About
The Hourglass Ensemble is a Sydney-based group of elite chamber musicians and soloists whose mission is to enjoy playing the best music with the best performers at the highest level, and to draw in an audience with a large range of experience with contemporary music to understand new artistic worlds. Their unique expertise is in blending new and unusual combinations of woodwind, with strings, voice, percussion, piano, actors and designers, exploring timbral possibilities of familiar groupings, focusing on commissioning, premiering and recording Australian composers, and exporting works from their homeland to the world.
The group returned from a highly successful debut tour of Poland, Switzerland, Germany and Austria in 2017, and are about to release their first two EPs. They'll return to Europe and add North America to their audience in 2018.
Hourglass was born in 2015 from the manifesto of artistic director Andrew Kennedy– to play new and recent music that an audience will be able to enjoy and understand on first hearing, to deformalise the concert experience to make it less abstract and threatening, and to give the uninitiated listener an explicit guide to accessing the art music world. Following that philosophy, the group has explored a diverse repertoire from unaccompanied solo pieces to well-loved late Romantic pieces, to re-imagined twentieth-century classics, to brand new chamber opera and Australian-themed song cycles.