Since forming in 2012, 12 Ensemble have resolutely followed their own musical path. Max Ruisi and Eloisa-Fleur Thom, the artistic directors of this pioneering string collective, talk to Stephen Moss
If you were making your first disc, what would its centrepiece be? You could go the popular route – something safe and universally loved that would guarantee you an audience – or you could opt for the urgent, keening sounds of Lutosławski’s Musique funèbre, the Polish composer’s homage to Bartók, completed in 1958. UK-based string group 12 Ensemble opted for the latter for their debut disc, Resurrection, in 2018, and that choice exemplifies the ambition and confidence of their music making. They do things entirely their own way and, at a time when classical music often feels battered and defensive, prefer to go on the attack.
I meet their joint artistic directors Max Ruisi and Eloisa-Fleur Thom at the offices of their record label, Platoon, in the middle of a hipsterish set of studios in north London. Platoon is owned by Apple Music (which also recently bought Swedish label BIS), and a lot of the confidence of this enterprise comes from the fact that cash is not in short supply. Money doesn’t just talk, it can also help you explore less well-trodden areas of the repertoire and present your findings with total self-belief.
Max Ruisi is a cellist, a product of a prodigious musical family (one brother, Roberto, was appointed leader of the Hallé Orchestra in 2022; another, Alessandro, is first violin of the Ruisi Quartet). Eloisa-Fleur Thom is a violinist. 12 Ensemble are proudly conductorless and seek to reach decisions collaboratively, but Ruisi and Thom are the artistic brain of the group, running the show from their flat in Hackney, life partners as well as musical partners.
Their latest release, Metamorphosis, is on the surface positively crowd-pleasing compared with the Lutosławski. Its cornerstone, as the album’s name suggests, is Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, his work for 23 solo strings – 12 Ensemble naturally have to grow a little to play it. But the truly revelatory performance on the disc is of the late Canadian composer Claude Vivier’s Zipangu, a work for 13 strings written in 1980. It is quite extraordinary: astringent, discordant, at times terrifying (and hard to divorce from the self-destructive composer’s tragic life story – he was murdered by a young hustler in Paris in 1983), yet, as you listen more closely, strangely alluring. ‘Once you attune your ears,’ Ruisi says, ‘it’s straight-
