Movie composer Felicity Wilcox’s musical sea-change bears fruit

Australian composer Felicity Wilcox was making a successful living in the commercial field writing film scores and with an eye to the big event when she decided on a new course.

Felicity Wilcox with percussionist Claire Edwardes and fellow composer Damien Ricketson.

• Two masters at work
• Chopin and Mozart to die for
• Two Baroque stars sharing the journey

Australian composer Felicity Wilcox was making a successful living in the commercial field with an eye to the big event – writing more than 60 soundtracks and composing the music for the Paralympics Opening Ceremony in Sydney in 2000 – when she decided on a new course.

She started getting commissions from some of Australia’s leading chamber groups, including the Australia Ensemble and a joint project, Uncovered Ground, by early music group Ironwood and the ultra-modern Ensemble Offspring, which is a highlight of the collection and gives the album, released by the Melbourne-based label Move, its title.

Wilcox’s is an important voice in contemporary classical music as this collection attests. She covers a variety of musical styles, moods and ideas, but her work is always accessible, engaging and, perhaps not surprisingly given her cinematic background, visually evocative.

For her reimagining of 17th century French composer Marin Marais’ work Le Tourbillon, she combines acoustic and electronic effects to summon up the wildly swirling “tornado” of the title, aided by Anthea Cottee’s viola da gamba and Nathan Henshaw’s tenor saxophone.

Another superb track is Vivre sa vie, a new soundtrack for Jean-Luc Godard’s new-wave movie classic of the same name, which she cut back to a manageable 15 minutes for a commission from Paul Stanhope for the Australia Ensemble, performed on this recording by the excellent Sydney band Ensemble Offspring with Claire Edwardes on percussion, flutist Lamorna Nightingale, Ben Kopp on piano and Jason Noble’s bass clarinet.

Noble features in the opening track the solo People of this Place, Wilcox’s acknowledgment of First Nations Australians and their land on which she lives in the Blue Mountains, in which he channels the didgeridoo before taking off with a showcase of tonguing effects and leaping runs.

The collection features four excerpts from Wilcox’s longer work, Gouttes d’un Sang Etranger (Drops of Foreign Blood) which was featured in Sydney’s 2014 Vivid Festival. This wide-ranging work in based loosely on Marin’s music but is also a nod to the composer’s French ancestor Pierre Claude Louat and his experiences as a migrant here in the mid-19th century.

One of the most intense, and condensed, works on the album is SON, a movement from her string quartet performed by the Sydney Art Quartet, and the collection ends on a serene note with Falling, an extract from her larger work Snow.

Uncovered Ground Collected Chamber Works can be downloaded from iTunes or streamed on Spotify and Apple Music and is available as a CD for $25 through Buywell Music or the Australian Music Centre.