Summer Festivals 2024 Announced

We are happy to announce Sinfonia of London’s festival appearances for summer 2024, at the BBC Proms and Summer at Snape. Snape Maltings and the Royal Albert Hall are both part of our DNA and we consider them spiritual homes, so we can’t wait for you to join us there.

We gave our first ever concert in 2021 at the BBC Proms, where we are thrilled to return each year. On 4 August 2024 we return again to the Proms, the world’s greatest festival of classical music, and a temple to orchestral music. We present a programme of iconic American works from the last 100 years: ranging from much-loved favourites, including Barber’s Adagio and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with the great British pianist Steven Osborne, a work that was premiered 100 years ago in 1924; to one of the towering and most imaginative orchestral works of the last century, Harmonielehre by John Adams. Before works by Copland and Ives, both key figures of American 20th century music, we open the programme with a UK Premiere by legendary jazz trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis, Herald, Holler and Hallelujah!

Full details here, with tickets on sale from 18 May: https://www.bbc.co.uk/events/e64z3d

WATCH: Our first performance at the BBC Proms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-f3F6wS69o

Snape Maltings is more than just a beautiful concert hall created by Benjamin Britten and his partner Peter Pears, but one of the most important cultural centres in the UK: the home of Britten Pears Arts, who present the Aldeburgh Festival, where we gave two concerts in 2023, and their summer series, Summer at Snape, which we open “with a bang” on 26 July 2024. We continue two major threads of our repertoire: British music by Britten and Walton, and Rachmaninoff – performing live for the first time his Symphony No.2, which forms the second half of the programme.

Our recording of the piece for Chandos Records was given ★★★★★ by BBC Music Magazine, and our 2023 performance of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances at the Aldeburgh Festival was heralded as “exhilarating” (Arts Desk) and “dazzling” (Guardian), becoming Marquee TV’s Most Watched Music Title of 2023.

“The lyricism and individuality of the woodwind, the potency of the brass, the commitment of every player, combine to make this orchestra one of the best ensembles anywhere, with Wilson the catalyst.”
The Guardian

It’s an honour to open this festival in Snape with Britten’s A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, followed by a performance by one of our two Leaders, Charlie Lovell-Jones, of Walton’s fiendish Violin Concerto.

LISTEN: English Music for Strings, given ★★★★★ by the FT:

“The players do not half go for it. The most exhilarating of recordings, arguably the first to rival Britten’s own.” Financial Times

Hugh Canning described in The Times our first performance at Snape during the Britten Birthday Weekend 2021:

The sound in the Malting’s ideal acoustic was sensational: every pianissimo registered, and every fortissimo climax palpably contained. More please.” The Times

Full details here, with tickets on sale also on 18 May: https://brittenpearsarts.org/events/sinfonia-of-london.