The London Sinfonietta in 50 Objects

This is where it all begins (leaving aside some months of preparation). A new group. A new conductor. A new way of doing music, mixing the very new with the repertory of Classical and Romantic pieces for small orchestra: two regions of the musical garden that stand neglected. At least, that’s the guiding idea to begin with. The London Sinfonietta will soon discover – indeed, it will soon create – an audience for new music alone. Hans Werner Henze has long been a major European figure, but his music is not yet much played in Britain. John Tavener, 23 at the time, is a total unknown. The Whale causes a sensation, jump-starting his career and the London Sinfonietta's.

Object featured: programme from the London Sinfonietta’s first concert, 24 January 1968
 

Harrison Birtwistle is the London Sinfonietta’s second big discovery, and his Verses for Ensembles makes as big a splash as The Whale. It thoroughly re-conceives the concert platform as theatre, as arena, with solo trumpeters standing to pronounce signals and fanfares while woodwind players move from sombre low instruments to incisive high ones, answering or folding into statements from brass or percussion. The London Sinfonietta is also a big discovery for Birtwistle, who will go on finding new things to say for this kind of formation, his commissions by the ensemble numbering more than 20 and including some of his most powerful works.

Object featured: London Sinfonietta Concert Diary, 1969

The signature is Ringo Starr’s, on a contract he makes to record John Tavener’s The Whale, in the first of the London Sinfonietta’s adventures with popular musicians. Tavener comes from a long line of high-end builders, the family company run at this point by his brother Roger. Roger knows The Beatles, and is renovating Ringo’s home in Highgate. Introductions have been made. Tavener the composer has dinner with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, swapping tapes, and meets Ringo at his brother’s house. ‘My brother had prepared caviar,’ as he later recalls, ‘but Ringo just wanted a jam sandwich. We finally agreed to record The Whale at that meeting.’

Object featured: recording contract between Ringo Starr and Nicholas Snowman, former General Manager of the London Sinfonietta
 

The British première of György Ligeti’s brilliant, fantastical Chamber Concerto, in mid-January, initiates a long, international association between the London Sinfonietta and the great composer. There is a repeat performance at the International Society for Contemporary Music festival in London a few months later, and by 1976 the ensemble has not only played the piece around the globe but recorded it and other pieces for a Decca LP. During this same period the composition influences what is becoming the regular London Sinfonietta line-up, of around fourteen soloists on a full array of orchestral instruments. Ligeti’s Hamburg Concerto, the last work he finishes, will also be introduced to the UK by the London Sinfonietta.

Object featured: photograph of György Ligeti and former Artistic Director Michael Vyner attending a rehearsal at Southbank Centre's Queen Elizabeth Hall

Having made his London Sinfonietta debut the year before, Luciano Berio takes the ensemble to Lisbon and Berlin, besides appearing with them again in London and making a recording with his former wife (and continuing muse) Cathy Berberian, of a new piece written for her: Recital.

Over the next few years there will be more tours with Berio, to Germany, to Nice, and to the composer’s home town of Imperia. Often the programme will include his Folk Songs, again with Berberian, or his Dantean musical journey Laborintus II. In later London concerts he will bring the London Sinfonietta his moving memorial to Berberian, Requies, as well as his guitar concerto Chemins V.

Object featured: Berlin Tour Schedule for Berio's Folk Songs, 5 & 6 November 1972

Never a composer to aim low, Karlheinz Stockhausen in his piece for the London Sinfonietta has the musicians mirror the origin of the universe, fanning out up the side aisles of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, blown by Ylem, the cosmic wind. This is, happily, one of the first of the ensemble’s moments captured on television, and the entire concert programme is also recorded for LP release by Deutsche Grammophon. Apart from a repeat performance in Florence a few days after the London event, Stockhausen never performs again with the London Sinfonietta, which goes on keeping pace with him, giving the British premières of Der Jahreslauf (at a 70th Birthday concert) and Fünf Sternzeichen.

Object featured: LP of Stockhausen's Ylem, recorded by the London Sinfonietta in 1973

The year begins on a peak, with the world premiere at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 4 January of a concert-length work by Hans Werner Henze: Voices. Setting a miscellany of poems in a miscellany of styles, by turns vociferously political and ardently lyrical, this is a work of its hour, the time when the revolutionary spirit of 1968 is ebbing, its passing remembered with regret, not least by this composer. Voices is an instant classic. By September the London Sinfonietta, always with Henze and the original soloists, Rose Taylor and Paul Sperry, has taken the work to Milan, Turin, Naples, Wiesbaden and Berlin, and it is to remain one of the ensemble’s staples.

