March 2020: Classical Music Remixed
Classical music is getting remixed, reimagined and revamped in all sorts of ways, ready to be aired in clubs, art galleries, cinemas, museums and music halls. Here are a few of the gigs and events we’d like to go to in London, Cambridge, Leeds, Glasgow, Salford, Leicester, Newport, Mold, Aberystwyth and Cardiff (probably not going to make it to them all, tbh). If you want to have a drink with us, we host monthly gatherings at Fidelio Orchestra Cafe in Clerkenwell for anyone working in classical music. Catch you on 17th March, or see you on social media @alterclassical.
9-20 March, free-£15
Leeds College of Music & Belgrave Music Hall, Leeds
The boundary-pushing Sounds Like THIS festival is on throughout March, with a whole range of pioneering music and sound art in venues across Leeds. There’s a lot of good stuff on the line-up but we particularly like the sound of the radical reinterpretation of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations by Xenia Pestova Bennett and the opera Romeo & Her Juliet, a reimagining of the classic piece with both Romeo and Juliet portrayed by women.
Sunday 29 March, 7.30pm, £13 (£6 <25s)
Omnibus Theatre, Clapham
This is St Matthew Passion as you’ve never heard it before, with choir, orchestra and electronics. Collective31 gives an innovative and imaginative reinterpretation of Bach’s monumental masterpiece written in 1727, fusing together traditional choral and electro-acoustic music. Interspersed with the traditional, iconic performance of Bach’s passion will be newly commissioned electroacoustic works inspired by and based on the original.
Friday 27 March, 7.30pm, £20
CLF Art Cafe, Peckham
Choruses and arias by 18th-century composer George Frideric Handel, remixed live with electronic music by Nico Bentley. Featuring baroque ensemble, Festival Voices chorus and a wicked dose of playfulness, Handel Remixed will challenge conventions, surprise the senses and inspire the imagination in ways the composer would no doubt have relished. The varied setlist comes from the Coronation Anthems, Jephtha and Tamerlano.
Thursday 19 March, 2pm - 8pm, £12.50
ICA, Charing Cross
Mahogany Opera’s festival is the place to hear five cross-genre works in progress from the opera and music theatre world, testing ideas that challenge and provoke. There’s also a Round Table (‘From dream to reality: how can we help new opera and music theatre to thrive in theatres and opera houses?’), and funding surgeries for artists and producers led by Arts Council England.
Wednesday 11 March, 6.30pm, £14.40 (£13.40 students)
Picturehouse, Cambridge
The Solem Quartet are bringing their cinema experience to the Cambridge Picturehouse: the soundtrack to dystopian film The Lobster (feat. Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz and Olivia Colman) is almost exclusively classical, with pieces by Shostakovich, Stravinsky and Strauss. We saw this when it was in London and thought it was hilarious, quirky and a great way to spend an evening.
Friday 13 March
MediaCityUK, Salford
BBC Radio 3 and BBC Sport are challenging members of the public to attempt to run 5K and “beat” the music of Beethoven’s epic Fifth Symphony (which lasts between 30-35 minutes), performed live by the BBC Philharmonic – and raise money for Sport Relief along the way. Be there on the day or run your own race with Radio 3 on BBC Sounds.
Wednesday 11 March, 7.30pm - 10pm, £10 (£5 students)
The Glad Cafe, Glasgow
It’s the very first OVER / AT gig from a brand-new series bringing together new music from the trans community. Tonight’s programme features trans classical voices (speaking, singing, silent), with works including John Cage’s 4’33” reimagined as an intersectional protest, and Sarah Hennies’ Contralto, exploring transfeminine identity through the voice. The gig is BSL interpreted, and the venue offers gender neutral toilets and wheelchair access.
Friday 20 March, 8pm, £15
Cutty Sark, Greenwich
Go below deck on the Cutty Sark to hear the BBC’s professional chamber choir and cellist Robin Michael perform the beautifully haunting music of iconic composer John Tavener: Song for Athene (heard at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales) and Syvati, both written in the 90s. Also programmed is music by living British composers Rolf Hind and Judith Weir.
Friday 20 March, 7.30pm-9.00pm, £12 (£5 16-25s)
Tate Britain, Pimlico
Taking its cue from the British Baroque: Power and Illusion exhibition, this newly commissioned live sound performance takes you on an immersive journey through musical styles more than 300 years apart. In the final room of the exhibition you’ll find an intimate reimagining of English baroque music through a heady combination of live instrumentals, analogue synths and electronics by Benjamin Tassie.
