Summer Season Announced At Wigmore Hall April-July 2023

Wigmore Hall's packed summer season (1 Apr - 21 Jul) features nearly 200 concerts and events. At the heart of Wigmore Hall's summer programme is the core chamber, piano and vocal repertoire upon which its reputation as the international home of chamber music is built, but there are also visits from legendary jazz musicians, Yiddish cabaret and forays into the avant garde.

Contemporary and 20th-century music of the avant-garde, by composers Erwin Schulhoff, Cathy Berberian, Peter Maxwell Davies, John Zorn, and Colin Jacobsen, performed by Claron McFadden, Elaine Mitchener & Apartment House, JACK Quartet and Brooklyn Rider.

Pianist Rebeca Omordia presents a day devoted to celebrating music and musicians from Africa in the second African Concert Series

Legendary jazz pianist Fred Hersch makes his Wigmore Hall debut

The Cardinall's Musick performs all three of William Byrd's masses on the 400th anniversary of the composer's death

Nitin Sawhney performs his album Beyond Skin, unplugged at Wigmore Hall

Piano

The 24-year-old Japanese pianist Mao Fujita performs all of Mozart's Piano Sonatas across five concerts in five days at Wigmore Hall (Mon 10 - Fri 14 Jul); his recording of the works was issued last year on Sony Classical.

Igor Levit and Alexei Volodin perform three major works for Piano Duo by Mozart, Debussy and Rachmaninov (Sat 6 May). Jonathan Plowright, known for presenting often neglected repertoire, gives a rare performance of Poulenc's Les Soirées de Nazelles (Wed 26 Apr), which, like Elgar's 'Enigma' Variations, is a set of eight variations, each representing one of the composer's friends. Steven Osborne (Sat 1 Apr) and Nikolai Lugansky (Thu 18 May) both perform Rachmaninov, and there is Chopin from Garrick Ohlsson (Thu 6 Apr).

Paul Lewis continues his Schubert series (Sat 29 Apr & Mon 1 May), François-Frédéric Guy joins Jean-Efflam Bavouzet's on his Tour de Debussy (Mon 17 Apr), to perform music for two pianos by Britten, Strauss and Brahms with Emmanuel Strosser (Tue 27 Jun), Angela Hewitt returns to the Wigmore in Mozart and Beethoven (25 May), Kirill Gerstein concludes his Busoni Residency (Sun 2 Jul) and Filippo Gorini performs Bach's The Art of Fugue (Sun 23 July)..

Song

Soprano Christiane Karg gives a recital of songs (Mon 3 Apr) accompanied by harp, including an arrangement of Strauss's Four Last Songs and some rarely heard songs by Respighi. Schubert's Winterreise is performed by baritone Sir Simon Keenleyside and pianist Malcolm Martineau (Mon 8 May) and countertenor Iestyn Davies explores 'England's Orpheus', Henry Purcell (Fri 12 May).

Soprano Claron McFadden's recital (Fri 28 Apr) spans the avant-garde across the 20th Century. She performs Erwin Schulhoff's Dadaist 1919 Sonata Erotica, in which the female vocalist performs an org*sm on stage, music written by or inspired by Cathy Berberian, including her 1966 work based on comic book sounds, Stripsody, and settings of Walt Whitman by George Crumb and Oliver Knussen.

Five leading artists, tenor Mark Padmore, baritone Roderick Williams, pianist Julius Drake and the actors Rory Kinnear and Pandora Colin, perform poetry and music side-by-side exploring Shakespeare's idea of the seven ages of man, taken from the famous "All the world's a stage..." soliloquy from his play Much Ado About Nothing.

Mezzo-contralto Elaine Mitchener will become the first female soloist to perform Peter Maxwell Davies's operatic monodrama Eight Songs for a Mad King when she joins forces with the leading contemporary music ensemble Apartment House for a late-night concert (Fri 26 May).

Tenor Christoph Prégardien gives three very distinct programmes focused on Hanns Eisler (Mon 3 Jul), settings of Goethe (Wed 5 Jul) and Handel's heyday in London (Fri 7 Jul) and Handel is the focus of the tenor Michael Spyres concert with baroque ensemble Il Pomo d'Oro (Sun 21 May).

Choral

Wigmore Hall presents two special concerts at St James's, Spanish Place, a short walk from the Hall in Marylebone. Solomon's Knot, working with the stage director John La Bouchardière, will perform Bach's St Matthew Passion (Mon 19 Jun), with an approach more akin to innovative live theatre than traditional choral performance and Le Concert Spirituel performs Handel's Coronation Anthems and Te Deum.

The Irish Baroque Orchestra performs the original 1742 version of Handel's Messiah (Sun 2 Apr), which in that year received its World Premèire in Dublin, and The English Concert and Harry Bicket perform highlights from Handel's opera Ariodante (Mon 24 Apr).

Easter at Wigmore Hall sees the viol consort Fretwork perform the St Matthew Passion of Bach's predecessor Johann Sebastiani on Good Friday (Fri 7 Apr).

On the 400th anniversary of his death, The Cardinall's Musick performs all three of William Byrd's Catholic Mass settings (Tue 4 Jul), which were written by the composer, himself a covert-Catholic, for clandestine performance during the period of Catholic persecution under Elizabeth I, when Catholic Mass was banned and Priests regularly executed.

