Music / Luminescence 10^th Birthday Gala. At Albert Hall, June 15. Reviewed by MICHAEL WILSON.

Surviving a decade as a chamber music ensemble is worth celebrating, not least when that period included covid and a cost-of-living crisis.

This concert marked this achievement (including some short speeches about the founding of Luminescence and how it developed a philosophy) but was primarily an exposé of truly remarkable chamber singing, with a challenging program consisting almost entirely of modern Australian composers (including a world premiere).

Singing and body percussion are the most elemental girders in how humans make music, because they require nothing outside one’s own body. And yet the word luminescence is about light; specifically light that is self-generated rather than reflected, which makes Luminescence a brilliant name. In this expression, both the six-member Luminescence Chamber Singers and the 19-strong Luminescence Children’s Choir (originally drawn from the teaching studios of the chamber singers) were on spectacular display.

Led by AJ America (alto) as artistic director, sopranos Josephine Brereton and Rachel Mink, tenor Dan Walker, baritone Lucien Fischer and bass Alasdair Stretch are a tight and familiar ensemble, with excellent communication evident with the audience and each other. A physical and expressive performance style shows they love what they do, but they are technically superb as well.

Opening with I Heard You Sing by Jess Green (commissioned by Luminescence in 2022, and imagining a baby in utero, then being breathed into birth), each of the six voices featured, but the piece was anchored by Brereton, Mink and Walker, including a percussive clapping accompaniment.

Dan Walker is well-known as a conductor, director and composer in Canberra and beyond, and three of his works were included in the program. The children’s choir commenced their bracket with his Sunset New England, where the choir demonstrated a remarkable uniformity in tone, adherence to pitch, great diction and very precise entries and endings.

Elliott Gyger’s I Am Not Yet Born returned to the theme of sounds within the womb, starting with a dramatic sforzando and rapid decrescendo to pianissimo. This piece required great range in both singing and sounding: improvisations, repeated lines of spoken text and sequencing of musical lines. The result was breathtaking, even if the subject matter (the state of the world the baby was to enter) was somewhat sobering.

Finally, Neil Finn’s Little Fish (words by Michael Leunig) was a beautifully simple and harmonised way to end the children’s bracket.

Other highlights of the afternoon were in the chamber singers’ second bracket: the traditional Swedish song Tystnaden (the silence), and the world premiere of Elena Kats-Chernin’s Lichtmärchen (fairy tale on light), commissioned for the event (and the composer was present). This evocative work envisions a world without light, where light is a spirit trapped on the sea floor before being drawn up through the darkness to finally illuminate the world on reaching the ocean’s surface.

Luminescence has established itself not as a group, or an organisation, or an act – although it is all these things.  Luminescence, like its namesake in nature, is a phenomenon.