25 March - 4 April, 7pm - 9pm, £25
CLF Art Cafe, Peckham
The Opera Story’s new production is being performed in the round in the club closest to Peckham Rye station. It retells the Greek myth of Pandora’s Box with new music by Alex Woolf and a libretto by Dominic Kimberlin. Follow the story of these five friends who are about to learn they did not know each other so well after all. Secrets don’t stay secrets for long!
25 March - 4 April, 7.30pm, £12.50-£30 (£5-£17.50 students)
Wilton’s Music Hall, Whitechapel
Any chance to visit Wilton’s, the world’s oldest and last surviving grand music hall, is a treat, and especially so when it plays host to a new opera production. OperaGlass Works presents Britten’s 20th-century work The Turn of the Screw, a haunting, ambiguous telling of innocence and corruption. Set in an old English country house, the housekeeper and two young orphaned children welcome an eager new governess when she arrives from London to look after them and a ghostly tale unfolds.
Wednesdays 4, 11, 18, 25 March, 6-7pm, free
Candid Arts, Angel
There’s a little-known art gallery/cafe in a hidden spot behind Angel Tube station, and it’s playing host to a series of informal chamber concerts with music by Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Ravel. Have a drink and meet the performers afterwards at the bar at this rush-hour concert, perfect for de-stressing after work before going on to dinner on Upper Street.
Sunday 1 March, 12pm, free
Cafe Oto, Dalston
Come and take part in a participatory performance and recording session of this legendary and rarely performed work. Conceived by John Cage in 1969 as an audience participation event, the score calls for the performance space to be filled with 12 record players and hundreds of records. The audience are then encouraged, in the manner of DJs, to make their own selections and play the records freely, thus performing the work. In this way, a new music emerges from the simultaneous, and ever-changing mix of recorded sound.
27 February - 27 March
Newport, London, Mold, Aberystwyth, Cardiff
Composer Philip Venables and director Ted Huffman examine the real-life tragedy of Russian teenage runaways Denis Muravyov and Katya Vlasova. Dubbed a modern-day Romeo and Juliet, they broadcast their forbidden final days together on social media. And rightly or wrongly, the public clicked, watched and responded. Splicing verbatim text, video, music and theatre, Denis & Katya explores how stories are shaped and shared in our age of trolls, conspiracy theories, fake news, and 24/7 digital connection. What makes you click?
Thursday 5 & 19 March, 1pm - 2pm, £14 (some free tickets to <25s)
New Walk Museum, Leicester
This Leicester festival includes hour-long lunchbreak concerts in the beautiful Victorian Art Gallery at New Walk Museum, each of which features music by a non-male composer. In March, the Amatis Piano Trio plays Moorlands by Swedish composer Andrea Tarrodi, and guitarist Sean Shibe plays Serenade by Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, alongside music by Bach, Shostakovich and Ravel.
Tuesday 24 March, 7.30pm, £17-22.50 (£5 14-25s)
Barbican Centre, Barbican
Richard King’s 2019 book The Lark Ascending is re-told through a blend of music, visuals, spoken word and dance from a cross-genre mix of artists. Performances from musicians featured in the book are punctuated by readings from it, with video direction by Rob St John. There’s a new arrangement of Vaughan Williams’s piece which gave the book its name, plus a set by Deep Throat Choir and Arthur Jeffes performing a selection of Penguin Cafe Orchestra material.
Thursday 12 March, 8pm, £12 (£5 students)
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
The Solem Quartet are playing in the inspiring setting of Kettle’s Yard, a unique house in Cambridge containing a collection of modern art. They’ve lined up music by John Luther Adams, an American counter-cultural hero. In the 1970s he dropped out of mainstream Californian life and vanished into the Alaskan wilderness, but in 2014 his originality was finally acknowledged when he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Also on the programme is Cassandra Miller’s Warblework, which contains dreamy transcriptions of Canadian birdsong, and Kaare Husby’s 2nd String Quartet, a beautiful cacophony of avian melodies.
Hannah Fiddy is a creative entrepreneur, developing new audiences for classical music. She has created and promoted numerous concerts outside of traditional spaces, including warehouses, pubs, clubs, museums, hospitals, prisons and even in Primark. Hannah also hosts monthly drinks for the classical music industry and runs a choir in Stoke Newington. Her alter ego is the Founder of London Flashmob, producing quirky events from wedding proposals to cultural pranks for up to 1,000 people.
Follow Hannah on Twitter @Hannah_Fiddy.
Photo credits: Classical Remix by Dimitri Djuric; Wilton’s by Paul Marc Mitchel; Sounds Like THIS by maskofstorrow