Australia Ensemble
The Australia Ensemble, resident at the University of New South Wales since its founding in 1980, is widely recognised as Australia’s leading chamber music ensemble. Seven principal instrumentalists form its core, joined by guests for standard repertoire and unusual combinations.
The Australia Ensemble lives up to its name on tour at home and abroad. It has appeared in every Australian state for Musica Viva and other presenters, and at the Adelaide Festival, the Festival of Sydney and the Barossa Festival.
International touring has been regular since 1982, with performances in the USA, the UK, the Soviet Union, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, Poland, New Zealand, Japan, China, India, South America and South Korea. In 1988 it made three overseas tours as Bicentenary events; the following year it was the featured group at the Hong Kong Festival of the Arts. It played a major role in the 1994 Adelaide Festival and, that October and November, toured to Vienna, Kaufbeuren, Halle, Dresden and Paris.
Australia Ensemble is featured on the following titles
Le Tango Perpetuel
Ian Munro, superb pianist and imaginative composer, turns piano masterworks into chamber colour for the Australia Ensemble. The disc also preserves a rare late performance by tenor Gerald English in Satie’s Sports et Divertissements.
Merry-Go-Round
Australia's foremost chamber group meets one of the country's most engaging composers. Martin Wesley-Smith draws on politics (East Timor, Afghanistan), Lewis Carroll, and personal tributes to Don Banks and Peter Platt.
Mozart & Brahms: The Clarinet Quintets
Catherine McCorkill joins the Australia Ensemble for two pillars of the clarinet chamber repertoire: Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581, on basset clarinet, and Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet, Op. 115.
Shostakovich
Two of Shostakovich's most powerful and popular chamber works, given hair-raising performances by Australia's finest chamber ensemble.
Incredible Floridas
Two of Australia's finest chamber works by one of its leading composers. Richard Meale shows two major strands of his style: the coruscating drama of Incredible Floridas, a homage to Rimbaud, and the more harmonically romantic String Quartet No. 2.
Mozart: The Wind Quartets
The Australia Ensemble, with Geoffrey Collins (flute) and David Nuttall (oboe), play Mozart’s four flute quartets and the Oboe Quartet. The recording was the Recommended Performance in the 1995 Gramophone Good CD Guide.
Schubert
Schubert's best-loved chamber works: the great String Quintet in C and The Shepherd on the Rock, played by The Australia Ensemble with guest artists Jennifer Bates (soprano) and David Pereira (cello).
Café Concertino
The Australia Ensemble, Australia's foremost chamber group and in residence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, presents commissioned and core Australian chamber works.
Australia Ensemble also appears on
Musica Viva: 60th Anniversary, Selected Commissions 1975–2004
This disc marks sixty years of Musica Viva Australia’s work commissioning Australian chamber music. Since 1945 the organisation had helped bring nearly a hundred new works into being, building a distinctive national repertoire. A full list of those commissions is included with the CD.
Raft Song at Sunrise: Chamber Music, Vol. 2
Following the best-selling first volume of Ross Edwards’s chamber music (TP051), this disc gathers some of his most enduring works, recorded here for the first time.
An Australian Collection
Nineteen tracks drawn from the Tall Poppies catalogue, chosen to show the range and depth of Australian composition and performance across the label’s first decade.
Onomatopoeia
Long-awaited performances of Nigel Westlake’s most acclaimed chamber works, with outstanding Australian players. One of Tall Poppies’ most successful releases.
Carl Vine: Chamber Music, Vol. 1
A first gathering of Carl Vine's chamber works from the 1980s. Intelligence, wit and feeling sit side by side, played by leading Australian musicians, many of them in pieces written for them.
Members of Australia Ensemble
Geoffrey Collins
Geoffrey Collins’s flute has been the voice of much new Australian chamber music. His playing moves from buoyant Mozart quartets to driving Vine sonatas, dreamy Boyd and Westlake colours, and solo works written for him that treat the instrument without cliché.
Nigel Westlake
Westlake has played in fusion bands and soundtrack sessions, with Australia’s leading instrumental groups, and as a soloist with orchestras and classical ensembles in Australia and in major cities worldwide, from London and Paris to Tokyo, Beijing and New York.
Dene Olding
Australian violinist Dene Olding brings refined, expressive tone and sure intonation to chamber music that ranges from Schubert’s great C major Quintet to the full span of Peter Sculthorpe’s string quartets and new Australian scores.
Irena Morozov
Irena Morozov's viola anchors the Australia Ensemble's chamber sound across Australian commissions, Schubert's C major Quintet and Nigel Westlake's Antarctica film score, holding the middle voices with poise and warmth.
David Pereira
David Pereira is an Australian classical cellist, teacher and composer, born in Macksville, New South Wales, in 1953. He has premiered many concertos and solo works written for him by Australian composers, and served as principal cellist of the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
David Bollard
David Bollard is a New Zealand-born classical pianist who has made his career in Australia as a performer, teacher and adjudicator. He was a founding member of the Australia Ensemble from 1980 until 1998.
Dimity Hall
Dimity Hall's violin is the quiet force inside the Australia Ensemble and Goldner String Quartet: refined tone locked with Dene Olding, chamber playing that can turn Schubert unearthly and Sculthorpe fierce without ever raising its voice for effect.
Julian Smiles
Julian Smiles's cello underpins the Goldner String Quartet's complete Sculthorpe cycle and the Australia Ensemble's chamber recordings, from Schubert's String Quintet and Shostakovich's Piano Quintet and Trio to the Mozart and Brahms clarinet quintets.