City of London Sinfonia Reveals Three-Part Concert Series, PATTERNS OF NATURE, at Smith Square Hall
Learn more about the lineup here!
By: Stephi Wild Jun. 20, 2024
City of London Sinfonia (CLS) will return to Smith Square Hall (formerly St John’s Smith Square) this autumn with a three-part series, Patterns of Nature, curated in partnership with a trio of inspiring experts to bring fresh perspectives on environmental themes by placing them at the heart of the concert experience. This brand new series will bring together masterworks of the Western classical canon alongside lesser performed gems to introduce conversations about climate awareness and explore ideas around our shared responsibility to the planet.
The 2024/25 season will open on 17 September with Shimmering Interference, reuniting CLS with Professor James Sparks, Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Oxford, and collaborator on CLS’s 2018 popular touring concert series, Bach and the Cosmos. This time the expert mathematician and CLS musicians will turn their attention towards the shared language of patterns that can be found in the music of Béla Bartók and John Adams, and within the natural world. Music from Pole to Pole (15 October) will take musical inspiration from cloud formations and atmospheric phenomena on a globe-spanning journey from Antarctica to the Arctic with an expert guide: the atmospheric physicist and author, Dr Simon Clark. Humanity and Nature (13 November) will offer an opportunity to reflect on the earth’s awe-inspiring eternal beauty in a performance of Mahler’s masterpiece, Das Lied von der Erde, performed by Yvonne Howard and Satriya Krisna, conducted by Kenneth Woods, and with an introduction from Dr Helen Anahita Wilson, transdisciplinary researcher and Composer-in-residence at Chelsea Physic Garden, on grief and the healing powers of the natural world.
Rowan Rutter, Chief Executive Officer of City of London Sinfonia, said: “Over the past year we’ve been asking ourselves why we do what we do, beyond the making and sharing of music – because we as an orchestra want to be a more significant vehicle for social change and impact. We also want to redefine and broaden the concept of excellence within our output of classical music; expanding the definition beyond the excellence of playing to incorporate an excellence of experience and interaction for our audiences and the way that they share in the process with us. This also gives us the opportunity to broaden who we work with, inviting speakers, academics, activists, scientists, composers from beyond classical music, and writers to share our platform, meet our audiences, and present work together. This mini-series is the start of this new approach to inclusive programming, using our programme and platform not only to share music, but to explore ideas and to ask questions about the world around us. There is much more to come!”.
Alexandra Wood, Creative Director & Orchestra Leader of City of London Sinfonia, said: “It is always refreshing and illuminating to collaborate with people from different disciplines. This season, I am super excited to be joined by three brilliant minds thinking about science and nature to create concert experiences which will be interesting, thought provoking, and allow us to appreciate some fabulous music with ‘new’ ears - audiences and performers alike!”.
Shimmering Interference: Bartók, Adams, and their mathematical worlds
17 September 2024
Smith Square Hall
To mark the opening of City of London Sinfonia’s 2024/25 season the orchestra will be reunited with Professor James Sparks, Professor of Mathematical Physics and Head of the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford, to explore the power and beauty of patterns in music and nature.
CLS and Professor James Sparks last collaborated in 2018 on the touring concert series, Bach and the Cosmos, an exploration of the composer’s mathematical brilliance in a presentation best described as a TED talk with live orchestra. In this upcoming concert collaboration, Shimmering Interference, they will take a closer look at the shared language of mathematical patterns that can be found in the music of Béla Bartók and John Adams and within the natural world.
Béla Bartók’s Divertimento for Strings was written in the summer of 1939, on the precipice of the Second World War, at the idyllic alpine retreat of Swiss conductor and patron, Paul Sacher. Suffused with vigorous energy and completed in just two weeks, the composition would be one of his last completed on European soil before the breakout of war forced him into exile. Bartók was an avid collector of plants, minerals and insects, and Professor James Sparks will explain how patterns we find in nature, such as in the fir cones that were said to have adorned the composer’s desk, found their way into his music. Shaker Loops, arguably one of John Adams’ best known works, is an exhilarating, electrifying sonic experience from one of America’s greatest living composers. Performed by CLS in its orchestral arrangement (1983), Professor James Sparks will explain how the oscillating patterns that give the piece its insistent kinetic energy mirror patterns found in natural phenomena, simple formations that build in complexity to sublime effect.
Music from Pole to Pole: cloud formations from Antarctica to the Arctic
15 October 2024
Smith Square Hall
Music from Pole to Pole is a concert programme inspired by the extraordinary range of cloud formations and atmospheric phenomena on a globe-spanning journey from Antarctica to the Arctic, with an expert guide: the award-winning science communicator, atmospheric physicist, and author, Dr Simon Clark.
From the South Pole - the atmosphere with the fewest clouds on Earth - with its wispy, iridescent nacreous clouds, to the dark grey, sun-blocking, slab-like nimbostratus of the mid-latitudes, to the dynamic and sometimes menacing cumulonimbus of the tropics, to the continent-spanning cirrus clouds that paint the skies above the north Atlantic, Music from Pole to Pole will take audiences on an unforgettable musical journey through the cloud atlas, and explain how the actions of humankind have already begun to destabilise this perfect ecosystem.
