Jasdeep Singh Degun to join Norfolk & Norwich Festival 2023 lineup

Norfolk & Norwich Festival have announced virtuoso sitarist Jasdeep Singh Degun will be joining the 2023 line up this May, ahead of the full programme launch on Tuesday 21 February.

Leeds born musician Jasdeep Singh Degun will perform his debut album Anomaly at St Peter Mancroft on Thursday 18 May with a nine musician ensemble including the tabla, santoor, esraj, and mridangam. The twelve track album features music rooted in the ancient repertoire of raags, with frameworks used in the improvised performances of Indian classical music, and delivered with contemporary flair. Tickets for priority bookers are available today and will be on general sale Wednesday 25 January here.

The Festival will run for 17 days from 12 May - 28 May 2023 with artists from around the world and the region presenting a huge variety of work and events throughout the city and around the county. Last year, the festival celebrated its 250th anniversary and is considered to be the oldest single-city arts Festival in the UK.

The full programme for the Norfolk & Norwich Festival will be announced in February, with the current lineup including:

Country and bluegrass musician Rhiannon Giddens will be playing at St. Andrew's Hall on the Festival's opening weekend, Friday 12 May with Italian singer-songwriter Francesco Turrisi. The duo will be performing their acclaimed album They're Calling Me Home which won the Grammy Award for Best Folk Album this year. A MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, Giddens co-founded the Grammy Award-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, and she has been nominated for six additional Grammys for her work as a soloist and collaborator. Performing in Norwich for the first time, Giddens has performed for the Obamas at the White House, served as a Carnegie Hall Perspectives curator, and received an inaugural Legacy of Americana Award from Nashville's National Museum of African American History in partnership with the Americana Music Association.

International circus troupe Chelsea McGuffin & Co will present their neo-vaudevillian production Le Coup. Bringing together acrobatics, magic, dance and live music, the show is a tribute to funfairs, travelling boxing troupes and the showmen and women of yesteryear. The show will headline the Adnams Spiegeltent in Festival Gardens from 17 - 28 May.

Innovative contemporary classical music groups 12 Ensemble and GBSR Duo both commission work that reinvents the classical canon and pushes the boundaries of the form. They will be joining forces on Friday 19 May at St Andrew's Hall to perform pieces from a range of exciting emerging and established composers. The programme includes works by Mica Levi from the 2014 film Under The Skin starring Scarlett Johannson, a world premiere of a Norfolk & Norwich Festival co-commission by Laurence Osborn reinventing the tombeau genre - works written by one composer on the death of another - and Ambient 2, a major work of the ambient genre that encourages a collective meditative experience written by pioneering British artist Brian Eno.

The Festival is delighted to welcome The Hallé from Manchester, returning to Norfolk for the first time since 1955. The Orchestra will team up with German conductor Kevin John Edusei, former Chief Conductor of the Munich Symphony Orchestra and the Bern Opera House. Kevin John Edusei is joined by acclaimed Argentinian pianist Nelson Goerner. They will be performing American composer Missy Mazzoli's Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres), written in 'the shape of a solar system' and Dvořák's sunny Eighth Symphony, bursting with the beguiling folk tunes of Bohemia.

Festival regulars Britten Sinfonia will return with Musical Everests performing music by Britten, Tippett, Maconchy and Phibbs. The orchestra will play rare work from 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation and the summitting of Mt Everest, alongside the premiere of brand new work composed in this coronation year 70 years later.

Sensory theatre makers Frozen Light return to the Festival with an immersive sensory sound experience for audiences with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD). Fire Songs is performed in collaboration with Thetford Singers and singers from across Norfolk and Norwich, and is a work co-commissioned by Norfolk & Norwich Festival and The Garage.

Full information on all Norfolk & Norwich Festival events at nnfestival.org.uk.

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