NW Live Arts perform a fantastic melee of different types of music from different cultures interlaced with poetry readings exploring the meaning of ‘belonging’.

Attab Haddad oud
Christina McMaster piano
Antonio Romero percussion
Toby Carr lute, theorbo and Baroque guitar

While the musicians trace the history of the relationship between oud and lute, reimagine Bach, Satie and Ligeti in diverse ways and the whole ensemble sweeps us aways with jazz and improvisation, we consider in what kind of music an instrument belongs and how it can be transposed in a dialogue between cultures and genres. At the same time poets from Holborn Community Association and STAR students from Birkbeck University in dialogue with the musicians, bring us powerful and beautiful writing stimulated by the thought of ‘belonging’. NW Live Arts are working with writer, John Simmons from Bloomsbury based writing group 26 who has led and facilitated the creative writing workshops in preparation for this concert .

Running time: Approx 90 mins

Tickets: £12 (£10)

Brahms’ first Sonata for Violin and Piano in G major is an indescribably beautiful, warm composition, yet it is also bittersweet. A deep melancholy lies at the heart of the work, written in the wake of Felix Schumann’s death, 24-year-old son of Robert and Clara Schumann and Brahms’ godson. It is gorgeously lyrical, drawing its material from two earlier songs by Brahms. This trait is shared by Strauss’ heroic, ebullient, deeply romantic Sonata for Violin and Piano. It shares the key of E-flat major with the 2nd (and 3rd) movements of Brahms’ sonata, and programmed as such transfigures it into a defiantly joyful musical declaration. The deeply intimate slow movement threatens to sink into the dark territories of Brahms’ Sonata at the onset of the finale (a funeral march), but the fervour of the music wins out, bringing this programme to a thrilling, virtuosic close.

FREE – but pre-booking is essential

This concert will also be streamed on the Bloomsbury Festival youtube channel

The award-winning Amies Freedom Choir is an ensemble for female survivors of human trafficking to come together and sing. Directed by Adwoa Dickson with co-musical director Anna Samant, the choir meets weekly to sing, create, perform and make recordings. We focus on learning through singing; skills such as teamwork and confidence, in a supportive environment. The atmosphere is joyous and is a major element for participants to rebuild their lives and embrace new futures.

In 2020 the Amies Freedom Choir was awarded the prestigious Women of the Year Community Spirit Award and was widely praised in the media. It is one of many arts for social change projects run by Bloomsbury-based charity, Pan Intercultural Arts.

Funded originally by Youth Music it is now also supported by Arts Council England, The Maingot Trust and Lifelines International.

Tickets: FREE – but pre-booking is essential

British-Bengali band Khiyo will be joined on the stage by Sahana Bajpaie to perform an aray of songs from Bangladesh and India. They will perform their own compositions, songs by national poet of Bangladesh Kavi Nazrul Islam, Nobel-Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore as well as covers of songs from the independence movement that led to the creation of the nation of Bangladesh in 1971.

Tickets: £10 (£5 concs)

Journey through the history, culture and music of Ireland from early folk music juxtaposed with new works using modern technology. Music will include beautiful traditional folk melodies from across Ireland arranged for saxophone and harp. Alongside the traditional, three new works by John Buckley, Christopher Moriarty and Ian Wilson will feature. Each was commissioned by Robert Finegan for saxophone and electronics, based on the theme of ‘A Modern View of Ancient Ireland’.

Tickets: £8 (£6 concs)

Ten new piano pieces by ten composers from all around the globe. This recital of premieres comes with music inspired by modern times, folk traditions, soundtracks, and Latin rhythms. They will be performed by pianist, composer, and creative producer, Marisa Muñoz-López and accompanied by specially created illusions by magician Markhele.

Tickets: £5

In her multimedia exhibition Serenade on Skin (20 – 23 Oct), Tamar Geist challenges the traditional conventions of both art exhibition and classical-music recital by interweaving bodypainting works, live singing, and performance art.

Haunting, beautiful, tragic, mysterious: for centuries, Ophelia’s decline into ‘madness’ and her premature death have inspired countless painters, poets and composers; in this opening concert, Tamar inhabits the iconic character of Shakespeare’s Ophelia in an immersive performance of songs by Brahms, Strauss, Heggie and Gavrillin. The music intertwines with her ethereal paintings that use her own body as a canvas.

