London is set to host a mesmerizing series of concerts celebrating the legacy of Orlando Gibbons. From the immersive 'Fretwork; Tenebrae' at Wigmore Hall to the rich harmonies of 'Resounding Shores: Chamber and Chapel' at the Royal Academy of Music, the city's vibrant music scene will bring Gibbons' works to life. Not to be missed are the performances by the renowned ORA Singers and the legendary Jordi Savall with Hespèrion XXI.

Orlando Gibbons' Legacy Resounds in London Concert Series

This fall and winter, London becomes a hub of musical splendor with a series of enchanting performances dedicated to the works of William Byrd. From the meditative tones of 'Resounding Shores: Chamber and Chapel' at the Royal Academy of Music to the exhilarating 'James McVinnie: Fantasias' at the Southbank Centre, these events promise to captivate and inspire. Join us at Wigmore Hall for an array of soulful evenings, including performances by Stile Antico and The Gesualdo Six, culminating in a Shakespearean celebration by Nicky Spence and Dylan Perez. Don't miss this unique opportunity to experience the timeless beauty of Byrd's compositions.

Celebrate the Musical Genius of William Byrd Across London's Iconic Venues

An inclusive conversation exploring the traditions and performance practices of the Baroque, 19th Century and Contemporary classical guitars. Featuring John Williams, Adrian Walter, Richard Savino and the Director of the International Guitar Research Centre at the University of Surrey, Stephen Goss.

Beyond The Notes: The Guitar In Conversation

Royal Academy Of Music

Works by Paul Archbold, Casken, Debussy, Ravel and Phoenix Archbold performed by Nancy Ruffer, Christopher Redgate, Hugh Webb, Bridget Carey and Sophie Harris.

Paul Archbold 60th Birthday Concert

Students focus the spotlight on instrument makers, particularly those specialising in keyboards, who play an indispensable role in classical music development.

EPSG:4326

The Keyboard Makers

Royal Academy of Music

The Musicians' Company is delighted to present the final Selection Round of the 4th New Elizabethan Award, adjudicated by Helen Grime M.B.E., Ian Partridge C.B.E., Angela Dixon, Elizabeth Kenny, Graham Devine, Helen Sanderson and Michael Lewin (chair).
This international biennial award is for classical guitarists and lutenists for the performance of solo and/or ensemble music by composers from the two great Elizabethan ages.

New Elizabethan Award

‘A good voice… [is a] gift… so rare there is not one among a thousand that hath it’, wrote William Byrd in 1588. This didn’t put off singers wishing to try their luck: songbooks became hugely popular around the turn of the 17th century, most notably John Dowland’s groundbreaking First Booke of Songs or Ayres (1597).
This was music for performers to make their own. These works have a strongly operatic flavour, blending poetry and music to create intensely expressive drama that goes straight to the listener’s heart. Highlights include Purcell’s masterpiece In guilty night, which is held in the Academy’s Spencer Collection.

Resounding Shores: Songs, Scenes and Dialogues

Cabaret events devised by Musical Theatre students follow performances of Into the Woods.

Musical Theatre Cabaret

Academy Voices mark the end of the academic year with a special opera gala. Join us for a performance featuring arias from beloved operas of all periods from the baroque to the 20th century.

Academy Voices: Opera Gala

Your favourite storybook characters are brought together for a timeless and enchanting classic. The Baker and his wife wish to have a child, Cinderella wishes to attend the King’s Festival and Jack wishes his cow would give milk. While everyone’s wishes are granted, are the consequences of having ventured into the woods ultimately worth it?

Into The Woods

Susie Sainsbury Theatre

How does one write a new biography of a well-known composer? This talk by Robert Sholl, also in conversation with writer and pianist Roderick Chadwick (Royal Academy of Music) and the composer Julian Anderson (Guildhall School of Music and Drama), evaluates the life and legacy of Olivier Messiaen (1908-92). Using new photographs, commentary, and sketch materials, as well as performances of his work by student organists Ophelia Amar and Jeremy Ng, it examines critical perspectives on Messiaen’s life and the poetics of his music.

