Profiles
Marios Joannou Elia (*1978) studied composition with Adriana Hoelszky at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and with Klaus Huber in Basel as well as musicology in Vienna. For being the best student at Mozarteum the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture honored him with a special grant award. He has been engaged as artistic and scientific assistant at Mozarteum.
Numerous institutions such as the A.G. Leventis Foundation Paris, the European Centre for the Arts Dresden, the Hinrichsen Foundation London, the Allianz Cultural Foundation Munich, the Akademie Schloss Solitude Stuttgart, the Art Foundation Baden-Wuerttemberg, the Berlin Academy of Arts, the Hanne Darboven Foundation Hamburg and the Federal Chancellor of Austria have awarded Elia’s work.
Elias’ international success began in 2002 when the Cambridge University new music society has premiered his work With a pair of scissors and thousand threads. With Antidoron he has won the Witold Lutoslawski Award in Warsaw in 2004. Other prizes include the BMW Patronize Award of the Musica Viva (Munich), the Austrian Prize ‘Recherche’ for composition, the Edison Denisov Prize (Moscow), the Kazimierz Serocki Prize and the PWM Edition’s Special Prize (Warsaw), the Sun River Composition Prize in Chengdu (China) and the Audience Prize of the Music Today festival in Seoul. In 2007 Elia was awarded the Theodor-Koerner-Fonds Composition Prize and lauded by the Federal President of the Republic of Austria at the Hofburg Imperial Palace in Vienna.
Marios Joannou Elia's compositional work comprises compositions of a wide range of genres and instrumentation, from theater play till opera/music theatre, multimedia and event culture, instrumental and vocal works, inclusion of electronic media and an expansion of the musical material through unusual acoustic and optical elements.
His stage works have been produced by the Stuttgart State Opera, the Hanover State Opera, the Macedonian Opera and Ballet in Skopje, the Rampe Theatre Stuttgart, the Toihaus Theatre Salzburg, the Central Theatre in Salzburg etc.
Elia's music has been commissioned and performed widely in important festivals and concert halls like the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, the Warsaw Philharmonic Hall, the Festival Hall in Hellerau (Dresden), the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ (Amsterdam), the Millenáris-Teatrum (Budapest), the Koendori Classics (Tokyo), the Kumho Art Hall (Seoul), the Auditorio Público de Abogados (Buenos Aires), the ACMI (Melbourne), the Jerez Teatro Hinojosa (Mexico) and the Qi bai Shi Museum in Xiangtan (China).