A FORM OF EXILE: On Edward Said and Late Style is Coming to Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre

​On Sunday 9th March, City of London Sinfonia and the London Review of Books will present dazzling works of music and literature created in the twilight of great artistic lives. The performance will explore the connections between these works, as traced by the renowned literary critic and public intellectual Edward Said in his final book.

The event will weave together readings and music, offering a deeply immersive exploration, and interrogation, of Said's final theoretical preoccupation. Khalid Abdalla, reading as Said, alongside the incomparable Juliet Stevenson, Will Keen and Aliyah Odoffin, will animate reflections on, and examples of, late style – interspersed with Said's most important musical case studies, performed by the City of London Sinfonia. The programme includes Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, arguably the greatest of all late works, as well as Richard Strauss's last orchestral piece and Britten's String Quartet No.3, which references Death in Venice, his final opera.

Said, perhaps best known for his 1978 book Orientalism and for co-founding the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with Daniel Barenboim, was a regular contributor to the LRB until his passing in 2003. His last piece for the paper, ‘Thoughts on Late Style', became the first chapter of his final book, On Late Style, published posthumously in 2006. In it, Said examines music by Beethoven, Strauss and Britten, and books including Jean Genet's Prisoner of Love and Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard, positing a theory of late style as a distinct, radical, and vital aesthetic category.

Together, these musical and literary works tell a story of courageous perseverance, startling originality and lateness as ‘a form of exile' – wherein Said, as a Palestinian, found unlikely kindred spirits. The resulting ‘concert-essay' is a moving account of artistic, human and political truths, which has never been told quite like this before.

A Form of Exile: On Edward Said and Late Style is the second concert collaboration between City of London Sinfonia and the London Review of Books, following a successful 2023 concert about the creative partnership in the 1930s between Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden.

Rowan Rutter, City of London Sinfonia's Chief Executive Officer, said: ‘Our founder, Richard Hickox, loved the spoken word and all that could be done between it and music. Much like Hickox was then, we want to push forward our artform, and certainly the voices and collaborators within it – pushing past the old boundaries of the “canon”, and finding exciting collaborations that engender a new cross-artform experience. Delving into the final thoughts of one of the 20th centuries great theorists alongside these iconic works of music offers a new lens through which to see both, one tinged with humour and politics and celebration.'

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