Olivier Messiaen: Writing An Old Life Anew

Dame Myra Hess Chair of Piano, Professor Joanna MacGregor, gives a masterclass to piano students.

Joanna Macgregor

Barbara Meyer, Curator of Instruments at the Academy for over a decade, gives an introduction to the Museum Strings Gallery and string instrument collection for deaf and hearing impaired audiences. There will be a sign interpreter accompanying the tour and participation from Academy students.

Deaf Awareness Week Tour

The celebrated guitarist and Academy alumnus, known commercially as MILOŠ, works with Academy guitar students.

Miloš Karadaglić

Birtwistle’s 1994 curtain-raiser Fanfare for Glyndebourne is followed by Schoenberg’s melding of his own harmonic practice with the American wind band tradition. The jazz-inflected idiom of HK Gruber’s 3 MOB Pieces is also heard in Leonard Bernstein’s spectacular Prelude, Fugue and Riffs.

Prelude, Fugue And Riffs

Breaking down the barriers between meditative church music and theatre music, this rich programme features sumptuous symphony anthems, including the vivid Like as the hart by Pelham Humfrey, who remains little known owing to his untimely death in his mid twenties. Charles II liked to use his violin band even in chapel, creating a special blend of intense spiritual anguish punctuated by cheerful instrumental moments

Resounding Shores: Chamber and Chapel

Within Brahms’s extensive output of chamber music, the Piano Quintet stands out for its large scale and its thrilling musical writing.

Brahms Piano Quintet

Jonathan Leathwood, professor at the Lamont School of Music at the University of Denver, works with guitar students

Jonathan Leathwood

A 2011 piece by Sally Beamish based on Mozart’s Adagio for glass harmonica is paired here with an arrangement for wind quintet of one of Dvořák’s most well-known works, the ‘American’ string quartet. The remarkable work of Ruth Crawford Seeger has been revived extensively in recent years, including her Suite from 1952.

Dogoda Quintet

An improvisation to silent film by organ students from the Academy and the University of Music, Lübeck, directed by Visiting Professor of Organ, Franz Danksagmüller.

Organ And Film

International Jazz Artist in Residence and NEA Jazz Hall Of Fame inductee, bassist Dave Holland, is one of the most influential jazz musicians in the world.

Academy Jazz Orchestra With Dave Holland

Ultramarathon legend Jasmin Paris – the first woman to have ever completed the notoriously tough Barkley Marathons race, and the first woman to have won the Montane Spine Race – speaks to Academy students about her historic victories as an athlete.

An Evening with Jasmin Paris

Valegro Quartet

Grammy award-winning baritone Christopher Maltman is joined by Audrey Saint-Gil to work on Italian operatic arias.

Christopher Maltman And Audrey Saint-gil

Frederic Rzewski’s soul-stirring work is widely regarded as a modern classic, and one of the most ambitious keyboard compositions of the 20th century.

Academy Piano Series At Wigmore Hall: Emanuil Ivanov

Wigmore Hall

Experience the extraordinary range and vitality of Academy alumna Augusta Read Thomas, one of the most performed composers of her generation. Described by the American Academy of Arts and Letters as ‘one of the most recognisable and widely loved figures in American music’, she is celebrated across these two concerts.

Composer In Residence: Augusta Read Thomas

Head of Composition Philip Cashian talks to Academy alumna Augusta Read Thomas about her busy career as a composer, curator and educator.

Composer In Residence: AUGUSTA READ THOMAS in Conversation

Jonathon Heyward, Academy alumnus and Music Director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, returns to conduct Mahler’s fourth symphony.

Jonathon Heyward Conducts The Academy Symphony Orchestra

Composer In Residence: Augusta Read Thomas with the Academy Manson Ensemble

The Maknickas Family Trio

Visiting Professor of Guitar Fabio Zanon makes a welcome return to work with Academy students.

Fabio Zanon

Academy Jazz ensemble concerts mark the culmination of the small ensemble projects on the Jazz course. Students perform sets of music on which they have been working with a variety of distinguished visiting musicians.