Curated by Dr Simon Clark together with CLS’ Creative Director and Orchestra Leader, Alexandra Wood, each cloud formation will find its expression in music. The programme will include Webern’s Five Movements for String Quartet, evoking the spare, shimmering beauty of the clouds that form above the vast polar desert of Antarctica; Vivaldi’s “Summer” invoking the altocumulus castellanus of the tropics, the friendly fluffy clouds that often foretell the arrival of dramatic thunderstorms and lightning; and Anna Þorvaldsdóttir’s mesmerising “Spectra”, iridescent like noctilucent clouds, the rarest and most intangible of all known cloud species.
Music from Pole to Pole is a first-time collaboration between CLS and Dr Simon Clark, the award-winning science communicator, atmospheric physicist, and author. With a passion for demystifying complex academic theory and breaking down barriers around access to education and careers in science, Dr Simon Clark’s YouTube channel, SimonOxfPhys, is enjoyed by more than half a million subscribers, and his first book, Firmament, an introduction to and history of atmospheric science, was crowned one of the Best Books of 2022 in Waterstones’ Climate Change and Conservation category.
Humanity and Nature: Mahler’s The Song of the Earth
13 November 2024
Smith Square Hall
On 13 November, CLS will return to Smith Square Hall with a performance of Mahler’s monumental symphonic song cycle, Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) featuring the internationally acclaimed mezzo-soprano and long-standing friend of the orchestra, Yvonne Howard, and Indonesian-born Leeds-based tenor, Satriya Krisna, conducted by Kenneth Woods, Artistic Director of Colorado MahlerFest.
Described by Leonard Bernstein as Mahler’s “greatest symphony”, and by the composer himself as, “the most personal thing I have done so far”, Das Lied von der Erde was composed in 1908-1909 in the wake of a disastrous year in which the composer was forced to resign from his post as director of the Vienna Court Opera, received the diagnosis of an incurable heart condition, and suffered the death of his elder daughter. Reflecting on events in a letter to Bruno Walter in 1909, he wrote: “How should I describe such a colossal crisis?... Yet I am thirstier than ever for life and I find the ‘habit of living’ sweeter than ever.”
The pathos of these words permeates what would be Mahler’s penultimate completed work, a transcendent song cycle set to ancient Chinese poems translated into German by Hans Bethge, words of contemplation on the brevity of a human life and the earth’s awe-inspiring eternal beauty.
Ahead of the performance, CLS will be joined by Dr Helen Anahita Wilson, award-winning composer and transdisciplinary researcher, with a PhD in Music and Health Humanities, who explores relationships between sound, the human body, and the natural world. As the inaugural Composer-in-residence at Chelsea Physic Garden, one of the oldest botanic gardens in Europe, she has collated bioelectricity readings and other biodata from plants and flowers and translated them into musical compositions in a form of interspecies music-making. These experiences will inform a discussion on grief, healing, and hope, through the lens of our deep connection to the natural world.
Alongside announcing the first concerts in its 2024/25 season, CLS is delighted to introduce the seven members of its inaugural Artists Council. The Artists Council has been created to enrich the organisation with broader expertise and knowledge from across the world of music and performance, as well as developing its equity, diversity, and inclusion, participation and pedagogical practice. Co-Chaired by CLS’ Creative Director and Orchestra Leader, Alexandra Wood, and CEO, Rowan Rutter, The Artists Council is: Phillipa Anders, formerly Director of the Music Programme at Britten Pears Arts, with over three decades of experience working within education, the arts and the community; Nicola T. Chang, the award-winning composer and sound designer for stage and screen whose credits include: For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy (Apollo Theatre/Royal Court/New Diorama), My Neighbour Totoro (RSC/Barbican) and Kerry Jackson (National Theatre); Raghad Haddad, former member of the Syrian National Symphony Orchestra, who also performed with Damon Albarn and Africa Express on the Orchestra of Syrian Musicians European Tour in 2016, and winner of the 2022 Youth Music Award for inspirational musical leadership; Professor Nathan Holder, Professor and International Chair of Music Education at the Royal Northern College of Music and award-winning author (Listen and Celebrate, Where Are All The Black Female Composers and If I Were A Racist); Anahi Ravagnani, doctor in audience engagement in classical music, has collaborated with various cultural organisations in the UK and Brazil as an Education projects manager such as the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra, the National Foundation for the Arts (Brazilian Ministry of Culture), the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and more recently, the London Symphony Orchestra ; Dr Sita Thomas, Artistic Director and CEO of Fio, Wales’ leading Global Majority theatre company, documentary filmmaker (The Way I Play, BBC), Intimacy Coordinator (Doctor Who, BBC) and presenter (Channel 5’s milkshake!, London Symphony Orchestra); and Matthew Kofi Waldren, the well-known British/Ghanaian conductor, a former ENO Mackerras Fellow who has been nominated at the International Opera Awards and the Olivier Awards. Matthew works with major opera companies and orchestras, recently conducting several world and British premieres, and is a long-standing CLS friend and collaborator, who opened 2024’s Opera Holland Park season with the orchestra last month.
City of London Sinfonia is Resident Orchestra at Opera Holland Park, a partnership that celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. The programme is: Tosca, conducted by Matthew Kofi Waldren, with acclaimed South African soprano, Amanda Echalaz, in the title role (28 May to 22 June); The Barber of Seville (4 to 21 June); a double bill featuring Wolf-Ferrari’s Il segreto di Susanna and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (17 July to 3 August), Acis and Galatea, Opera Holland Park’s first production of a Handel opera, directed by Louise Bakker (19 July to 2 August), and The Yeomen of the Guard, in a brand new production directed by John Savournin and conducted by David Eaton (7 to 10 August).
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