2026 is a year of big birthdays … which means it’s also shaping up to be a wonderfully busy year of activities and performances. I turn 50, and my longtime friends and collaborators ELISION turn 40 ( … and, in my personal world, my wife turns 40 as well, my dad turns 75 … ), so there’s plenty of celebrating to be done. Traveling, concerts, conducting, premieres, retrospectives—a nice way to spend a year.
First, some recent news:
Turgut Erçetin’s new portrait CD on Wergo (Podium Gegenwart/Deutscher Musikrat) was recently released. I contributed as a conductor on two of the five tracks on the disc, Thousand dead bodies under my bed, all cloaked with the breath of the living, which I recorded with Musikfabrik at the WDR Funkhaus in July 2021 in the depths of the pandemic period (masks, PCR test roulette every 48 hours), and Das Phonem zwischen zwei Wörtern (c), which I recorded with ELISION at Deutschlandfunk Köln in April 2024. The disc also includes contributions from the SWR Symphony Orchestra conducted by Brad Lubman (nice to be in such elevated company) and two further tracks from ELISION and Musikfabrik, and is, I have to say, really rather beautiful. Worth a listen. [Edit: it has also since been nominated on the longlist for the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik, which is a nice extra little bonus.]
At the moment my energies are mostly focused on a new violin sonata (yes, really), which I’m writing for my friends Harry Ward and Alex Waite. I’ve worked with Alex extensively over the last few years with various ELISION projects, most notably my Piano Concerto, which I wrote for him (and then re-wrote for him, and the re-re-wrote for him, more on which below), plus Self-Portrait, Three Times, Standing, which we’ve recorded and performed together now many times over the last several years, … and a pretty thrilling performance of Xenakis EONTA, which we performed last year in an ELISION/ANAM project and will reprise this April in Hannover, plus various other ELISION performances, premieres, and recordings over the years (Lim, Barrett, Erçetin, etc.). I’ve conducted with Harry twice in Liza Lim’s two violin concerti—Speak, Be Silent and Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus—with ELISION in recent years, and we see each other regularly at the Berlin Philharmonie, where he plays in the first violin section of the Berlin Philharmonic (and where I am, well, simply a SuperFan), and we occasionally run into one another here in Schöneberg, where we both live.
It’s a curious project. I really have set out to write a ‘sonata’, whatever that might mean a quarter of the way through the 21st century. It’s even in three movements (sort of—the movements overlap and intertwine and run more or less simultaneously across the work’s 17-or-so minutes, constantly melting into one another), and, perhaps most strangely, it’s ‘based on’ (sort of) the Brahms G Major violin sonata, the so-called Regensonate, drawing in particular on some of the formal and behavioral principles in the Brahms that I find particularly interesting (spinning, transforming, meandering, repurposing …), plus has some links to the underlying introspective, plaintive, wistful, understated character of the Brahms. It’s part of a larger recent project exploring some new ways of thinking about and designing form(s), which I’ve discussed extensively in my various “Material is a verb. Form is a fluid.” guest lectures over the last few years, but this ups the ante a bit, attempting to take those methods and embed them in a larger multi-movement structure that is itself also liquid and shapeshifting.
The piece is scheduled to be finished sometime in the summer, for a planned premiere in autumn 2026.
And … there are two projects that I completed in recent months that will receive their premieres in the first half of 2026:
25. April ‘05, the new bassoon piece commissioned by James Aylward that I finished over the summer, will have three performances scattered across Europe in February and March. The piece is a companion piece to 27. Juni 2009, the E-flat clarinet solo I wrote for Carl Rosman during the pandemic … for which, incidentally, a wonderful video has been published from the premiere (below). The pieces are based on small overpainted photographs by Gerhard Richter, and, like the two Self-Portrait quartets from 2018 & 2019, are, in effect, mirror images of one another.
I’m particularly excited (relieved, even?) about the premiere of the revised (and re-revised) version of the Piano Concerto (2021–23; rev. 2023–25), which will have its first outing during a two-concert residency by ELISION at HMTM-Hannover (our first guest ensemble in a five-year ‘Incontri Ensemble-in-Residence’ program funded by the VolkswagenStiftung) as part of the Klangbrücken Festival in April 2026. I spent many months at the end of 2023, following the premiere in Melbourne, making extensive revisions to the piece, … but it still somehow wasn’t quite right, still not quite good enough … so I again spent several months in the summer/autumn this year going even further, rewriting whole layers of material, writing even more solo piano material (I discovered only when making the parts that Alex is active in all but two systems in a 22-minute piece), writing extensive transitional passages to smooth over some of the rough sectional edges, redoing how some of the instrumental groups interact with one another in the form (pulling some things into alignment, being more rigorous about some chordal material in the ensemble writing and its interaction with chordal material in the piano solo, reinforcing the ‘concentric circles’ aspect of the relationship between the piano, the plucked/struck/electronics quartet, and the hazy resonance from the other two chamber ensembles, etc.), plus continuing to fix things that never quite spoke in the way I wanted them to, or that I just didn’t particularly like, or in the worst cases that I found sort of embarrassing. And of course I continued to tweak the electronics, as one does.
In general, the aim was to make the piece more fluid, more linear and transformational, and to somehow to make the form feel a bit more inevitable and intentional, so that we ‘stumble into’ new material, and so that the shift towards the more ‘poignant’ material towards the end is a bit more gradual and emergent. It was a massive project, and frankly quite exhausting and more than a little bit humiliating, but I think it’s now a significantly better piece. I’m really pleased that we have a chance to get it out into the world. (There will also be a recording. Watch this space.)
