ELISION Ensemble - Critical Acclaim

Critical Acclaim

" … an uncompromisingly radical attitude to the presentation of the music, treating each piece as a score for a total art work, involving installation artists to design the sets for their performances and taking their audiences on a journey, not only through the music but through the performance space itself."

"ELISION has gone the distance and established itself not only as one of Australia's finest contemporary music ensembles but as an ensemble of international standing …"

"Elision is a unique venture with a wonderful record of explorations of cross-cultural and intermedia composition and performance, engagements with architecture, medicine and science, and enjoys a capacity to develop unique and successful international collaborations. It has changed the face of Australian music, not only in its support for talented composers and musicians, but in ways of presenting music for new audiences. Elision has also cleverly developed an international market for its work by commissioning composers from other countries and by partnering overseas ensembles in productions. It has achieved a remarkable touring record."

"Conventional people may choose to stay at home."

"Chris Dench (b. 1953) has become a part of the musical life of Australia, as has Richard Barrett (b. 1959) in works written for the Elision ensemble, whose splendiferous range of colours (with a prominent tuned percussion centre, including angklung, mandolin and guitar, as well as full stretches of winds and strings) has produced a kind of sensuous complexity that may be uniquely Australian."

"What we need is the regular chance to see the other greats of new music—Frankfurt's Ensemble Modern, Paris's Ensemble Intercontemporain, Klangforum Wien, Amsterdam's Ives Ensemble, Australia's ELISION Ensemble—to experience other ways of interpreting the greats of the 20th and 21st centuries, and to hear their unique performance practices at the cutting edge."

"From time to time one still comes across the idea that modernist music, by its very nature, is ugly and inexpressive, and that the newly tuneful composers of the last couple of decades have saved the art from going down some blind alley. If evidence were needed to counter that notion, a recent CD of solo works by Brian Ferneyhough (Etcetera KTC 1206), played by the extraordinary musicians of the Australian group Elision, would do the trick."