A trained classical-singer and actor, a choir-conductor and a painter, Tamar has always sought innovative practices to merge musical performance with visual-arts. During London’s 2nd lockdown she discovered body-painting and enthusiastically embraced it to her toolkit. The pandemic restrictions were the prompt which drove Tamar to create a one-woman-show from her dorms room, all crafted and executed single-handedly using a smartphone-camera and an iPad. By painting on herself and transforming to various characters from operas, poems, and plays, she was able to tell a multi-layered story using colours, sounds and movement.

This artistic fusion platform is also used by Tamar to further explore her Ph.D topic, which looks into the Jewish-Orthodox ban on female singing. The connecting thread between the displayed artworks in this exhibition are her attempt to find alternative ways to express her voice. This is one of three themed-recitals (which correspond with the displayed body-painting artworks) in which Tamar will explore stereotypes associated with the female voice, tell the story of silenced or historically neglected female characters, as well as try to challenge gender boundaries, and reclaim classical-music pieces that are traditionally performed by men.

Suitable for ages 16+

Tickets: £8 (£6)

The Beethoven Sonata 109 transports the listener to hitherto extraordinary realm of thought and imagination, with lyrical charm, structural grandeur and daring treatment of key relations. Liszt’s Petrach Sonnets are transcriptions of his own songs, inspired by the poetry of Italian Renaissance poet Francesca Petrarca. Each is a mediation on love itself. Within the Sonnet 104, Liszt compares and explains the unearthly origin of the will of feeling, and discovers the meaning of life, and love as a vital force.

Liszt’s transcriptions of Schubert’s songs, Auf dem Wasser zu singen (To be sung on the water), describes a scene on the water of a narrator who is in a boat, and the narrator’s reflections on the passing of time. Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel) is one of Schubert’s most famous lieder. The piano mimics the whirr of the spinning wheel, the treadle pedal, and reflects Gretchen’s agitated thoughts and loss of peace as she thinks about Faust. The passionate and stormy Liszt Transcendental Etude in F minor concludes the recital.

FREE – but pre-booking is essential

This concert will also be streamed on the Bloomsbury Festival youtube channel

This recital will feature a varied programme of 17th and 18th century folk music from across the UK, Ireland, and central Europe, paired with contemporary music in the folk idiom. From the music of the early Irish blind harpers and songs of the 17th century French court, to original compositions by the performers, it promises to be a thought provoking blend of old and new. Nobody’s Jig will be joined on the night by special guest, flautist Eimear McGeown.

Nobody’s Jig are Victoria Hodgkinson (voice), Sergio Bucheli (lute) and Tara Viscardi (harp).

Running time: Approx 60 mins

Tickets: £12 (£10)

Three very different approaches to the search for spirituality in song with Debussy’s Ariettes oubliées, Schönberg’s Four songs Op.2 and Barber’s Hermit Songs.

FREE – but pre-booking is essential

This concert will also be streamed on the Bloomsbury Festival youtube channel

Due to circumstances beyond our control this event has been cancelled.

The multimedia exhibition Serenade on Skin (20 – 23 Oct) by Tamar Geist will still take place.

This concert marks the culmination of Ensemble Matters’ yearlong preparation around their theme of the year, “Shades of Light”. The programme boasts three world premieres in response to the theme.

The night begins with Tristan Murail’s Thirteen Colours of the Setting Sun (1978), a work that explores the successive shades of the setting sun from “incandescent bursts to the progressive removal of light intensity”. In similar spirit, Amy Crankshaw’s composition, Golden Hour, musicalises the natural environment, exploring the sonic equivalent of how changing light affects one’s perception of the surrounding environment in particular.

On a metaphorical level, Katabasis, a short film by Ian McNaught Davis (film) and Owen Ho (music), descends into the underworld through a characterful blend of analogue and digital films, hand-drawn animations, and field recordings from the Mecklenburgh Square Garden. Likewise responding to death, Alondra Ruiz-Hernandez’s short film also explores elements of life and will be screened to the live performance of Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead (chamber arr. by Owen Ho), contemplating on the intricacies between life and death in the broader context of our current condition.

Running time: Approx 60 mins

Tickets: £12 (£10)

Duo Fantaisie was formed in Autumn 2019 at the Royal College of Music, and consists of New Zealander cellist Lavinnia Rae and Scottish pianist Iain Clarke. Aiming to combine the popular canonic duo works with contemporary, ground breaking new music, the duo successfully auditioned for the Royal College of Music’s Gateway Scheme in 2019 for professional performance engagements in and around London, receiving highly positive feedback on their ensemble dynamic.

Lavinnia is in her first year of the Masters in Orchestral Artistry in association with the the London Symphony Orchestra at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, studying with Rebecca Gilliver, and Iain is in his second year of a Master of Performance, studying with Danny Driver at the RCM.

