Ligeti Quartet return to Kings Place with a showcase of new music by Anna Meredith and Christian Mason, two of the most influential and celebrated composers on the London scene.

Anna Meredith MBE needs no introduction to either classical or electronic audiences. Ligeti Quartet and Anna have collaborated regularly over the last decade and are currently recording a new album of her music. At Kings Place, they will perform her first string quartet Songs for the M8 as well more recent works such as the raving and swarming Tuggemo. This concert will also feature the first outing of new arrangements from Anna’s much 2016 album Varmints, put together by Richard Jones and his Ligeti Quartet colleagues.

This concert will be also be something of a post-launch party for the quartet’s album Songbooks Vol. 1, released to critical acclaim in October 2020 on the Nonclassical label. Christian Mason’s first two songbooks are centred around vocal traditions from Tuva and Sardinia: throat or overtone singing in which resonances of simultaneous multiple pitches can be produced in the voice. Each ‘song’ explores these techniques on bowed strings, through re-imagined traditional melodies. This is music which is highly experimental at heart, but will have you singing it back to yourself on the journey home.
Writing in the Telegraph, Ivan Hewett described it as ‘a heartening reminder that modern music too can refresh the spirits and take us out of ourselves’.

Thanks to Arts Council England, Britten-Pears Foundation, City Music Foundation, Kronos Quartet and Fifty for the Future, RVW Trust, St John’s Smith Square, University of Sheffield.

-
London Unwrapped
Sounds of a Migrant City | Throughout 2021

London has been a melting pot since its earliest days, both a place of refuge, a glittering cultural nexus, the most cosmopolitan of all British cities. This year-long series aims to delve into four hundred years of London’s musical past, with its dazzling display and troubling undercurrents, its openness, opportunities and barriers. The series highlights a music story that always been driven forward, disrupted, shaped and inspired by outsiders and immigrant communities, and showcases the diversity of creativity in the city today. Featuring artists in residence Iestyn Davies and Cassie Kinoshi, Allan Clayton, Elena Urioste, Aurora Orchestra, The Sixteen, Phantasm and many more.