Jazz Ensembles

Recently retired former Ede Zathureczky Professor of Violin at the Academy, György Pauk, returns to impart his wisdom to students in this violin masterclass.

György Pauk

Temporal Harmonies Inc

Principal Oboe for the Berlin Philharmonic and Visiting Professor of Oboe, alumnus Jonathan Kelly, returns to work with oboe students.

Jonathan Kelly

Under the musical guidance of Head of Opera, Christopher White, members of Royal Academy Opera and the Preparatory Opera course, alongside the Repetiteur Fellows and students from the Conducting Department, present a varied programme of operatic scenes.

Royal Academy Opera Scenes

The Academy Wind Ensemble presents a programme of music ranging from the 17th to 21st century. The music Henry Purcell wrote for the funeral of Mary II in 1695 is some of his most moving. Judith Bingham’s Bright Spirit, from 2001, is similarly inspired, written in memorial to pioneering doctor William Reynish. A 2012 work from the Academy’s own Head of Composition, Philip Cashian, leads into Tippett’s Triumph. This work for concert band takes as its inspiration the composer’s humanist oratorio from the early 1980s, The Mask of Time.

British Wind Music

A recital of chamber music by Handel, performed by members of the Historical Performance Department.

Handel Chamber Music

Professor in Residence Jeroen Berwaerts conducts Academy Brass for the second time this term in a mixed and varied programme from Elizabethan England through to the work of maverick American composer Charles Ives which closes the programme – his Variations on ‘America’ uses a tune that is surprisingly familiar.

Symphonic Brass With Jeroen Berwaerts

Regent Hall

Trevor Pinnock returns to conduct Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn, followed by Mendelssohn’s immensely successful third symphony celebrating Scottish landscape and history, which premiered in Leipzig in 1842 in the presence of Queen Victoria.

Trevor Pinnock Conducts The Academy Chamber Orchestra

This programme offers a rare and wonderful taste of music by some of England’s greatest composers, including Orlando Gibbons and William Byrd. The repertoire is sublime and often strange, and is the musical equivalent of a fragile Vermeer portrait, combining exquisite intimacy with enigmatic melancholy.

Resounding Shores: Ye Sacred Muses

Curated by Joanna MacGregor, this year’s Autumn Piano Festival opens a two-year project of Robert Schumann’s complete works for solo piano, performed by Academy pianists – over fifteen hours of the greatest and most original piano music ever composed.

Autumn Piano Festival

Remembering Osian Ellis (1928-2021)

Emily Beynon, Visiting Professor of Flute and Principal Flute of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam, gives one of her regular masterclasses.

Emily Beynon

A showcase of the stylistic variation and versatility of contemporary brass and percussion writing by Academy composers.

Voices: New Brass Works

Violinist Anthony Marwood, William Lawes Chair of Chamber Music, performs works by Beethoven and Brahms alongside Academy students.

Chamber Music With Anthony Marwood

The Funny Bones With Joe Evans And Ishy Aasgaard

Composers and instrumentalists taking part in the Art Foundation Lucerne Riot Ensemble Mentorship scheme curate a programme of new music.

Riot Ensemble Duets: Side-by-side Concert

Aquarium is dedicated to her daughter Stephanie in thanks for introducing the composer to the world of tropical fish.

Flute Chamber Music

In the week of a seismic election in the United States, we celebrate the cultural richness of 20th-century America through the vastly contrasting musical worlds of three great composers: Price, Copland and Gershwin.

Septura Side-by-side

The Academy’s doctoral programme provides a collaborative environment for musicians to share and critique working practices, and a framework for developing long-term projects that will drive distinctive careers. It also offers a research and development engine for the Academy’s taught programmes.

Doctoral Symposium

Academy organ students perform solo and ensemble works by Petr Eben, Thierry Escaich and Jean-Baptiste Robin.

Organ Recital

Debussy’s String Quartet represents a distinctively French take on what had been a genre defined by central European rules.