Object featured: Framed poster promoting the London Sinfonietta's performance of Voices at the Teatro alla Scala, Milan on 26 March 1974

After Hans Werner Henze and Earle Brown, Luciano Berio is the third composer from abroad to accept a London Sinfonietta commission – a testimony to the ensemble’s by-now solid international reputation. The result is a lively addition to Berio’s sequence of concertos: Chemins IV for oboe and strings, which brings a visit to the London Sinfonietta from Heinz Holliger. Normally, of course, the ensemble fields soloists from its own ranks, but on occasion it will welcome a musician having a particular association with the composer, as with the viola player Aldo Bennici in another Berio piece (Voci) or the flautist Aurèle Nicolet in one by Holliger (Scardanelli-Zyklus).

Object featured: printing plate for photo of Luciano Berio

The year of Iannis Xenakis’s Phlegra is also the year when the first of the London Sinfonietta’s many spin-offs is founded: the Ensemble InterContemporain, at IRCAM in Paris, the institution to which the London Sinfonietta’s founding manager Nicholas Snowman had transferred.  Xenakis’s piece exemplifies what makes the London Sinfonietta model so attractive, featuring a group of soloists such as could be used by composers in endlessly various ways. The letter from Greek composer Iannis Xenakis to Michael Vyner shows the warm relationships the London Sinfonietta’s current manager has established with leading composers around the world: Hans Werner Henze, Luciano Berio, Gyorgy Ligeti, Toru Takemitsu, Hans Abrahamsen, Elliott Carter and many more.

Object featured: correspondence between Iannis Xenakis and former Artistic Director Michael Vyner on Phlegra

Early this year the London Sinfonietta participates for the first time in the Arts Council’s Contemporary Music Network, taking music by Robin Holloway, Iain Hamilton and Kurt Weill to venues in Farnham, Huddersfield, Leeds and Liverpool. Gigs outside London have been on the ensemble’s agenda from the first, along with foreign tours, but the CMN gives the ensemble the opportunity to maintain regular contact with audiences around the country. CMN tours happen at least annually throughout the next decade, and less regularly thereafter, allowing, for example, Olivier Messiaen’s Des canyons aux étoiles… to be heard by the widest possible public.

Object featured: Arts Council Contemporary Network promotional leaflet from 1977

In early December, fresh from a tour that took music by Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies to Germany, the London Sinfonietta launches its Schubert/Webern series. Over the next six weeks the entire output of Anton Webern is presented, in the sympathetic company of less familiar works by Franz Schubert. This extraordinary cycle, the brainchild of David Atherton, reveals much about both composers and provides a key example for later grand exercises in taking stock, such as the Manchester School series of 1982 or the enormous Stravinsky centenary retrospectives given that same year in Germany and in London, or the Ravel/Varèse festival of 1983/84.

Object featured: Schubert/Webern series book

Having first appeared with the ensemble at the previous year’s Aldeburgh Festival, Oliver Knussen responds to a London Sinfonietta commission with Coursing, performed at the end of a concert conducted by another fairly recent recruit, Simon Rattle. Scored for the basic fourteen-piece formation (woodwinds, brass, strings, percussion, piano), Coursing is short and precise but also hectic and heroically difficult. It gives the London Sinfonietta a work-out, and a calling card they will soon take to Germany, Argentina, Sweden, France and Switzerland. It also introduces them to a top-flight composer/conductor with whom they are to work for decades.

Object featured: rehearsal schedule for the premiere of Oliver Knussen's Coursing, 14 April 1979 and (right) stage arrangements for Birtwistle's Carmen Arcadiae Mecanicae Perpetuum, Falla's Harpsichord Concerto, Knussen's Coursing, Falla's psyche, Goehr's Lyric Pieces and Falla's Master Peter's Puppet Show

The release on LP of Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy makes a major contemporary opera generally available. Quite apart from that, the album sets the seal on the London Sinfonietta’s close association with a composer who has completed his seventh score for them. It also marks a high point in the ensemble’s relationship with the recording industry, and in particular Decca Records. That company has already been responsible for a dozen London Sinfonietta releases, including discs devoted to Hans Werner Henze, Witold Lutosławski, György Ligeti and Brian Ferneyhough. The work of the London Sinfonietta, and the music they are committed to, can thus reach individuals and radio authorities around the globe.