The Klangbrücken concerts are part of a little flurry of conducting activity with ELISION connected to their Spring 2026 European tour, which is itself part of their extensive 40th birthday celebrations that are spread across the year. My contributions to the two Klangbrücken concerts include conducting works by Liza Lim, Iannis Xenakis (both of which also incorporating the HMTMH student performers of Ensemble Incontri), Charlie Sdraulig (wp), Evan Johnson (wp), Jakob Lerch (wp), and Betty Zampia Mavropolou (wp). The concerts also include works by Mateo Servián Sforza, Kate Milligan, Julio Estrada, and Cat Hope. After the residency in Hannover we travel to Sweden for a few concerts that will include Self-Portrait, Three Times, Standing (15.3.1991–20.3.1991), in Gothenburg and Vara.
ELISION’s 40th birthday celebrations also provide a platform for a wave of performances, again by Carl Rosman, of 27. Juni 2009 during a little Australian tour in February (with a nice little coincidence that the clarinet solo and bassoon solo from this collection will be performed on the same day on opposite sides of the planet on 22 February). … And then there’s a little birthday concert planned here in Berlin on 30 June, the night before my actual birthday, details to be confirmed soon.
Given these intertwining birthdays and anniversaries, it’s worth taking a quick moment to acknowledge just how central ELISION has been to my work over the last 20 years. The first direct links were in early 2005, when Daryl Buckley first invited me to write two pieces (one for him, one for the group), which then also led to a prompt to finish an old unfinished solo voice piece, though there are personal connections to several of the players that go back to 2002. My first visit to work with them as a composer was for two performances in Melbourne in 2007, during which we also did the first round of creative development sessions for the new ensemble piece. In 2008 they presented a portrait concert of my work at the old ABC Ferry Road studios in Brisbane. And then things snowballed fairly quickly from there. There have been 23 pieces of mine that they’ve commissioned, premiered, or performed, and I’ve long since lost track of the number of performances of my work that they’ve given—I think it’s probably close to 100 by now, across 11 countries. We’ve made seven CDs together, plus another few where I’ve contributed as a producer. I’ve been conducting with them on and off since 2013, and that has ramped up fairly significantly in the last 3-4 years, which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. They are collaborators, instigators, partners in crime … and they’ve been endlessly supportive and open and enthusiastic as I’ve meandered through various compositional experiments that—to be blunt—virtually every other collection of performers in our field would have rejected.
But most importantly, they’ve become good friends. It’s a fascinating group of people, full of wildly intimidating talent and intelligence, but also rather a lot of charm, playfulness, silliness, openness, curiosity, and general camaraderie. Our time together is always principally marked by extremely intense and dedicated music-making, of course, but it’s also just as likely to include a long group jog, a trip to a museum, blisteringly spicy Thai food, or a night out sampling esoteric whiskeys. There are always funny stories that accumulate around every project, particularly on the international tours, which slowly get added to the group’s evolving mythology, passed down through the generations of performers.
It’s been a delight—an utter privilege—to get to be a part of it for the last few decades. And I’m very much looking forward to this upcoming year of fun together. Congrats to Daryl and the whole gang, past and present, for 40 extraordinary years. Long may it continue.
Various additional projects, performances, radio broadcasts, and other details are below.
Performances
Carlos Cordeiro, clarinet. Hochschule für Musik und Theater Leipzig, Germany. 5 December 2025. The wreck of former boundaries (solo clarinet)
James Aylward, bassoon. Madrid, Spain. 3 February 2026. 25. April ‘05 (wp)
ELISION (Carl Rosman, E-flat clarinet). Melbourne Recital Centre, Salon. 20 February 2026. 27. Juni 2009
James Aylward, bassoon. Amsterdam, Plein Theater, Amsterdam, Netherlands. 22 February 2026. 25. April ‘05
ELISION (Carl Rosman, E-flat clarinet). Phoenix Cultural Centre, Sydney. 22 February 2026. 27. Juni 2009
ELISION (Carl Rosman, E-flat clarinet). Callaway Music Auditorium, University of Western Australia, Perth. 24 February 2026. 27. Juni 2009
James Aylward, bassoon. Cologne, Germany. 7 March 2026. 25. April ‘05
ELISION (Aaron Cassidy, cond.). Klangbrücken Festival, Richard Jakoby Saal, Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover. 16 April 2026. Piano Concerto (wp, revised version)
ELISION (Aaron Cassidy. cond.) Vara Konserthus, Vara, Sweden. 20 April 2026. Self-Portrait, Three Times, Standing (15.3.1991- 20.3.1991)
ELISION (Aaron Cassidy. cond.) Gothenburg Cathedral, Sweden. 21 April 2026. Self-Portrait, Three Times, Standing (15.3.1991- 20.3.1991)
Conducting
Conductor, ELISION & Ensemble Incontri. Klangbrücken Festival, Richard Jakoby Saal, Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover. Work by Liza Lim, Aaron Cassidy, Jakob Lerch (wp), Charlie Sdraulig (wp), Evan Johnson (wp), Betty Zampia Mavropolou (wp), and Iannis Xenakis. 16 & 17 April 2026
Conductor, ELISION Ensemble. Vara Konserthus, Vara, Sweden. 20 April 2026
Conductor, ELISION Ensemble. Gothenburg Cathedral, Sweden. 21 April 2026
Current projects
sonata for violin and piano (in progress). For Harry Ward and Alex Waite
Other events will be added as details are confirmed.