Biography

The Australian recorder virtuosa Genevieve Lacy has become one of the few Australian players of her instrument to achieve international stature, commissioning works from composers worldwide while notching a strong record of recordings, collaborations, solo performances, and artistic directorships at home. Lacey was born in 1972 in Papua New Guinea. She took up the recorder at age five. In 1980 her family moved to Melbourne and then to the inland city of Ballarat, where she took piano and oboe lessons, as well as studying recorder. Her university training on recorder took place at the University of Melbourne; the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, in Switzerland; and the Carl Nielsen Academy of Music in Denmark. Her break as a performer came when she filled in for an ill violin soloist in a 1999 performance of Vivaldi's Four Seasons by the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra; she went on to tour Europe with the group two years later. Lacey has commissioned and premiered works from a diverse group of top-rank composers including Estonia's Erkki-Sven Tüür; Australia's Elena Kats-Chernin, Peter Sculthorpe and Paul Grabowsky; John Surman of the U.K.; Christian Fennesz (Austria); Ben Frost (Iceland); and the American Nico Muhly. She has been especially noted for shaping a wide variety of innovative festivals and musical events in artistic directorships, including 2015's The Acoustic Life of Sheds and the 2016 sound installation Pleasure Garden, featuring music by Jacob van Eyck. Recordings based on both those projects are among Lacey's more than ten recordings for Australia's ABC Classics. In 2018 she recorded Tüür's Illuminatio for Ondine. Lacey has also written and recorded more than a dozen works for recorder and electronics, as well as an arrangement of various Vivaldi works called Il flauto dolce, which she recorded in 2001 with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra. Her activities in 2018 included an artist-in-residence stint at the Melbourne Recital Centre.