Object featured: Master tapes from the London Sinfonietta's recording of Punch and Judy © DECCA

On the run-up to the composer’s centenary next year, the London Sinfonietta and conductor David Atherton gain the privilege of performing Stravinsky’s Les Noces from two early drafts only recently released for performance. The concert, on January 30, places the definitive score between the original orchestral version, never before heard in Europe, and the composer’s second attempt, with percussion and keyboards only. Apart from anything else, the event signals how the ensemble plays a role in constantly reviewing the founding modernists, and has done so from when it was new – and some of the works it was playing, like Stravinsky’s Canticum sacrum, were new also.

Object featured: brochure detailing concerts in the London Sinfonietta's Stravinsky festival, 1981

George Benjamin conducted the London Sinfonietta in his Octet at the Bath Festival two years ago, but it is the first performance of At First Light, commissioned by the ensemble and conducted by Simon Rattle at St John’s Smith Square, that makes him an essential member of the London Sinfonietta family. Startlingly original and evocative in the sounds it obtains from the usual group of soloists, it also becomes essential to the repertory for the new-music ensembles arising in the London Sinfonietta’s wake. Benjamin is to work with several of these, but most of all with the London Sinfonietta, especially during the two decades from 1990–2010, conducting his own music and that of his heroes: Olivier Messiaen, Gryörgy Ligeti, Pierre Boulez and Gerard Grisey.

Object featured: handwritten score of At First Light, centre of Movement III, courtesy of George Benjamin and Askonas Holt

The appointment of Gillian Moore as education officer opens whole new avenues by which the London Sinfonietta can propagate contemporary music. Bridges are built between the professional musical world and schools, often schools lacking strong musical traditions of their own. It is a two-way process, with instrumentalists and composers visiting schools to work with children and teachers, and those children and teachers invited to rehearsals and performances, often bringing their own work, related to what is being played at the particular London Sinfonietta concert. It is also an initiative followed and imitated by other cultural institutions.

Object featured: photographs from the London Sinfonietta's early education projects

The London Sinfonietta was not yet a year old when it offered its first staged production, of Stravinsky’s Renard, and was also in the pit for Alexander Goehr’s Arden Must Die at Sadler’s Wells back in 1974. The collaboration now with Opera Factory, run by director David Freeman, makes opera a much more regular feature of the ensemble’s calendar for several years. It all begins with Michael Tippett’s The Knot Garden, in a year when the ensemble also plays for the Glyndebourne production of Knussen’s Where the Wild Things Are. Nor does opera ever quite go away. There will be productions in the next century of, for example, pieces by George Benjamin and Harrison Birtwistle.

Object featured: document announcing the partnership between the London Sinfonietta and Opera Factory

A concert in December at the Royal Festival Hall’s Music Box has some new names on the programme, both senior – Conlon Nancarrow, whose wizard Study No. 7 will be one of the ensemble’s party pieces in the 21st century – and junior. Judith Weir, bringing her sprightly, sparkling Serbian Cabaret, is young enough to have been marked in her teens by London Sinfonietta concerts, records and broadcasts. So of course is Oliver Knussen, conducting, and by now very much a London Sinfonietta veteran and mainstay. And so is Hans Abrahamsen, who earlier in the year responded to an LS commission with his lustrously poetic Märchenbilder. A new generation is arriving.

Object featured: Response Festival flyer. Works included Oliver Knussen's Ophelia Dances, Conlon Nancarrow's Piece for Chamber Orchestra and Judith Weir's A Serbian Cabaret and many others.

In April-May Channel Four broadcasts 'Sinfonietta', a series of six television programmes, devised and hosted by pianist Paul Crossley. While commentary and illustration provide context, the focus in each programme is on the music, performed by the ensemble, from their repertoire of 20th-century classics. Arnold Schoenberg (Pierrot lunaire) and Igor Stravinsky (Renard) bookend the series, around Alban Berg, Edgard Varèse, Olivier Messiaen, Charles Ives and Anton Webern. Next year Channel Four will move on to Harrison Birtwistle’s television opera Yan Tan Tethera, again with the London Sinfonietta. Thresholds are breached, for audiences hundreds of times larger than could fit into a concert hall.

