Brooke Green
Brooke Green writes and arranges for soprano and viols, folding Renaissance song into new consort music that carries Dorothy Porter, boatpeople laments and forgotten Australian histories into dark, close-voiced shimmer.
As director of Josie and the Emeralds she builds programmes where Gibbons, Dowland and Morley sit beside her own work and her reinventions of Edwards, Kats-Chernin and Pandolfo. Bone Burning Tunes sets Porter with long lines and unsettled harmony; The Shades rides a Joplin-like tread into stranger chords and took the audience prize at an international competition for new viol music. Travelling to the Question waltzes with Hildegard and harder questions. Later pieces for voice, viols and theorbo chase the phoenix theme of rising after sorrow, from Mungo Lady to detention stories and uppity women of myth, and she completes a lost Stevenson set of Misereres by restoring the missing trebles. The sound is intimate, plucked and bowed, built for late listening and for music that still wants to move the listener.
Performing as Josie and the Emeralds
Josie and the Emeralds is a Sydney early-music ensemble founded in 2011, uniting soprano with viol consort in Renaissance song and new Australian writing for the viol.
The Emerald Phoenix
In 2014 Tall Poppies released The Emerald Leopard (TP233), with Brooke Green’s music for soprano and viols. The Emerald Phoenix presents her recent works for soprano, viols and theorbo, featuring Josie Ryan and bass violist Laura Vaughan.
The Emerald Leopard
Josie and the Emeralds pair acclaimed early-music soprano Josie Ryan with some of Australia’s finest viol players, the Emerald City Viols. Founded in 2011, the group is known for sophisticated performances and inventive programmes of Renaissance and contemporary works, including compositions and arrangements by director Brooke Green.
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Musica Viva: 60th Anniversary, Selected Commissions 1975–2004
This disc marks sixty years of Musica Viva Australia’s work commissioning Australian chamber music. Since 1945 the organisation had helped bring nearly a hundred new works into being, building a distinctive national repertoire. A full list of those commissions is included with the CD.