London is set to vibrate with the musical genius of Arnold Schoenberg as the city celebrates his 150th birthday with a series of breathtaking concerts. From the enchanting performances at Wigmore Hall to the powerful renditions at Royal Albert Hall and Southbank Centre, this celebration promises an unforgettable journey through classical masterpieces. Highlights include the HarrisonParrott Foundation's homage, the BBC Symphony Orchestra's Shostakovich 5, and the riveting 'A Dark Century' at Royal Festival Hall.

London Celebrates Arnold Schoenberg's 150th Birthday with Exquisite Concerts

From the freezing desolation of the Antarctic tundra to the lush harmonies that scandalised early 20th-century audiences, London is set to host a series of compelling musical events this season. Highlighted by the genius of Anton Webern, these events, including 'Music from Pole to Pole' at Smith Square Hall, 'Schoenberg: Reshaping Tradition' at the Southbank Centre, and a significant recital by Dames Sarah Connolly and Imogen Cooper at Wigmore Hall, promise to offer an unforgettable auditory journey.

London's Musical Vanguard: Exploring Anton Webern's Influence Across Iconic Locations

We open our 2024/25 season with a portrait of one of the most misunderstood pioneers of the early 20th-century avant-garde. Arnold Schoenberg's early works such as his Chamber Symphony, written in 1906, expanded the lush harmonies of late Romanticism to the extent that it scandalised audiences and incited them to riot at the strange physicality of the sounds they were hearing.

Schoenberg: Reshaping Tradition

Southbank Centre

Commissioned by the Southbank Centre to mark the reopening of the Royal Festival Hall, the two orchestras reunite under fast-rising conductor Chloe Rooke for a London revival of this landmark setting of wartime diary entries by Gertrude Stein, a work that manages to prove harrowing, poignant and consoling all at once, and whose visions of war have scarcely been more relevant. 

BBC Proms: Songs of Wars

Kensington Gore

Galina Ustvolskaya joined the composition class of Dmitri Shostakovich at Leningrad State Conservatoire in St Petersburg, and immediately won his esteem, with the elder predicting 'world fame'. 

However, the conditions couldn't have been much worse: it was the time of 'Great Terror', the Soviet Union's clamp down on any radical thinkers and artists who veered from the communist line. 

Sound Within Sound: Ustvolskaya 

Join us for a journey through Mexico that features striking chamber works, unconventional musical experiences, and the experimental song Preludio a Colón. 

Described by Kate Molleson as a 'confounding mix of absolutist, traditionalist, visionary and shameless revisionist', Carrillo never ceases to surprise, in his music as well as his words. 

Carrillo & Revueltas

The programme includes the exciting dancing textures created by pioneering multi-layered tape pieces such as Steve Reich’s Violin Phase and Vermont Counterpoint. Richly complex patterns create compelling listening in Julius Eastman’s Joy Boy and modern New York icon Julia Wolfe’s East Broadway. We’ll look to the British version of the movement with Michael Nyman’s captivating In C Interlude while the weaving melodies hypnotise in Anna Clyne’s Just as they are. The concert will close with a performance of Gavin Bryars’ extraordinary Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, in celebration of the composer’s strong links to Portsmouth in his highly experimental ensemble the Portsmouth Sinfonia.  

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Minimalism

Portsmouth Guildhall

This concert will celebrate the second year of our programme in Enfield with pieces co-created by students from St Ignatius College and The Purcell School for Young Musicians and a new commission inspired by workshops in Edmonton sitting alongside classic minimalist works. The programme includes the exciting dancing textures created by pioneering multi-layered tape pieces such as Steve Reich's Vermont Counterpoint, alongside richly complex patterns in Julia Wolfe's East Broadway. We'll look to the British version of the movement with the weaving melodies in Anna Clyne's Just as they are and Gavin Bryars’ extraordinary Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet.  

London Sinfonietta: Minimalism

Dugdale Arts Centre

In our annual concert for schools, presenter Patrick Bailey, London Sinfonietta musicians and our Sound Out Young Ensemble explore how to compose and create new music. Listen to pieces by living composers, join in with the performance and hear new work by young people who have taken part in our Sound Out and Composition Challenge programmes. 

Sound Out 2024

We're supporting the next generation of composers and music-makers through our Composition Challenges programme, but we need your help! Donate to us during the Big Give and your donation will be doubled through match funding, and have twice the impact.

The Big Give

London Sinfonietta travels to the future with three UK premieres and a favourite past commission. Sky Macklay’s Microvariations will lull you into a false sense of tonality before whisking you on a whistle-stop, microtonal tour of 19th Century European orchestras, “a fast-forward and transcontinental sonic truncation and fantasy on” the journey of British conductor George Thomas Smart and his tuning fork in 1825. In George Lewis’ lively Tales of the Traveller, the eponymous hero travels the limits of imagination: the piece allows a soloist total free reign to improvise against a notated ensemble part. After the interval, Katherine Balch’s “serenade to lost or wasted time” plays a soprano soloist against four hand-held cassette tape recorders to distort and fragment our memory of the piece even as it is played, while the programme is rounded off by Michel van der Aa’s latest commission for the ensemble, Shades of Red, which illustrates the different perceived properties of the colour red, alongside a soundtrack which confronts the players with their own warped and distorted soundworld.

New Traditions

The first of three Sinfonietta Nova concerts will feature London Sinfonietta's Jonathan Morton. The concert will take you on a journey through the raw and palpable power of Krzysztof Penderecki, the eerie and unsettling undercurrent of the Oscar-winning soundtrack 'There Will Be Blood' to the unistic and deeply layered style of composer Zygmunt Krauze, who will sit at the piano.