Object featured: VHS tapes of the 'Sinfonietta' series on Channel 4

With the arrival of what are called at the time ‘minicomputers’, digital technology is now playing a much bigger part in new music, used in real time in the concert. The London Sinfonietta’s Electric Weekend signals this, with two pieces created at IRCAM, Pierre Boulez’s computer music institute in Paris. Tristan Murail’s Dèsintégrations brings to the ensemble a classic of emergent spectralism, while Jonathan Harvey’s Bhakti has electronic and instrumental sounds dancing on the edge of nirvana. Soon there will be more from IRCAM, notably George Benjamin’s Antara. Meanwhile, Brian Ferneyhough’s Time and Motion Study III has a cellist fully wired up.

Object featured: Rehearsal and Concert Schedule from the Electric Weekend festival

The ensemble celebrates its 20th birthday with a bumper concert at the Royal Festival Hall. Every aspect of the London Sinfonietta’s work is engaged: fostering young composers (Simon Holt) and established figures (Harrison Birtwistle, Hans Werner Henze), acknowledging ancestors (Olivier Messiaen, Igor Stravinsky, Anton Webern, Kurt Weill), performing opera (Maurice Ravel’s L’Heure espagnole), connecting with popular music (Paul Whiteman), involving schools. Later in the year there are visits to IRCAM, Milan, Lisbon, Aldeburgh, New York, Berlin, Turku, and Palermo. Luciano Berio and Witold Lutosławski arrive for concerts. Toru Takemitsu comes with a new piece. Business as usual.

Object featured: 20th Anniversary Concert Programme Book

In the weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the London Sinfonietta plays in Warsaw for the first time and, back in London, introduces a recent work by the Hungarian master György Kurtág. The ensemble has already given several performances of his portrait of a woman on the brink, Messages of the Late Miss R.V. Troussova. Now comes his blown-apart piano concerto, …quasi una fantasia…, where the soloist plays with and against instrumental groups placed around the auditorium. Events over the coming decade, including a 70th Birthday weekend, will add other pieces for scattered ensembles, notably a stammered-out setting of Samuel Beckett’s What is the Word.

Object featured: Archive copy of the score for György Kurtag's ...quasi una fantasia...

The music of Tōru Takemitsu, floating between French modernism and Japanese tradition, has been part of the London Sinfonietta’s life for several years. Rain Coming, the first piece he wrote for the ensemble, has never been absent from its music stands for long. Now in November comes a 60th-birthday celebration, with Kent Nagano conducting Takemitsu’s two London Sinfonietta pieces, both characteristically based on nature, the second being Tree Line. Takemitsu himself is there, diminutive of stature but a luminous presence, as he will be during the ensemble’s tour of Japan in 1992 and will be again, in spirit, at his memorial festival in 1998.

Object featured: Concert information for Toru Takemitsu's 60th Birthday Concert, November 1990

An Elliott Carter festival on the South Bank has the London Sinfonietta playing two concerts, including the British premiere of the composer’s Violin Concerto. Oliver Knussen, a longstanding friend and admirer, is the conductor, as at most of the Carter performances the ensemble has been giving regularly over the last decade. The relationship continues through the rest of the composer’s long life, bringing premieres of the Clarinet Concerto, ASKO Concerto, opera What Next?, piano concerto Dialogues (a London Sinfonietta commission) and song cycle In the Distances of Sleep. For Knussen’s 50th birthday in 2002, the 93-year-old writes a warm viola-bassoon duo, Au Quai.

Object featured: scorebook to Elliott Carter's Violin Concerto

Holy minimalism does not figure on the London Sinfonietta schedule until 1989, when scores by Arvo Pärt and Henryk Górecki are presented. Robert Hurwitz, head of Nonesuch Records, is there for the Górecki/Schnittke Weekend. He is also bowled over by Górecki’s Third Symphony, or Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, so a recording is arranged with Dawn Upshaw as soloist, takes place in May 1991, and is released a year later. Soon afterwards Classic FM goes on air, with an enthusiasm for the Górecki that drives sales up past the million mark. In June 1993 the London Sinfonietta will give two performances with Upshaw at a sold-out Barbican Hall.

