Welcome to our Autumn Season at the RCM, presenting a wide range of concerts, talks and events for all tastes, including a series of works inspired by our natural world.
We bring our 150th anniversary celebrations of Royal College of Music teacher and alumnus Ralph Vaughan Williams to a close, with performances of his monumental A Sea Symphony and the ever-popular The Lark Ascending. We are delighted to welcome Sakari Oramo for his first visit to the RCM, conducting Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony alongside Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. Prince Consort Professor of Conducting Martyn Brabbins also returns with a programme including Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony, a dramatic depiction of the 1905 revolution.
Other large-scale performances include the colourful excitement of Latin American music and more with Natalia Luis-Bassa and the RCM Wind Orchestra; James MacMillan’s clarinet concerto, Ninian, describing the life of the Celtic Saint; an evening of film music written by the greats of the genre from Bernard Herrmann to John Williams; and a workshop performance with Chloé van Soeterstède based on Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony.
Chamber music, both instrumental and vocal, features throughout the autumn, where we contrast the familiar – Dvořák, Haydn and Mendelssohn – with less well-known masterpieces by Crumb, James Tenney and Crawford Seeger in our Chamber Spotlight series. Contemporary sounds abound in New Perspectives, and alumna Shiva Feshareki returns to curate a programme of electronic music in the atmospheric surroundings of our new Performance Hall. This autumn also sees a unique collaboration with the Australian National Academy of Music, Quartetthaus, in 1851 Place next to the Royal Albert Hall – a totally immersive experience based on the string quartet.
We welcome visitors including Maxim Vengerov, Dame Sarah Connolly and Angela Hewitt to share their experiences in masterclasses, and we celebrate the life of guitarist and lutenist Julian Bream in a day of events curated by guitarist John Williams. The season rounds off with performances of Offenbach’s uproarious operetta, Orpheus in the Underworld.
We look forward to welcoming you to the Royal College of Music.
