Explore Ensemble; Lotte Betts-Dean mezzo-soprano

Explore Ensemble commissioned a new work from Laure M Hiendl after giving the UK première of their Seht meine Wunden at Wigmore Hall in 2025. The Vienna-based composer’s art often transforms quoted fragments through deconstruction and extended repetition to create sensual soundscapes. Lisa Illean, born in Australia and based in the UK, has chosen to set lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Sea and the Skylark, combining live and pre-recorded sounds to evoke the poet’s sense of the eternal purity of nature and ‘two noises too old to end’. Morton Feldman’s Spring of Chosroes, a tightly-wound violin and piano duo, connects the programme’s new compositions through its use of repetition and exquisitely delicate sounds.