Object featured: BPI Gold Disc Awarded for the London Sinfonietta's Recording of Henryk Górecki's Third Symphony

In May Witold Lutosławski returns to conduct an 80th-birthday concert. He has been programmed by the London Sinfonietta since its second year, and was here for his 60th birthday and his 70th, when he came with a new piece, dedicated to Michael Vyner and the ensemble: Chain 1. He was back in 1990 to conduct that piece at the memorial concert for Vyner, when the ensemble took over the Royal Opera House. Iridescent in harmony, complex but punctiliously contoured in texture, his music might be what Ravel would be writing now. It is music that at once challenges and honours the musicians, who respond to him warmly, as well as with their customary professionalism.

Object featured: programme from Witold Lutosławski's 80th Birthday Concert

Thomas Adès becomes the first composer younger than the London Sinfonietta (three years younger) to be commissioned by them. The resulting work, Living Toys, fits brilliantly into the ensemble’s living history, after Ligeti, after Stravinsky. It has its first performance at a concert in February that introduces another composer to the ensemble: Julian Anderson. Both will be London Sinfonietta regulars henceforth, together again, for example, twenty years later in Moscow, Vladimir Jurowski conducting. Adès also appears now and then as a conductor, notably to bring Jean Barraqué’s music to the London Sinfonietta.

Object featured: Thomas Adès' manuscript of Living Toys © Faber Music

In November Markus Stenz, having taken over as Music Director the year before, conducts a concert spotlighting two composers not much played by the ensemble hitherto: Morton Feldman and Luigi Nono. Masters of opposed extremes, of intense calm and calm intensity, and both of them dying in their 60s, their music is speaking ever more loudly as the century ends. Especially their late music. Feldman’s quiet irregular patterns are at once static and alive with movement. As for Nono, the London Sinfonietta’s involvement with his music reaches towards a climax in 2008 with two performances at the Royal Festival Hall of his Prometeo, an elegy for protest.

Object featured: concert programme for Nono & Feldman, November 1995

Gnarly Buttons, commissioned from John Adams, provides a crazy-beautiful, extravert-introvert concerto for Michael Collins, the London Sinfonietta’s clarinettist for the last 13 years. Adams’ music has been appearing regularly on the ensemble’s programmes since 1988, and the following year he himself arrived to conduct a concert. That began a relationship that has now gone on through performances of his opera Nixon in China in Paris, recordings for Nonesuch, and a Prom. Gnarly Buttons proves a stayer. There will be again a Nonesuch recording and a Prom very soon, and it will pop back up at the Royal Festival Hall in 2001 and in New York two years later.

Object featured: a fax from composer John Adams to former General Manager Paul Meecham regarding the commission of Gnarly Buttons

The State of the Nation is instigated; a concert series that will run annually for six years, focusing on younger British composers. Among those brought forward this time are some already familiar to London Sinfonietta audiences (Philip Cashian, David Sawer) and some new faces. Nearly all of them will contribute to the ensemble’s concert programmes on into the next century. Coming three months before the election that will bring Tony Blair to power, this first State of the Nation seems to have a message, conveyed even in some of the works’ titles: Sam Hayden’s Time is Money, Fraser Trainer’s True to Life, Keith Johnson’s Sabotage, Django Bates’s Some More Upsets….

Object featured: London Sinfonietta's Evening Standard Award for Outstanding Ensemble, received in 1997 in part due to the State of the Nation series

It is great fortune that brings the London Sinfonietta the chance to work with Gérard Grisey, and to commission what will be one of the last great works of the 20th century: Quatre Chants pour franchir le seuil (Four Songs for Crossing the Threshold). It is a less happy circumstance that will take him from the world before the first performance, to be conducted by his friend George Benjamin, with Valdine Anderson the soprano soloist. This is a work that seems to have been composed on the threshold of which it speaks, a voyage towards death, scary, strange and ultimately appeased. 

Object featured: letter from Gérard Grisey to Cathy Graham, former Managing Director of the London Sinfonietta, September 1998

In October, just ahead of the composer’s centenary year, Kurt Weill’s small-scale dramatic pieces Der Jasager and Happy End are performed in concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Also this year comes a new recording of Der Silbersee, Weill’s last big work before fleeing Nazi Germany, with the London Sinfonietta conducted by Markus Stenz. Weill’s music is in the ensemble’s bloodstream – it had been playing it since 1972. A re-release on CD of the legendary Deutsche Grammophon set, including a stunning account of the Violin Concerto from Nona Liddell, the ensemble’s long-term first violinist, wins a Grand Prix du Disque.