Woolf Quartet

Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies were two of the most prominent avant-garde musical voices in post-war Britain.

Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot

A recital of Janacek’s paean to Moravian folk music, Debussy’s light-filled reflections, and Schubert’s virtuosic homage to his hero, Beethoven: the exhilarating Wanderer-Fantasie.

Academy Piano Series at Wigmore Hall: Tom Zalmanov

We welcome Arto Noras, one of Finland’s most celebrated cellists, to work with Academy string students.

Arto Noras

Harp Chamber Music

International Visiting Professor of Horn, soloist and former Principal Horn of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Radovan Vlatković, works with Academy horn students.

Radovan Vlatković

Many renowned composers of opera also wrote songs for the concert platform. In this programme, Academy Voices present both, contrasting lavish opera arias with more intimate art songs.

Academy Voices - Qui La Voce, Lì La Canzone

The Jazz Department is proud to collaborate once again with Spice Jazz and the EFG London Jazz Festival to celebrate 85 years of Blue Note Records.

The Music Of Bobby Hutcherson And Duke Pearson

Brasserie Zedel

currently being edited by renowned organist-composer Jean-Baptiste Robin and musicologist Aurélie Decourt, niece of Jehan Alain (1911-1940) and daughter of the celebrated organist and teacher, Marie-Claire Alain (1926-2013). Presented in collaboration with the Eric Thompson Charitable Trust for Organists & Organ Music.

Masterclass: JEAN-BAPTISTE ROBIN AND AURÉLIE DECOURT

St Marylebone Parish Church

The earthily rustic arrangements made famous by the Danish String Quartet are interposed here with works by Beethoven and Caroline Shaw. Shaw’s piece was inspired by Haydn, and plays with the familiar form of Minuet and Trio. Beethoven’s Op 18 quartets are his first major works in the form, through which his individual voice already percolates.

Loriini Quartet

When Hansel and Gretel find themselves lost in the forest, they happen upon a house made of gingerbread. Unable to resist temptation, the siblings begin to eat the house, only to be captured by the witch who lives inside.

Hänsel Und Gretel

A day of piano trio performances by Academy students. Programmes to be announced.

Piano Trio Day

Works by three eclectic composers comprise this afternoon’s programme. Paul Hindemith’s output was bewilderingly large, and the Kleine Kammermusik performed today finds him in neoclassical mood. Jacques Ibert also wrote much music across several genres, including for several French- and English-language films. Pianist Jean-Michel Damase had a much smaller output, but wrote several pieces for wind quintet.

Jubilee Quintet

A programme featuring works by composers with experiences of London.

Guitar In London — An Evening Of Guitar Chamber Music

The Academy’s first SIDE-BY-SIDE with the Dunedin Consort presents concerts in Edinburgh and the Duke’s Hall. It will feature Purcell’s Hail, Bright Cecilia!, written in honour of St Cecilia, patron saint of musicians, a work in which all instruments have ‘character’ movements and where singers and instrumentalists play equally dramatic roles. Preceding this famous ode is Sir John Clerk of Penicuik’s relatively little-known cantata, Leo Scotiae Irritatus, depicting Scotland’s unsuccessful venture to set up an empire in Panama.

Resounding Shores: Hail, Bright Cecilia

Greyfriars Kirk

Our 2024 series closes with Purcell’s Hail, bright Cecilia!, written in honour of St Cecilia, patron saint of musicians. In this work, all of the instruments have ‘character’ movements where singers and instrumentalists play equally dramatic roles. Preceding this famous ode is Sir John Clerk of Penicuik’s relatively little-known cantata, Leo Scotiae irritatus, which depicts Scotland’s ambitious (and unsuccessful) venture to set up an empire in Panama.

Resounding Shores: Ode to St Cecilia

New Every Morning by the Royal Orchestral Society patron and former Master of the King’s Music, Dame Judith Weir opens the concert, followed by Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto no.1, written for Rostropovich and one of his most popular and approachable compositions. Brahms’ towering masterpiece – Symphony No 4 in E minor – completes the evening.

