ELISION Ensemble has announced its 2026 season, marking a monumental 40 years at the forefront of contemporary Australian music.

The Melbourne-based new music pioneer, led by Artistic Director Daryl Buckley, celebrates the occasion with a stacked calendar that includes an international tour, a collection of world-premiere works and a landmark Sydney restaging of a 30-year-old opera by frequent ELISION collaborator and Australian compositional luminary Liza Lim.

ELISION Ensemble. Photo supplied

ELISION kicks off the celebrations with The Big Birthday Tour, taking three different programs to Melbourne Recital Centre, Sydney’s Phoenix Central Park and Perth’s Callaway Music Auditorium (20–24 February).

The Melbourne performance features world premieres from rising Australian composer Victor Arul, Liza Lim and Icelandic composer Einar Torfi Einarsson, while the Sydney and Perth performances include works by American composers and ELISION associates Aaron Cassidy and Evan Johnson, as well as Lim.

In April, the ensemble is Europe-bound for a tour across the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden (the latter, for the first time). With an apperance at the Klangbrücken Festival and a performance in Gothenburg Cathedral, ELISION has programmed some European gems and a huge list of brand-new works by Australian composers Charlie Sdraulig, Kate Milligan and Richard Barrett, Iranian-born Golnaz Shariatzadeh and German-based Jakob Lerch and Zampia Betty Mavropoulou.

ELISION’s international connections continue in late June with a multi-arts installation project, hosted by the Akademie der Künste Berlin alongside the scenic River Spree. Created as part of Lim’s five-year ARC Laureate Fellowship, the ensemble performs two brand-new works: Lim’s site-specific installation K{(no)t]w}, The Knot of no and not now for double bass and aeolian instruments and the installation version of Kate Milligan’s Rivurtext.

Returning home in July, ELISION marks its 40th anniversary with Tailor of Time, a birthday celebration at Melbourne Recital Centre. Under the baton of British conductor Clement Power, ELISION serves up Richard Barrett’s elsewhen, the Australian premiere of Milligan’s Great Dog! and Lim’s The Tailor of Time, a half-hour work inspired by Sufi poet Rumi’s writings about time, repetition and paradox.

Liza Lim at Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Photo © Fiona Wolf/University of Sydney

ELISION also joins forces with Sydney Chamber Opera to stage the Sydney premiere of Lim’s first opera, The Oresteia, 33 years after its debut. Written when she was 24, the seven-part work premiered in 1993 in a sold-out Melbourne production directed by Barrie Kosky, who also co-wrote the libretto with Lim. Drawing on the poetry of Sappho and Aeschylus’s Ancient Greek trilogy of tragedies, the work unravels the many threads of memory – psychological, collective and societal. The Oresteia will arrive at Carriageworks for five performances in July and August, directed by Imara Savage and conducted by Jack Symonds.

ELISION’s season closer for 2026 sees the conclusion of the ensemble’s three-year residency at the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM). It says goodbye with two different programs on 14 and 18 September. The first, Sorcerer, takes its name from Richard Barrett’s work for pedal steel guitar (which will have its premiere during ELISION’s 2026 performance in Berlin), while Silent Noise features a brand-new work from Barrett and a dive into German Modernism with Helmut Lachenmann’s Mouvement (– vor der Erstarrung), which translates as Movement (– before freezing).

More about ELISION Ensemble and its 2026 season can be found here.