Meet Jason Singh from Open Souls

Jason Singh

This guy never slows down. Constantly jet-setting around the globe from Paris to India and Australia to Scotland, Jason performs with many musicians and artists from across the world.  He has been Sound Art Resident at the V&A, collaborated with the BBC Concert Orchestra and Aldeburgh Music, and he is the UK national advocate for Sing Up. Yet despite this hectic schedule, he still finds the time to perform to the children who we reach through our Learning & Participation programme.

This morning we had the final sharing of music and poems with the kids from St Anne’s Primary School in Tower Hamlets. Jason and fellow member of Open Souls Ranjana Ghatak performed a short set of beatboxing and Indian classical singing to which the students jumped around and waved their arms to!

Open Souls have also released a free download on Soundcloud which is a must-listen; Ranjana’s sultry vocals blend perfectly with Jason’s vocal percussion and Seb’s free-flowing rhythms.

Open Souls will be performing at Bishopsgate Institute on Friday 7 June from 8.00pm-10.00pm. Tickets are £5-16 and are available on our website.

If you can’t wait until then, check out this stunning video of him performing with Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré in the grand setting of Le Trianon, a spectacular concert hall in France.

Composer and Clarinettist Mark Simpson signed to Boosey & Hawkes

You might recognise his name from BBC Young Musician or BBC Proms Young Composer competitions when he won both titles in 2006, aged 17… You might have heard that he was the recipient of the Sky Arts Futures Fund worth £30 000… You might have heard about the premiere of his piece A mirror-fragment…by the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican which received a 5* review in The Guardian… Put simply, in the last few years Mark Simpson has managed to forge an impressive reputation for himself as one of the most talented upcoming musicians out there.

His most recent achievement is a major signing to Boosey & Hawkes for which we want to wish him a huge congratulations!

Mark celebrating with the B&H promotion team.

Mark said about the publishing agreement,

It is a huge honour and an absolute privilege to be signing with Boosey & Hawkes. I grew up studying the scores of the great composers in the B&H catalogue and to now be included alongside some of my compositional heroes is a dream come true.

Having appeared as a soloist for some of the UK’s most reputed orchestras including the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and BBC Philharmonic, Mark will be performing an intimate solo recital at Hoxton Hall on Tuesday 11 June. Tickets are £15 (£11.25 jobseekers/under 26s, £5 students) and can be booked on our website.

Check out this video of Mark performing his elegant piece Echoes and Embers for BBC Radio 3.

A contemporary take on a 600 year old musical masterpiece

Interested in a sneak peek of a premiere happening this summer?

Associate Artist Scanner aka Robin Rimbaud shares with us his never-been-heard-before interpretation of John Dowland’s Lachrimae. Listen to this exclusive clip which will be performed in full with a commissioned film by Chris Turner.

Check out one of Scanner’s previous collaborations with Chris, G(O)OD+(D)EVIL, a stunningly eerie visualisation of the tensions within human identity which reached over 80 000 people last year.

The premiere will take place on Saturday 8 June at Bishopsgate Institute. Alongside, The Haxan Cloak and Computer Junk Orchestra will also perform inventive interpretations of Lachrimae in their own styles.

Tickets are £16 (£12 jobseekers/ under 26s, £5 students) and can be booked via our website.

The Orlando Consort Celebrates Their 25th Anniversary

To celebrate their 25th Anniversary, The Orlando Consort have released this short video of interviews with their four current members. Listen as they discuss their early years and plans for the future including an awe-inspiring project to record the entire collection of Machaut’s polyphonic songs for Hyperion Records.

Founded in 1988, The Orlando Consort are known for their imaginative programming and have performed all over the world including at some of London’s most loved venues Wigmore Hall and Southbank Centre.

You can catch the Consort in concert at Food, Wine & Song on Friday 7 June at Christ Church Spitalfields followed by a three-course meal at The English Restaurant for £59 all in. They’ll perform a lively programme of works from 1250-1550, including pieces by Machaut and Guillaume Dufay, making a culinary journey from medieval France to early renaissance Italy. For  a lighter evening, enjoy the music without the meal for £12.

“The Orlando Consort’s performances are staggeringly beautiful”
The Times

For the full programme please click here.

In video: Christian Curnyn and Scanner discuss their Associate Artist series

Last week, we managed to pin down two of the busiest people in the music industry, Early Opera Company’s Director Christian Curnyn and Scanner aka Robin Rimbaud, to discuss their roles as Associate Artists and their creative contributions to  our Summer Festival.

Listen as they explore their varied programmes – including a caffeinated hour of Bach’s Coffee Cantata, an opera for 0-2 year olds, collaborations with The Haxan Cloak, and a secret underground tour curated by Elizabeth Walling of Gazelle Twin – and the different ways they reinvigorate music from the past.