ELISION is Australia’s premier new music ensemble, an international ’supergroup’ whose 17-strong membership includes some of the world’s leading musicians. We live in Paris, Berlin, Bern, Stuttgart, Cologne, Los Angeles, Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne.
The ensemble has focussed its practice upon exploring and expanding musical possibilities; establishing an international reputation through engagement with complex and virtuosically challenging aesthetics, a unique instrumentarium, and work in cross-disciplinary artforms, providing inspiring models of collaboration and innovation. ELISION is especially acknowledged for its rare level of expertise and authoritative interpretations of the music of Liza Lim, Richard Barrett, Mary Bellamy, Aaron Cassidy, Evan Johnson, Turgut Erçetin and others.
Notable ELISION achievements include the presentation of eleven seasons of contemporary opera from composer Liza Lim with performances at the Opéra National de Paris, Hebbel Theatre Berlin, Fomenko Theatre Moscow and the Saitama Arts Theatre of Japan; the premiere of five major cycles from Richard Barrett including CONSTRUCTION – a two-hour cycle commissioned by the European Capital of Culture programme; and the 2024 performance of Turgut Erçetin’s Das Phonem zwischen zwei Wörtern (b) for four ELISION soloists with the SWR Orchestra.
Over fifty tours to twenty-two different countries ELISION has commissioned approximately 800 new works, including repertoire classics such as Liza Lim’s Mother Tongue, co-commissioned with the Ensemble Intercontemporain and Festival d’Automne à Paris. ELISION has also joined with leading groups Ensemble Modern (Frankfurt), CIKADA (Oslo), Line Upon Line (Austin) and MusikFabrik (Köln) for large-scale projects. Conductors worked with include Jean Deroyer, Franck Ollu, Christian Eggen, Manuel Nawri, Simon Hewett, Denis Cohen, Carl Rosman, Pierre-André Valade and Eugene Ughetti. Of singular importance to ELISION was the relationship with Italian conductor Sandro Gorli, established in the early 1990’s, which led to him becoming a resident conductor for the ensemble for the better part of that decade.
ELISION has performed at the Berlin Philharmonie, Saitama Arts Theatre Tokyo, Pompidou Centre, Sydney Opera House, Queensland Art Gallery, and Vienna Konzerthaus; at festivals such as Wien Modern, Maerzmusik, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Festival Ars Musica of Brussels, Züricher TheaterSpektakel, the 50th Warsaw Autumn Festival, Ultima Oslo, TRANSIT Leuven, Spitalfields London, the Chekov International Theatre Festival Moscow, and Festival d’Automne à Paris. These engagements complement two decades of major appearances at the Brisbane, Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide Festivals with long-form installation and mixed media works (including Lim and de Clario Bardo’i-thos-grol; Barrett and CROW Opening of the Mouth; Rodgers & Cooper Tulp; Lim operas (Moon Spirit Feasting, The Navigator) supported by the Australia Council’s Major Festivals Initiative, as well as feature concerts (including John Zorn and also John Rodgers for Adelaide Festival). Other significant collaborations include work with Indonesian artist Heri Dono and Australians, Justine Cooper, Judith Wright and Judy Watson.
The group’s discography extends to twenty-two compact discs including recordings made at the Deutschlandfunk Köln, Radio Bremen and BBC Maida Vale Studios for release on HCR, KAIROS, NEOS, NMC, WERGO and MODE, reviewed to acclaim in Gramophone, The Wire, New York Times, the Sunday Times and BBC Music Magazine.
Main image: ELISION Ensemble onstage at the Melbourne Recital Centre, 2023 (photo Lauren Murphy)