Australian Youth Orchestra
Momentum Ensemble are back on the road!
AYO’s Momentum Ensemble program is back with a vengeance! Twenty five Momentum Ensemble musicians will be heading on tour for the first time since 2019- performing a diverse range of repertoire for audiences in regional Victoria, New South Wales and Spring Bay Mill in Tasmania.
Newcomers to the AYO community might think the programs for young musicians are entirely focused on large-scale orchestras. However, AYO’s Momentum Ensemble program challenges emerging performers in a different way.
Momentum Ensemble brings graduates of AYO’s orchestral programs together to perform in chamber ensembles and chamber orchestras. These musicians are on the cusp of their own freelance careers, and the program strives to mirror the artistic variety you will find in the professional lives of 21st century musicians. The ensembles could be string quartets, wind quintets or anything in between – and the performance spaces range from art museums to school classrooms.
Over May and June, AYO is thrilled to bring Momentum Ensemble to audiences across regional Victoria, New South Wales and the idyllic surrounds of Spring Bay Mill in Triabunna, Tasmania. It will be the first time an AYO program has been performed at Spring Bay Mill, a sustainable venue maintained by the Graeme Wood Foundation, who are also generous supporters of Momentum Ensemble.
Led by renowned conductor Ariel Zuckermann, director of Israel Chamber Orchestra, the ensemble will present five diverse works under the title Belonging. Three of these works are written by living Australian composers: Brenda Gifford’s Bardju, Julia Potter’s Belonging & Longing to Be, and Lachlan Skipworth’s Avem Asperitas. These twenty-first century pieces are programmed alongside Toru Takemitsu’s Rain Coming and an arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
Avem Asperitas is a multi-disciplinary piece commissioned by AYO back in 2019, with the support of the late Peter Weiss AO. It is the result of a collaboration between two creatives living on opposite sides of the country- composer Lachlan Skipworth, based in Western Australia, and renowned photographer Greg Barrett, based in Victoria. The musical soundscapes of Avem Asperitas unfold in tandem with monochrome time-lapse clips filmed by Barrett on an iPhone- a distinctive and immersive live performance experience!