Object featured: the London Sinfonietta's Grand Prix du Disque award for its recording of Kurt Weill's Berliner Requiem and Violin Concerto

A new millennium. A new art gallery – one of the largest in the world in fact. The UK's leading contemporary classical ensemble hand-in-hand with its new leading arts space. The work: Harrison Birtwistle's site-specific 17 Tate Riffs, which places fifteen players (woodwind, brass and percussion) around Tate's now-iconic turbine hall. This is the first collaboration with an art gallery in what becomes a key part of London Sinfonietta programming. And with some very special guests present, including Her Majesty the Queen. 

Objects featured: photos from the opening of Tate Modern, 11 May 2000, featuring London Sinfonietta players beneath Louise Bourgeois' spider sculpture Maman and a press release detailing the performance.

In a year that begins with an Alfred Schnittke weekend and finishes with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting Magnus Lindberg, the London Sinfonietta takes part in celebrations to mark the 50th birthday of the Royal Festival Hall. The composers are roughly of the same generation as the building: John Adams, Gerald Barry, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Oliver Knussen (not conducting this time; that honour goes to Martyn Brabbins, another longstanding friend of the ensemble). Irishman Barry has been commissioned to engage children’s choirs from around London. His choice of text for them to sing, ‘God Save the Queen’, results in a piece that almost brings the house back down again.

Object featured: programme from the Royal Festival Hall's 50th Anniversary Concert

Sporadically present on the London Sinfonietta schedule for twenty years hitherto, Louis Andriessen now has his year, with performances of two commissions. His Very Sharp Trumpet Sonata is one of a dozen messages addressed to Oliver Knussen for his 50th Birthday Concert. The other piece is much more substantial: La Passione, a surrealist vision with solo violin and voice, introduced at Southbank Centre’s Andriessen Festival that also has the ensemble playing the composer’s opera Writing to Vermeer under Reinbert de Leeuw. La Passione gets a repeat in New York two years later, and Andriessen’s edgy music stays fully part of the ensemble’s ever-growing repertoire.

Object featured: scorebook to Louis Andriessen's La Passione, published by Boosey & Hawkes

Continuing its conversation with music from the other side of the road, the London Sinfonietta brings a startling programme to Southbank Centre’s first Ether Festival. Two ‘regular’ composers, David Horne and Morgan Hayes, each of them already having a history with the ensemble, provide arrangements of electronica tracks from WARP artists: Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada and Squarepusher. The weft, as it were, is represented by John Cage, György Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen and others, while another WARP musician, Mira Calix, adds an instrumental version of her Nunu. This proves a hit, as does the whole collaboration, and paves the way for many more. 

Object featured: press cutting from a Guardian feature with Squarepusher

The WARP project continues at the second Ether Festival, and on tours to Rome and Bruges as well as various cities in England. The London Sinfonietta also begin working with Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, who brings them his first concert work: smear. The piece, of smeared pitch, smeared colour, comes from his passion for the ondes martenot, ‘the most expressive electronic instrument ever invented’. Greenwood is back with the ensemble the next year, working also with musicians from the Arab Orchestra of Nazareth on arrangements of Radiohead numbers (‘Arpeggi’ and ‘Where Bluebirds Fly’) and songs by the Arab songwriters Farid al-Atrash and Mohammed Abdel Wahab.

Object featured: photos from the London Sinfonietta's collaboration with WARP, featuring Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, singer Lubna Salame, conductor Martyn Brabbins and the Arab Orchestra of Nazareth.

Tansy Davies’s unsettling, streetwise syncopations give the London Sinfonietta new challenges and new discoveries. Two pieces by her appear on the ensemble’s programmes in quick succession: neon in London and spine, at Aldeburgh, the third of her works to be given its world premiere by the ensemble. More are to follow, making her, with Thomas Adès, Julian Anderson and Dai Fujikura, a cherished member of the London Sinfonietta’s next generation. Neon, an electric-lit nocturne,  recorded in 2005 and released on the London Sinfonietta's own label the next year, returns to the schedule several times; in London, Adelaide, Budapest, Vilnius and Riga – a prime example of the ensemble's role in taking new British music abroad.

Object featured: CD featuring recordings of Tansy Davies' neon and Stuart MacRae's Interact, the first release on the London Sinfonietta's label as part of The Jerwood Series.

