Genevieve Lacey

Genevieve Lacey stands among the rare Australian recorder players to earn worldwide recognition, having solicited new pieces from an array of international composers while compiling an extensive catalog of recordings, joint projects, solo recitals, and leadership roles in Australian arts organizations.

Born in Papua New Guinea in 1972, she began playing the recorder at five. Her family relocated to Melbourne in 1980 and subsequently settled in Ballarat, where she pursued studies on piano and oboe alongside the recorder. She completed her higher education in recorder performance at the University of Melbourne, the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland, and the Carl Nielsen Academy of Music in Denmark. Her first major break arrived in 1999 when she substituted for an indisposed violin soloist during a performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons by the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, which later invited her on a European tour in 2001.

Lacey has requested and introduced compositions by leading figures such as Estonia’s Erkki-Sven Tüür, Australia’s Elena Kats-Chernin, Peter Sculthorpe, and Paul Grabowsky, Britain’s John Surman, Austria’s Christian Fennesz, Iceland’s Ben Frost, and the American Nico Muhly. She has gained particular notice for curating inventive festivals and installations through her artistic directorships, among them the 2015 project The Acoustic Life of Sheds and the 2016 sound installation Pleasure Garden, which incorporated music by Jacob van Eyck. Both undertakings yielded recordings issued on Australia’s ABC Classics label, one of more than ten albums she has made for the company. In 2018 she recorded Tüür’s Illuminatio for Ondine.

She has composed and documented over a dozen pieces for recorder and electronics, along with an adaptation of selected Vivaldi works titled Il flauto dolce that she captured in 2001 with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra. Among her 2018 engagements was a term as artist-in-residence at the Melbourne Recital Centre.