Genevieve Lacey has taken the humble recorder to new heights through a career that has included collaborations with Paul Kelly and the Namatjira family. This week, she and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra are set to soar together in a show exploring the majesty of flight.

Recorder virtuoso Genevieve Lacey is not content with simply performing old repertoire written for her often-underrated instrument.

Instead, the Australian musician is known for her commissioning new compositions, for enthusiastically re-interpreting old works, and for her diverse collaborations – that have included everyone from Paul Kelly to the Namatjira family.

Her upcoming show with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra – Taking Flight – is no different. As well as performing in the program, she is responsible for conceiving of and curating it conceptually. We spoke with her ahead of this week’s show.

CityMag: Your artistic practice is hugely varied and goes well beyond performance, but even with your diversity the recorder is central to a lot of your work. What is it about this instrument that attracted you initially, and what about it keeps you engaged still?

Genevieve: I fell in love with the recorder as a child – my older brother played, and I needed to do whatever he was doing! He still plays too, but not professionally. I got hooked, and never gave it up. I love the recorder’s simplicity, its pure sound, the diamond-cut edges of its articulation, the direct, no-fuss way it speaks like an organ pipe: on or off. I love the feel of it taking flight in my hands. I love that in every culture, through many centuries, people have played wooden pipes, cousins of my recorders. It’s a traveller, a chameleon, and a stayer.

As well as performing as part of this show, you’re the curator of Taking Flight. What is the conceptual underpinning of the program, and why did you want to explore those ideas?

Recorders have been playing bird for centuries. Our classic repertoire is graced with nightingales, cuckoos, warblers of all types, and in the eighteenth century, recorders were used for the curious, dubious pursuit of teaching caged birds to sing human tunes!

About a decade ago, I realised that all my recorder birds were European. As an Australian, with a deep love of our land, this felt odd. So began a quiet mission to work with composers to ensure different kinds of birdsong would enter the recorder’s language. Nowadays, I also play magpies, grey thrushes, honeyeaters, Little Jackie Winter, and most recently, butcherbirds.

This concert takes us into the world of avian-inspired music. From Einojuhani Rautavaara’s chillingly beautiful Cantus Arcticus with its whooper swans, mud larks, and sound poems of a Scandinavian landscape, to Hollis Taylor’s Central Australian desertscapes, via Vivaldi’s concerto for a stratospherically high recorder, and Jean-Féry Rebel’s eighteenth-century creation story, this performance is a kind of listening reverie. A chance to wend your way through land, dream and air-scapes, in the spirit of Plato’s idea of music, “giving wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything”.

How does a specific piece of music from Taking Flight connect and express the concepts of the program?

For years, Hollis Taylor has been lovingly and forensically listening to butcherbirds, with months spent annually making field recordings of this feathered virtuoso of the outback. Two years ago, she offered me the extraordinarily generous gift of some solo pieces. They were so compelling that I asked her whether she’d consider a concerto. In this concert, you hear its premiere. Hollis incorporates beautiful environmental recordings into her piece, so evocative that you can feel the heat of some, smell the night air and open spaces of others. Alongside its celebration of this extraordinary bird and the landscapes it inhabits, Hollis’ piece hints at shadows and loss – these air-scapes are fragile.

You once told The Australian, in relation to interpreting and performing written music, that “to mistake the notation for the thing itself is a really grave error, I think”. What happens between page and performance to transform a piece of music?

Through the hours, weeks, months and years of work, the notes on the page get taken into fingers, ears, brains, dreams, life. You catch glimpses of phrases unawares out of the corner of your eye, while cooking dinner. You find yourself thinking about the timing of a section while watching leaves dance in the breeze in the back garden, and their seemingly random movement tells you something you hadn’t yet understood. Your mind makes connections and associations as you sleep. You talk with friends, with the composer. You read a novel and the lilt of a particular line reminds you of something you were trying to solve musically in that tricky bit in the middle of the piece. Life takes its course, and imprints itself into the score in unexpected ways. It comes alive with you, and becomes a frame through which you see, hear, and experience the world.

And in practical, collaborative terms, every composer I have ever worked with has changed the score while we have been rehearsing. Sometimes it’s been in small ways, often in huge, jaw dropping ones. Most composers are musicians with hypersensitive ears and brains. Standing in a room beside players, hearing the physical realities of a specific acoustic and particular bodies interacting and producing sound, perspective changes, and with it, the score does too. Working with composers, I know that what is left to history is incomplete, inaccurate, often something else entirely from what happened in performance. Music is alive, not something immutable, held down and static in the hieroglyphics on a page.

There’s a delightful list of people who are important to you on your website. As someone who is so deeply interested in collaborating, how do you find the experience of creating shows like Taking Flight where you need to connect quickly to work with a new orchestra on a new work?

That’s a whole different skill. It is actually possible to establish deep connections under the searing pressure of pace. Classically trained musicians do this all the time.

And in this instance, I have been working with Hollis Taylor for some years, so our conversation is well established. My musical relationship with Erkki-Sven Tuur is nearly a decade old now – he wrote another of the pieces on the program, for me. My relationship with Antonio Vivaldi is longer still  – I’ve been playing him since I was a teenager.

Jim Atkins – the sound engineer – and I have worked together for 15 years, and Paul Kildea, the conductor and I, are friends. So even though we only have days to rehearse this concert, the conversations and relationships that brought it to bear are long and deep. Add those to the excitement of meeting an orchestra for the first time, and hopefully we’ll get the best of both pace and contemplation.