Royal Orchestral Society - Breaching Barriers

Visting Professor of Double Bass, Joel Quarrington, has served as the Principal Double Bassist for many orchestras, most recently the London Symphony Orchestra.

Joel Quarrington

We continue our fascinating survey of guitar concertos composed in the past hundred years, from diverse countries and musical traditions.

Beyond The Aranjuez

Michael Tippett’s Prelude, Recitative and Aria derives from his astringent opera King Priam, first performed in Coventry. The music of Louise Farrenc is seeing something of a renaissance in recent years, and her Sextet for wind and piano reveals a distinctive compositional voice. André Previn’s Trio reveals his wide-ranging musical interests, with jazz rhythms to the fore in its rambunctious final movement.

Woodwind Chamber Music

Visiting Professor of Harp, Anne-Sophie Bertrand, visits the Academy to work with Harp Department students.

Anne-sophie Bertrand

Academy Voices celebrate the legacy of composers who have taught and studied at the Academy since its establishment in 1822. The programme will include music by Paolo Tosti, Michael Head and current and recent composition students at the Academy.

Academy Voices - 200 Years Of Song At The Academy

Sir Mark Elder, the Academy’s Barbirolli Chair of Conducting, returns to conduct two mighty tone poems by Richard Strauss.

Sir Mark Elder Conducts The Academy Symphony Orchestra

The Academy Manson Ensemble and London Sinfonietta’s players perform SIDE-BY-SIDE at the Southbank Centre. Written shortly before Morton Feldman’s death, For Samuel Beckett is a meditatively shifting work, in which tiny differences between endless rhythmic and harmonic permutations suspend space and time. Feldman’s experiments with scale and entropy led him to an obsession with quietly powerful music: this evocative and mysterious work seems to appear from nowhere and float on elsewhere after its end.

Manson Ensemble Side-by-side With London Sinfonietta

Southbank Centre

The best and brightest musical theatre songs of the century so far. Devised and directed by Matt Ryan and conducted by Daniel Bowling, the creative team behind previous cabaret celebrations of the work of Kander & Ebb, Cy Coleman and Jerry Herman.

The Last Twenty Five Years!

Bach’s Toccata acts as a gateway to Chopin’s remarkable cycle of preludes: 24 miniatures in all major and minor keys, a scheme inspired by Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. Seen by many as his absolute masterpiece, the collection burns with Chopin’s private world of Intense moods and fierce colours.

Academy Piano Series At Wigmore Hall: Kasparas Mikužis

Odes for special occasions frame this opening programme, from Purcell’s ‘From hardy climes and dangerous toils of war’, performed at the wedding of Prince George of Denmark and Princess Anne, to one of his finest and most wistfully beautiful odes, ‘Love’s goddess sure was blind’, written in 1692 for the birthday of Queen Mary. In between, we hear Locke’s ‘The Oxford Ode’, commissioned in 1672 for the annual degree ceremony at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre. These three odes are interspersed with fantasias for viol consort by Purcell and Locke that represent the pinnacle of a two-century-long musical tradition in England.

Occasional Odes

The exquisite and retrospective world of the viol consort seems far from the theatrical, dance-influenced violin music of the English and French courts.

The French Way

This fantastical journey will include extracts from Purcell’s music for the stage and semi-operas exploring themes of love, magic, myth, authority, nature and transformation, weaving together narrative threads from The Fairy Queen, King Arthur and one of the first ever stage dramatisations of Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote, which features Purcell’s last ever song setting: ‘From rosy bowers’.

Royal Academy of Music

Sep 20, 2024

Olivier Messiaen: Writing An Old Life Anew

Sep 24, 2024

Joanna Macgregor

Sep 25, 2024

Deaf Awareness Week Tour

Sep 26, 2024

Miloš Karadaglić

Sep 27, 2024

Prelude, Fugue And Riffs

Sep 17, 2024

Beyond The Notes: The Guitar In Conversation

Jul 20, 2024

Paul Archbold 60th Birthday Concert

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