Brian Elias studied at London’s Royal College of Music with Humphrey Searle and Bernard Stevens and privately with Elisabeth Lutyens.
Brian was born in Bombay (Mumbai) and lived there until the age of thirteen.
His ballet The Judas Tree won an Olivier Award for Best New Dance Work and an International Emmy Award for Performing Arts.
Doubles was awarded the Best Orchestral prize at the 2010 British Composer Awards 2010 ‘Purely as psychodrama, The House is gripping. But what makes it really memorable is the clarity and vigour of Elias's orchestral writing. Humming throughout with perky rhythms, never cluttered, and full of imaginative ideas (including the 21st-century equivalent of the Pizzicato Polka), it struck me as among the best things that the 53-year old composer has penned.’ The Times (2002).
The bold and dazzlingly inventive The House That Jack Built – inspired by the rumbustiousness, games and jeers of the playground – is coupled with the elaborate, intense Doubles (a large orchestral work commissioned by the BBC Symphony Orchestra) and A Talisman, for bass-baritone and small orchestra which is based upon Hebrew text inscribed on a silver 19th century amulet - intended to protect against the Evil Eye - which was given to Elias's mother in 1969 by her uncle, whose family emigrated from Kurdistan to Bombay in the middle of the 19th century.
16th October 2011
“These substantial, gutsy yet fastidious pieces, written between 2001 and 2009, attest a formidable mastery of the orchestra. Their manner and content are mostly turbulent, their craft imperturbable...The performances bring out the rich dark colours of Elias’s imagination.”
29th September 2011
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“Elias is a wonderfully accomplished orchestral composer; every bar of these works has a sense of rightness, of every gesture and every texture being heard exactly as the composer conceived it, and there's an energy to much of the writing that gives it buoyancy and sparkle.”