In this lunchtime recital, the duo will be performing works by Manuel De Falla, and New Zealand composer Gareth Farr.

FREE – but pre-booking is essential

This concert will also be streamed on the Bloomsbury Festival youtube channel

Celebrating the 150th anniversary of Alexander Scriabin, one of Russia’s greatest composers, Pushkin House is proud to present this unique opportunity to hear all of his piano sonatas in one afternoon. Written over the span of just two decades (1892-1913) Scriabin’s Sonatas represent a unique artistic journey.

They will be performed by a team of internationally acclaimed pianists – Thomas Ang, Daniel Grimwood, Alexander Karpeyev, Dinara Klinton, James Kreiling, Yuri Paterson-Olenich, Maria Razumovskaya, Olga Stezhko and Nafis Umerkulova (more details on the Pushkin House website).

This concert is three hours in duration.

Tickets: £22 (£20)

In her multimedia exhibition Serenade on Skin (20 – 23 Oct), Tamar Geist challenges the traditional conventions of both art exhibition and classical-music recital by interweaving body-painting works, live singing, and performance art.

Removing all the masks, on this night Tamar performs in both her Drag King and Queen personas, blurs gender boundaries with paint and chansons. Join her as she bitterly revenges her unattainable loves and laughs at her Jewish biological clock – all taboos are deftly deflowered.

A trained classical-singer and actor, a choir-conductor and a painter, Tamar has always sought innovative practices to merge musical performance with visual-arts. During London’s 2nd lockdown she discovered body-painting and enthusiastically embraced it to her toolkit. The pandemic restrictions were the prompt which drove Tamar to create a one-woman-show from her dorms room, all crafted and executed single-handedly using a smartphone-camera and an iPad. By painting on herself and transforming to various characters from operas, poems, and plays, she was able to tell a multi-layered story using colours, sounds and movement.

This artistic fusion platform is also used by Tamar to further explore her Ph.D topic, which looks into the Jewish-Orthodox ban on female singing. The connecting thread between the displayed artworks in this exhibition are her attempt to find alternative ways to express her voice. This is one of three themed-recitals (which correspond with the displayed bodypainting artworks) in which Tamar will explore stereotypes associated with the female voice, tell the story of silenced or historically neglected female characters, as well as try to challenge gender boundaries, and reclaim classical-music pieces that are traditionally performed by men.

Suitable for ages 18+

Tickets: £8 (£6)

Genre-defying percussionist Beibei Wang is an acclaimed international virtuoso multi-percussionist, composer with both Chinese and British musical education background. Beibei has enjoyed a meteoric rise in the classical music world, receiving international praise for her projects. Her music spans many genres, ranging from classical, contemporary, experimental, traditional, improvisation, electronic, jazz, pop. By exploring new possibilities and challenging assumptions from all fields, she and her collaborators have developed genre-defying projects, pushing boundaries, including Dance theatre, Multimedia opera, Body & Sound live painting, Film installation, delighting audiences the world over.

This evening’s performance by Beibei Wang and special guests, coincides with an exciting exhibition at the Brunei Gallery, celebrating the 100 Year anniversary of the Chinese Ceramics Society.

Tickets: £10 (£5)

Prokofiev Classical Symphony (1918)
Stravinsky Pulcinella Suite (1919-20, rev.1949)
Chopin Piano Concerto No.1, Op.11 (1830)

Zhu Sun piano
Lucy Callen  and Owen Ho conductors

A night featuring two neoclassical works from Russia – Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite and Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony – and Chopin’s youthful Piano Concerto No.1. The programme shares a common theme of youth and nostalgia. Both Stravinsky and Prokofiev reworked music from their predecessors: Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite is a discovery of the past, an epiphany, and a look in the mirror that marked his so-called neoclassical phase. Likewise, Prokofiev’s work is composed in a style based on that of Haydn and Mozart, but added with twists and surprises typical of Prokofiev’s writing. Chopin’s youthful concerto, in a slightly different vein aesthetically, models itself upon the concerto style by his predecessors and brings the genre to the next level with its brilliant, virtuosic, richly ornamented, yet never trivial pianism. A night not to be missed!

Tickets: £12 (£10)

Enjoy a ravishing hour-long Handel recital from two of the most talented young singers from the baroque music world, in the intimate and beautiful setting of the picture gallery at the Foundling Museum, which has historic links to Handel.

Jerome Knox (baritone) was the winner of the 2020 international Handel Singing Competition and Ruairi Bowen (tenor) was a finalist.

Tickets: £12 (£10)