September 2021: Concert Picks
Make the most of lockdown lifting by booking yourself in for the ultimate treat: live music. Here are the concerts taking place across the UK that caught our eye this month, including the UK’s first women and non-binary string orchestra, and the first gig of a brand-new collective. If you enjoy our content, please consider supporting us by buying us a cuppa on Ko-fi. Thank you 😘
Friday 17 September, 8pm, £9-£13
Battersea Arts Centre, London
A new group we can get behind: the UK’s first women and non-binary string orchestra. Her Ensemble makes its debut to celebrate over 2000 years of female composers. As a quick stat for context, just 5% of the classical music pieces programmed worldwide are composed by women. Merging aspects from both classical and pop scenes, the mould-breaking group will perform a range of music combined with artistic lighting to reinvent the classical concert experience and canon of classical music as we know it.
Thursday 9 September, 8pm, £10
St Giles Cripplegate, Barbican
“Classical music unboringed”. This is the Rothko Collective’s debut gig: contemporary music, lighting, meditation and beer. The group’s aim is to redefine classical music, to take what is there and expand on it, make it more exciting, more accessible, and more relevant. Fusing music of the past and the present day with lighting design, the gig will both fragment the norms of a classical music concert, yet provide space for reflection and meditation. Ft music by Caroline Shaw, Arvo Pärt, Anne Müller, and some world premieres.
Friday 17 September, 4pm & 6.30pm, free
Knowle West, Bristol
This one isn’t classical but it is orchestral and it looks like just the thing we all need right now. SMOOSH! brings a 70-piece wind and brass band and a troop of dancers performing rip-roaring pop karaoke tunes on the move for a celebratory mobile street party. It’s an antidote to a year+ of lockdown restrictions, created by Paraorchestra, a professional ensemble of disabled and non-disabled musicians. You’re invited onto the street to dance and sing alone in magnificent, cacophonous, communal karaoke. Expect upbeat tracks by Massive Attack, Basement Jaxx, Fat Boy Slim and Adele.
14-15 September, 7pm, £5-£10
Bold Tendencies, Peckham
The Multi-Story Orchestra is known for being the first orchestra based in a car park. This is their first large-scale performance in over two years, bringing together orchestra, choir and three opera soloists. They’re performing an epic piece imagining the world recovering from climate change and being reborn again in the future. Music by Kate Whitley and poet Laura Attridge.
24 September - 2 October, £10-£25
Bristol, Stockport, Farsley, Birkenhead, London
In the dark and lonely depths of the Pacific Ocean, the whales are singing. Listen closely. Can you hear them? Manchester Collective brings together a strange and unsettling set of otherworldly music, including a meditative seascape for live electronics and strings by Alex Groves, and an ecstatic piece by Molly Joyce that presents the solo piano as a celestial, supercharged, percussive force of nature. This is the first Manchester Collective tour to include an intimate gig in a restaurant (Where The Light Gets In, Stockport).
The Swedish Church, Edgware Road
Saturday 18 September, 7pm, £12-£15
The United Strings of Europe (one of the artists we represent) has emerged as one of the leading string bands in the UK. Combining instrumental virtuosity with compelling programming, they have been celebrated for their honest, emotional performances. Go and hear this group of young musicians perform Scandinavian folk tunes and music by Mendelssohn, Strauss and Boccherini as part of the Northern Star Festival.
Friday 24 September, 8pm, £20 (<30s £8.50)
Kings Place, King’s Cross
Southbank Sinfonia’s musicians will be your guides for an orchestral tour of London’s most musical houses – and the scores that were created within. From the Belgravia terrace in which Mozart composed his First Symphony to the Marylebone flat where Jimi Hendrix worked on ‘Purple Haze’, London’s buildings have housed countless musical revolutions. Explore an exhilaratingly eclectic catalogue of music written in the capital over the past four centuries, accompanied by specially created projections that link each piece back to the very building their composer lived and worked in.
Monday 6 September, 7.45pm,
St Augustine’s Church, Luton
A mixtape concert, interspersing movements from Christian Mason’s Tuvan Songbook with other types of ‘song’ – the translucent modernism of Ruth Crawford Seeger, the electronic and pop aesthetic of Tanya Tagaq, and Beethoven's highly original Cavatina. It’s performed for you by the Ligeti Quartet, which champions today’s most exciting composers.
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.