The London Sinfonietta launches its own record label. Strong relationships built with major companies in the 1970s have faltered, and by now, with the rise of internet access to music, virtually foundered. NMC has taken up some of the slack where British music is concerned, putting out Harrison Birtwistle and Sandy Goehr albums featuring the London Sinfonietta, and provides an umbrella for the ensemble’s own venture. This is initiated by two releases devoted to younger Brits (Tansy Davies and Stuart MacRae on one disc, with Morgan Hayes, Jonny Greenwood and Dai Fujikura on the other) and two composers from Oliver Knussen’s A list: Toru Takemitsu and Charles Wuorinen.

Object featured: CD recording of Toru Takemitsu's Arc and Green, released on the London Sinfonietta's own label in 2006

A new score from Heiner Goebbels brings together two Southbank Centre Resident Orchestras from different sides of the musical spectrum: the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. The London Sinfonietta was playing Goebbels’s music a decade ago, and worked with a period-instrument group back in the 1970s, but Songs of Wars I Have Seen is different: an hour-long music drama needing no action. Through words by Gertrude Stein, Goebbels narrates the Second World War for a world now again at war. The OAE players are all women, and they in turn speak the texts, on a stage lit by household lamps. Behind them, the London Sinfonietta fields brass and percussion, all men. The production will travel to the US, Italy and Poland.

Object featured: table lamp used to light the set of Songs of Wars I Have Seen 

The opening of Kings Place gives the London Sinfonietta a new performing venue and office space. For the concert hall’s opening festival the ensemble offers Rock Music, Rock Art, a celebration of connections between art forms and continents. The focus is on rocks on an island in the Ugandan sector of Lake Victoria that emit tones when struck. Nigel Osborne and London Sinfonietta players have travelled to Uganda to listen and to work with local musicians. Both groups are together on stage at Kings Place in programmes that include, besides classic African-influenced pieces by Steve Reich and Iannis Xenakis, new works by Mira Calix, Tansy Davies, Nigel Osborne and the Ugandan composer Justinian Tamasuza.

Object featured: wooden carving given as a gift to the London Sinfonietta from the Ugandan musicians involved in Rock Music, Rock Art

Sonic Explorations, a three-day event programmed by Jonathan Harvey, showcases pieces by two dozen composers working with electronics. There are classics of tape music (Varèse’s Poème électronique, Ligeti’s Artikulation), but the emphasis is on electronics in live performance. Of two London Sinfonietta commissions, Dai Fujikura’s K’s Ocean has a trombonist wandering through extensions and echoes, while Claudia Molitor in It’s not quite how I remember it is an open space in which live and recorded music, speech and 3D video are all engaged. Electronics bring contact with the electronically connected present, or, in Harvey’s own music, with the divine.

Object featured: photograph of Oliver Coates performing The Room is the Resonator by David Fennessy at Sonic Explorations, Kings Place 2009

To their Experiment! Festival, scanning experimental music of several decades by  composers from the U.S. (John Cage, Steve Reich, Christian Wolff, James Tenney) and Britain, the London Sinfonietta welcome Mica Levi’s pop group Micachu and the Shapes. The relationship, requiring negotiation on both sides, gels. Out of it comes, the following year, an album, Chopped and Screwed, whose tracks are much darker than usual for the group, taken over by sinister harmonies, irregular uses of the voice or unexpected electronic interventions. For the composer, this is a step towards her acclaimed score for the film Under the Skin. For the London Sinfonietta, a conversation with the pop world is continuing.

Object featured: documentary on the collaboration between Michachu and The Shapes and the London Sinfonietta © Channel 4

In another new endeavour, Written/Unwritten, the London Sinfonietta collaborates with a group of young musicians from Kings Cross, the KX Collective, and with noted improvising artists: Nils Økland, virtuoso on the Hardanger fiddle, a Norwegian instrument with resonant extra strings, and the pianist Matthew Bourne. Musicians from the ensemble go halfway towards meeting their guests, playing, for example, string music by Stravinsky (Three Pieces for Quartet), Arvo Pärt, György Ligeti and Luciano Berio, as well as pieces by John Cage, Iannis Xenakis and Helmut Lachenmann. The written and the unwritten, the starter and the professional, are heard in alternation and at some moments together.