String Quartets

Twenty-six string quartets appear at Wigmore Hall in the summer season. Cuarteto Casals will perform three concerts (Sat 3-Mon 5 Jun), each with a performance of one of Haydn's opus 20 string quartets. Associate Artists the Takács Quartet perform works by Fanny Mendelssohn, Haydn and Schubert (Mon 15 and Wed 17 May). The Pavel Haas Quartet performs Dvořák's String Quartet in G (Thu 15 Jun) and the Jerusalem Quartet appears in Yiddish Cabaret with soprano Hila Baggio (Mon 29 May).

Two groundbreaking American string quartets take over Wigmore Hall for a day each this summer. Brooklyn Rider (Sat 8 Jul) has opened up the definition of what a string quartet should be and performs typically eclectic programmes featuring new music alongside established repertoire, here including an all-Philip Glass programme and a string quartet "envisioning" of Legendary jazz-bass Charles Mingus's Better Get Hit In Your Soul. With it mission to promote new music

JACK Quartet (Sat 22 Apr) perform avant-garde works by Erin Gee, John Zorn and Catherine Lamb, and juxtapose two Renaissance composers who were very much ahead of their time, Vincentino (1511-c.1576) who invented a microtonal keyboard and ars subtilior composer Solage, with composers of today

Chamber Ensembles

The Elias String Quartet, pianist Pavel Kolesnikov and tenor Mark Padmore perform Fauré's fiendishly complex song cycle La bonne chansons (Tue 2 May), a sea of rapid key changes and cross-referencing of musical themes between its nine songs. The Belcea Quartet and pianist Bertrand Chamayou perform Shostakovich's Piano Quartet in G minor and Franck's Piano Quartet in F minor (Thu 13 Apr). The incumbent 1st prize winners of the Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition, the Leonkoro Quartet are joined by Swedish clarinetist Martin Fröst for the Clarinet Quintets of Mozart (1789) and Brahms (1791).

Violist Lawrence Power explores the life and music of British-American violist and composer Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979) with pianist Simon Crawford-Phillips (Wed 31 May). Violinist Hilary Hahn performs with Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective (Tue 20 Jun) in an all-American programme featuring Copland and Barber, as well as be still and know, a 2015 work by Carlos Simon inspired by an interview with Oprah Winfrey, and the flexible chamber ensemble I Musicanti performs Farrenc's String Quintet and John McCabe's Sam Variations, alongside Schubert's 'Trout' Quintet

The African Concert Series

Pianist Rebeca Omordia unravels the cultural diversity of the continent of Africa in a day devoted to its music and musicians (Sat 13 May). The three programmes focus on piano music, song and chamber music and feature musicians and composers from Nigeria, Morocco, South Africa, Ghana and Burkina Faso.

Jazz and Contemporary

Legendary Jazz Bassist Christian McBride will appear at Wigmore Hall with special guests (Mon 17 Jul). He is well-known to Wigmore Hall audiences and produced a series of jazz concerts at the Hall in 2016.

Pianist Fred Hersch has been at the forefront of jazz innovation across three decades as an improviser, composer, educator, bandleader, collaborator, and recording artist. He makes his Wigmore Hall debut (Sat 27 May).

Associate Artist Nitin Sawhney performed the entirety of his critically acclaimed 1999 album Beyond Skin to a sold-out Royal Albert Hall in 2019. He reprises much of the same album for a more intimate special acoustic concert at Wigmore Hall Nitin Sawhney - Beyond Skin and Beyond, Unplugged (Thu 20 Jul).

New and Emerging Talent

Wigmore Hall has a keen history of supporting the younger generation of musicians. This summer there are public masterclasses by Christoph Prégardien (Thu 6 Jul) and Anne Sophie von Otter (Tue 20 & Thu 22 Jun) and performances by BBC Cardiff Singer of the World 2021 finalists Michael Arivony (Sun 16 Apr) and Sarah Gilford (Sun 25 Jun) and the all-female Korean Esmé Quartet (Fri 19 & Sun 21 May) which triumphed at the 2018 Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition. Wigmore Hall also hosts several Competitions, this year including the final and semi-final of the Kathleen Ferrier Awards (Tue 18 & Fri 21 Apr).

Sunday Morning Concerts

Wigmore Hall's Sunday Morning Concerts continue throughout the summer, offering an hour of music for just £16 (£14 concession), including a complimentary glass of sherry, coffee or juice. Highlights include the Busch Trio (Sun 7 May) and former BBC Young Musician of the Year, trombonist Peter Moore (Sun 16 Jul).

Wigmore Hall BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime concerts

Every Monday, BBC Radio 3 broadcasts a lunchtime concert from Wigmore Hall at 1 pm. The live audience in the Hall and thousands on their radios, and thousands more worldwide listening online can experience music from great international artists and young upcoming musicians from the BBC New Generation Artists scheme. This summer highlights include the Nash Ensemble performing Fauré's Piano Quartet No. 1 in C minor (Mon 17 Apr), violinist Alina Ibragimova and pianist Cédric Tiberghien performing Schumann Violin Sonatas (Mon 15 May).

Many concerts are streamed live and free of charge on Wigmore Hall's website. A list of forthcoming live streams from Wigmore Hall, all available on demand for between 30 to 90 days after the date of the concert, can be found here

Tickets go on general sale at 10am on Tuesday 14 February 2023 at www.wigmore-hall.org.uk.

Full concert listings for April-July 2023 at Wigmore Hall

Wigmore Hall's Summer 2023 brochure

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