Greg Dikmans

Greg Dikmans is a first-generation Australian of Dutch and Swiss parents. A virtuoso of the baroque flute and recorder, and a conductor, educator and scholar, he has been at the forefront of the Early Music movement in Australia since graduating with a Bachelor of Music degree from Sydney University. He is recognised internationally for research on early seventeenth-century recorder music and the performance practice of eighteenth-century French flute music, work for which La Trobe University awarded him a Master of Arts. He has continued that inquiry into French performance practice toward a PhD at the University of Melbourne.

In 1984 he returned to Australia after two years’ study in Belgium and the Netherlands, supported by a Churchill Fellowship and an Australia Council grant. At the Royal Conservatorium in Brussels he received the Diploma in Baroque flute with first prize; his teacher there was the world-renowned Bartholt Kuijken.

He is most widely known as artistic director of the Elysium Ensemble, which he founded in 1985. Through its annual Melbourne concert series and numerous national broadcasts for ABC-FM and 3MBS-FM, the ensemble has built a reputation for exciting, authoritative performances of Baroque and early Classical music.

Greg has performed extensively throughout Australia for Musica Viva and State Arts Councils, and in South-East Asia (for the Department of Foreign Affairs) and Europe. He has made numerous radio and television broadcasts and recorded for Move, including Breath of Creation (MD 3163) and, with the Elysium Ensemble, The Bedroom of the King (MD 3184).

As a tutor and associate lecturer at several tertiary institutions he has taught baroque flute and recorder, history and theory, and performance practice, and has directed Renaissance and Baroque ensembles.