Object featured: Written/Unwritten promotional flyer

Up to this point the London Sinfonietta has visited almost every European country, as well as several in Latin America, plus the United States, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Now comes China, with the ensemble giving a concert at The Orange, a new cultural centre in the Sanlitun area of Beijing. The event is part of the Beijing Music Festival, whose aim is to foster connections between China and the rest of the world. On the programme, conducted by George Benjamin, are his own Into the Little Hill, a piece by his fellow Olivier Messiaen student Qigang Chen, and two modern classics: Harrison Birtwistle’s Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum and Oliver Knussen’s Songs Without Words.

Object featured: Chinese passport stamp from the London Sinfonietta's 2012 trip to Beijing.

Probably the most sought-after composer in the world, Steve Reich accepts a London Sinfonietta commission and produces Radio Rewrite. The piece maintains a relationship with the composer going back through Variations for Vibes, Piano and Strings to the 1980s, and strengthens another, this rewrite being of two Radiohead tracks; ‘Jigsaw Falling into Place’ and ‘Everything in its right place’. Born the year after Elvis, Reich grew up on pop, on its syncopations and chord changes, but this is the first of his works to re-arrange music from the genre. His music in turn has influenced rock musicians, not least Jonny Greenwood, and now the dialogue proceeds to its next step. The London Sinfonietta take the piece on from its Royal Festival Hall première to a national tour, and then to cities around the world.

Object featured: poster promoting the London Sinfonietta's performance of Radio-Rewrite with Steve Reich at Brighton Dome, 7 March 2013

The London Sinfonietta fulfil a rock n' roll dream and play Glastonbury Festival. Once again the music is Reich’s, his consummation of togetherness and joy expressed through pulse and luminescent harmony: Music for 18 Musicians. Having performed Luca Francesconi’s Quartett at Covent Garden the night before, the musicians take an early train westwards. Nearly all of them were on board when the London Sinfonietta last presented the piece, on tour three years ago, so not much rehearsal is needed. Jonny Greenwood, playing Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, is the warm-up act. Then, before zipping back to London for another Francesconi, the London Sinfonietta perform Music for 18 to an audience of 3,000 moshing in the mud.

Object featured: behind the scenes footage of the London Sinfonietta performing Music for 18 Musicians at the West Holts stage, Glastonbury Festival 2014

Besides Glastonbury’s fields and London’s opera theatres, London Sinfonietta musicians can also be found at art galleries. Through ten consecutive Sunday afternoons they perform at the White Cube in Bermondsey, contributing to a gallery-wide installation by Christian Marclay. Teaming up with The Vinyl Factory, the London Sinfonietta produces limited edition vinyls of each of the pieces featured, live at each session. The Standard is taken with how “the distant tinkling of glasses in the films provided a wonderful ambience for Zoë Martlew’s performance of Alvin Lucier’s Music for Cello With One or More Amplified Vases.” For the Telegraph the stand-out is John Butcher’s rendering with London Sinfonietta players of ‘Good Liquor Caused my Heart for to Sing’: “Keening and melancholy, it was shabbily magnificent.”

Objects featured: LPs pressed by The Vinyl Factory at the White Cube, 2015

The London Sinfonietta takes to the tube in collaboration with TFL’s Art on the Underground. The aim? To reach people who have never entered a concert hall and now might. At the same time, though, such ventures take new music, professionally performed at the highest level, into new environments. Matt Rogers composes a sheaf of pieces for this application: Three Displaced Duets for horn, flute and cello at different stations, We Happened to Travel for twelve wind players, a marimba solo to go out as a station broadcast, and A Big Fan of the Underground, being an ‘installation for fan’.

Object featured: costumes designed by Jenny Hayton and worn as part of We Happened to Travel by Principal Cello Tim Gill (orange suit) and Trombone Ryan Hume (green suit), courtesy of Art on the Underground
 

The London Sinfonietta’s core remains today where it has been: in new concert music combining adventure with continuity, produced by outstanding composers. Fresh to the ensemble come Elliot Galvin, Eivind Beune and Elizabeth Winters. There are familiar names too: Harrison Birtwistle, Steve Reich, György Ligeti and Olga Neuwirth are featured. Mica Levi’s Under the Skin score goes on tour. But the most unusual event is the performance at the Royal Festival Hall of Georg Friedrich Haas’s in vain, whole sections of which are played in pitch-black, the musicians having memorized their parts to create boundless light and colour in the darkness.

Object featured: night-vision goggles worn by ushers in the Royal Festival Hall for Georg Friedrich Haas' in vain