Sinfonietta Nova

Łaźnia Nowa Theater

We mark the anniversary of our first-ever concert with a celebration of the eclectic, provocative, surprising and beautiful music we have commissioned and performed throughout our history. Performing a mix of new commissions and classic chamber repertoire written specially for the ensemble over the years, we will be joined by special guests for a festive evening of new music. 

Decades

The final instalment in London Sinfonietta’s fourth series of its pioneering Writing the Future music creation scheme sees visionary multidisciplinary artist Nwando Ebizie turn the traditional concert experience on its head. This groundbreaking new work will use multi-sensory immersion to challenge your perception of reality: poetry expressed in British Sign language and passionate dance create visual music, whilst vibrations throughout the space create a haptic experience. This multi-sensory theatrical and musical evening oscillates from romantic song to nightmarish visions, intimate reverie and lucid horror.

Nwando Ebizie:

Colour Factory

London Sinfonietta is reunited with “marvel” Norwegian saxophone virtuoso and composer Marius Neset to perform their “elemental” third collaboration, Geyser. Tension boils under the surface of this piece, unleashed intermittently in ecstatic outbursts of rhythmic energy, and echoed in the friction between Marius’ jazz quintet and the crack new music ensemble.

Marius Neset: Geyser

Bærum Kulturhus

London Sinfonietta celebrates the life of provocatively distinctive composer György Ligeti in his centenary year. Beloved of Stanley Kubrik, Ligeti’s richly avant-garde “micro-polyphony” explores how texture can be a structural device, and creates musical layers that create effects ranging from meditative stillness to cosmic existential terror. Pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard joins the ensemble for this performance, which concludes with the composer’s extraordinary Piano Concerto.

Ligeti 100

We are excited to be continuing our international touring schedule with a programme of contemporary favourites at the Beijing International Music Festival. First, we'll be performing with the inspiring Theatre of Sound opera company, bringing the festival two performances of Béla Bartók's only opera, Bluebeard's Castle. Then, on 9 October, a chamber concert featuring Olivier Messiaen's profoundly affecting Quartet for the End of Time and a tribute to the groundbreaking Chinese composer Chou wen Chung in the year of his 100th anniversary of birth. 

Beijing International Music Festival

Musicians Of Tomorrow

London Sinfonietta demonstrates the commissioning boldness for which it is known in this unflinching critique of modern society. Contrasting movements from Hans Werner Henze’s “brilliantly colorful” song cycle Voices, originally commissioned by the London Sinfonietta in 1973, with contemporary responses illustrating the frustrations and injustices of life 50 years on. 

21st Century Voices

Viitasaari Areena

Huddersfield Town Hall

Turning Points: Sound Unwrapped

Kings Place Music Foundation

A night of virtuosic fireworks from different musical and cultural traditions. The sounds of the far East in Dai Fujikura’s Shamisen Concerto are tempered by “a cadenza-like solo of dizzying rapidity that evokes prog-rock guitar as much as Paganini” (New York Times), while Tania León’s Rítmicas is based on “a rainbow of polyrhythmic inventions emerging from the Son and Guaguancó clave” of Cuba. The micropolyphonic textures of the oldest piece in tonight’s programme, György Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto, still sound as new as at its premiere in 1970.

Fireworks

This concert focuses on our perceptions of time, through two very different yet complementary masterpieces. The London Sinfonietta and Daniel Pioro will perform Gérard Grisey’s Vortex Temporum, a work that takes us through three time frames: ‘normal’, human time, the ‘expanded’ time of whales and the ‘compressed’ time of birds, via this pioneering spectralist composer’s virtuoso imagination. This late masterwork fulfilled Grisey’s vision of a music that transfigures our experience of time. On a symphonic scale, revealing dizzying dances and lavish harmonic language, the music carries us on a journey through boundary-breaking sound-worlds.

Vortex Temporum

Minimalist master Steve Reich returns to his New York arts scene roots in this bright and rhythmically agile piece, written and performed alongside painter Gerhard Richter’s film Moving Picture. The film starts with a two-pixel pulsating, colour-shifting line, which becomes four pixels, then sixteen, then 32 and so on. The music starts with a two-note oscillation that expands equally but then becomes liberated from the structure of the forms on film, allowing notes to escape and create their own destiny in this cool and elegant piece. Music by two other masters of the New York scene complement Reich’s music, while the London Sinfonietta, with Sound Intermedia, re-create Nunu, its commission from the late and sadly missed Mira Calix.

Reich/Richter

Written shortly before the composer's death, Morton Feldman's expansive For Samuel Beckett is a meditatively shifting work, in which tiny differences between endless rhythmic and harmonic permutations suspend space and time.

A giant of American minimalism, Feldman's experiments with scale and entropy led him to an obsession with quietly powerful music: this evocative piece seems to appear from nowhere and float on elsewhere after is end. 

Refracted Sound

London Sinfonietta returns to Kings Place, presenting an evening of music by Scottish composers exploring the idea of love and our deepest human need for connection.

Judith Weir’s evocative music sets the scene, before the Public World Premiere of a privately commissioned work Love Bade me Welcome by James MacMillan setting poetry about divine love by George Herbert.

London Sinfonietta

Nov 29, 2024

Refracted Sound

Dec 6, 2024

Love Lines

Oct 20, 2024

Schoenberg: Reshaping Tradition

Aug 9, 2024

BBC Proms: Songs of Wars

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London Sinfonietta