, with Alison Morgan's radiant high soprano shining in the heavens against deeply visceral fifths on the marimba and piano.

Raising Sparks

By Peter McCallum SMH Nov 10 2003
Halcyon Verbrugghen Hall Nov 7

There was the grizzled old man of modernism, rebarbative and truculent, the deft but passionately spiritual young Scottish stylist, and two young Australians of modern and postmodern persuasion, all coming together to make one of the most interesting new music programs of the year.

Halcyon consists basically of two singers, Alison Morgan and Jenny Duck-Chong, and its artistic mission is to present new and neglected chamber music involving the voice for which purpose they were joined here by the conductor, Matthew Wood, and diverse instrumentalists.

Vocally it was uniformly excellent; instrumentally a little more patchy. In Maiden Aunts, by Australian composer Jane Stanley to a poem by David Malouf, the two sopranos sang much of the text to a common rhythm, primly staying together against more untamed instrumental writing, except for the odd escape into melismatic indulgence. The vocal writing itself was angular and stiff, sometimes effectively, at other places a little inflexibly.

The Scottish composer James MacMillan’s impressive song cycle, Raising Sparks, adopted a more striking, incantatory and ritualistic style, grabbing attention with an arresting fluency of style and gesture, alternating serene, chant-like song fragments with an wild, shrieking refrain apparently representing the explosive moment of creation.

Duck-Chong was vivid, dramatic and powerful here, holding together its dark narrative with inner intensity and urgency.

Paul Stanhope’s Shadow Dancing for clarinet, viola and piano revolved ambiently around a single motive. The first movement inflected it with disjunctions and distortions, the second with more serene calm, while the finale had the character of human/divine dance sometimes found in the music of Ross Edwards. The most impressive work was Harrison Birtwistle’s Nine Settings of Celan. Celan is a post-holocaust poet, painstakingly trying to reconstruct poetic utterance after barbarism and the settings used the dark, miasmic yet glowing colours of low clarinets and strings.

Morgan brilliantly maintained a subdued, haunting expressiveness in the difficult vocal part, although the instrumental intonation, balance and tonal control was not precise enough to capture the craggy beauty of the instrumental textures. There was an impression here of a slight lack of differentiation in the characterization of each song.

Another intelligent program from Halcyon.

Cosmic views: new music in Sydney

By Keith Gallasch 2003
Halcyon Verbrugghen Hall Nov 7

Among new music events in recent months the one that lit me up was Raising Sparks from sopranos Alison Morgan and Jenny Duck-Chong who, as Halcyon, gather skilled musicians around them to present rare contemporary compositions and commissions. The standout in this truly daunting program was Harrison Birtwistle’s 9 Settings of Celan (1996) from his Pulse Shadows series. One of the enduring great late modernists, there is a monumentality about this British composer’s work, a sense of vast movements of nature and thought even when writing for small forces, here sublimely integrated soprano, 2 clarinets, cello, double bass and the requisite pulsing viola (Nicole Forsyth). Sensibly, Halycon reproduced translations of the Celan text in the program allowing for reflection on the poet’s brooding imagery. Morgan, in great voice, enunciated with clarity and in the challenging Todtnauberg, displayed eerie ease in the rapid alternations between the octaves of text spoken and sung.

In an hermetic reverie on the divinity scattered throughout creation, the Scots composer James Macmillan’s polystylistic Raising Sparks (to a poem by Michael Symmons Roberts) blends and juxtaposes chant, folk tune, flares and bursts of hurried sound, operatic passion and passages of simple tonal beauty. It’s music that is accessible but that also manages to formally challenge. Equally, Macmillan allows his Catholic faith to open up to Jewish mysticism, musically realised in the opening and recurrent chanting of ‘zimzum.’ (“In the Hasidic tradition the moment of creation can be understood as a divine act of self limitation [zimzum], where God held back his own power and light to make space to create something other than himself”; program note.)

By comparison, Australian composer Jane Stanley’s Aunts (2003) to a poem by David Malouf seemed modest fare, rather too literal at times in its enactment of the text, but nonetheless a fine vehicle for the entwining voices of soprano Morgan and mezzo Duck-Chong who seem to become the aunts while at the same time observing them at a distance both ironic and sympathetic. Also on the program, Paul Stanhope’s Shadow Dancing (2001) has a Ravelian summery ease, clarinet jazziness and, in the second movement, an (almost excessive) eastern edge on the viola, all held together by an engaging and finally mellow dancerly propulsion.

Raising Sparks was a big concert yielding striking resonances and contrasting visions between the Macmillan and the Birtwistle, from the low chant of ‘zimzum’ in the one as the light of creation shatters across the universe and, in the other, the final, hugely sustained last note on the word “light” following on from Beckettian angst glowing with hope, dimly (the same passage bluntly utters: “Art pap”). This was an exemplary concert—musically brave, thoughtful and meditative.

Artists supreme in ivory-towering task

Fred Blanks, Northern Herald, November 19, 2003
Halcyon Verbrugghen Hall Nov 7