This page presents a review of the Sydney Spring Ensemble by Roger Covell. It featured in the Sydney Morning Herald, September 1995.
The EONTA Challenge
Although Xenakis wrote Eonta more than 30 years ago (in 1963–64), it has lost little, if any, of its radical audacity, especially in those passages that cause the pianist to plunge about with ferocious velocity, engaging in what looked like the equivalent of precision bombing on individual notes and clusters.
Five young brass players — two trumpeters and three trombonists — provided Eonta with some savagely barbaric refrains and a few still and delicate moments. In some of them they intensified and altered sonorities by pointing the bells of the instrument towards the floor or ceiling or towards the uncovered strings of the piano.
The brass players’ concentration and sense of responsibility, guided by Woodward’s example and the direction of Simon Romanos, admirably previewed qualities displayed by larger groupings of the Sydney Spring Ensemble, an assembly of young musicians of making its first and very welcome appearance at this Sydney Spring International Festival of New Music recital.