1As you all know, the university is planning an arts festival for later this year,
2and here in the music department we've planned three concerts.
3These will be public performances, and the programme has just been finalised.
4The theme of the festival is links between the UK and Australia,
5and this is reflected in the music:
6each concert will feature both British and Australian composers.
7I'll tell you briefly about the Australian music,
8as you probably won't be familiar with that.
9The first concert will include music by Liza Lim,
10who was born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1966.
11As a child, Lim originally learned to play the piano - like so many children -
12and also the violin.
13But when she was 11 her teachers encouraged her to start composing.
14She found this was her real strength,
15and she studied and later taught composition,
16both in Australia and in other countries.
17As a composer, she has received commissions from numerous orchestras,
18other performers and festivals in several countries.
19Liza Lim's compositions are vibrant and full of energy,
20and she often explores Asian and Australian Aboriginal cultural sources,
21including the native instrument, the didgeridoo:
22this is featured in a work called The Compass.
23Her music is very expressive,
24so although it is complex,
25it has the power of connecting with audiences and performers alike.
26In the festival we're going to give a semi-staged performance of The Oresteia.
27This is an opera in seven parts,
28based on the trilogy of ancient Greek tragedies by Aeschylus.
29Lim composed this when she was in her mid-20s,
30and she also wrote the text, along with Barrie Kosky.
31It's performed by six singers, a dancer,
32and an orchestra that, as well as standard orchestral instruments, includes electric guitar,
33and a traditional Turkish stringed instrument.
34Lim wrote that because the stories in the tragedies are not easy to tell,
35the sounds she creates are also disturbing,
36and they include breathing, sobbing, laughing and whistling.
37The work lasts around 75 minutes,
38and the rest of the concert will consist of orchestral works by the British composers
39Ralph Vaughan Williams and Frederick Delius.
40Moving on now to our second concert,
41this will begin with instrumental music by British composers - Benjamin Britten and Judith Weir.
42After the interval we'll go to Australia for a piece by Ross Edwards:
43The Tower of Remoteness.
44According to Edwards, the inspiration for this piece came from nature,
45when he was sitting alone in the dry bed of a creek,
46overshadowed by the leaves of palm trees,
47listening to the birds and insects.
48The Tower of Remoteness is scored for piano and clarinet.
49Edwards says he realised years after writing the piece
50that he had subconsciously modelled its opening phrase on a bird call.
51Ross Edwards was born in 1943 in Sydney, Australia,
52and studied at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music
53and the universities of Adelaide and Sydney.
54He's well known in Australia,
55and in fact he's one of the country's most performed composers.
56He's written a wide range of music,
57from symphonies and concertos to some composed specifically for children.
58Edwards's music has been described as being 'deeply connected to Australia',
59and it can be regarded as a celebration of the diversity of cultures that Australia can be proud of.
60The last of the three Australian composers to be represented in our festival is Carl Vine.
61Born in 1954, Vine, like Liza Lim, comes from Perth, Western Australia.
62He took up the cornet at the age of five, switching to the piano five years later.
63However, he went to university to study physics, before changing to composition.
64After graduating he moved to Sydney and worked as a freelance pianist and composer.
65Before long he had become prominent in Australia as a composer for dance,
66and in fact has written 25 scores of that type.
67In our third concert,
68Vine will be represented by his music for the flag hand-over ceremony of the Olympics held in 1996.
69This seven-minute orchestral piece was of course heard by millions of people worldwide,
70and we'll hear it alongside works written by British composers Edward Elgar and, more recently, Thomas Adès.