naomi
D A T E S
11 Sep Klangspuren, Innsbruck
20 Nov Rainy Days, Luxembourg
27 Nov hcmf//, Huddersfield
P R O G R A M M E
Jonah Haven naomi
Dilay Doğanay no signatures
Maija Hynninen irradiance
W I T H
Juliet Fraser soprano
Aaron Holloway-Nahum conductor
A season about what gets left behind opens with a comedy about selling the end of the world. Jonah Haven's naomi follows a zealot-turned-saleswoman at Exit Mundi Inc., the corporation with the widest range of apocalypses for purchase anywhere. Twenty years in, one of its most ruthless closers meets a talking fox on her walk home from work and is given, for the first time in her life, a name. Around this 40-minute work sit two new pieces commissioned for Riot from friends old and new: Dilay Doğanay and Maija Hynninen.
Music in Twelve Parts
D A T E
30 Jan Southbank Centre, London
P R O G R A M M E
Philip Glass Music in Twelve Parts
On the eve of Glass's 90th birthday, we become only the third ensemble in history to perform Music in Twelve Parts, the work Glass himself called 'the end of minimalism'. It began as a single piece. A friend's misunderstanding of the title convinced Glass to write eleven more parts over three years, and the five-hour result has been performed outside the Philip Glass Ensemble exactly once. Gentle and ferocious, methodical and playful, it is the sound of a composer using up a language in public. He builds the system, exhausts it, and ends audaciously with a 12-tone row, as though picking through the wreckage of one style for the beginnings of the next. A monument and a ruin in a single evening.
The Night With…
D A T E S
26 Feb The Engine Works, Glasgow
27 Feb The Engine Works, Glasgow
PROGRAMME 26 FEB
Yannis Kyriakides Dreams of the Blind
Matthew Whiteside New work
PROGRAMME 27 FEB
Bára Gísladóttir Seven heavens (of different heights (and depths))
Henri Dutilleux Les Citations
Kate Milligan New work
Fergus Hall New work
Our Scottish debut, two nights at The Engine Works, is a programme built from fragments. Yannis Kyriakides' Dreams of the Blind gathers the dream-accounts of blind people into sound, voice and video-text, reaching for what language keeps dropping. Matthew Whiteside answers with a new work for the same forces. The second night centres on our annual Call for Scores, which this year drew 300 entries in three days. Two composers will be chosen to write new pieces for the occasion, alongside Dutilleux's Les Citations, a Riot touchstone stitched from borrowed voices and half-remembered sources. Bára Gísladóttir's Seven heavens (of different heights (and depths)) closes the evening, its stacked heavens each holding time like a small, sealed era.
Royal Academy of Music Residency
D A T ES
25 Nov St Mark's, London
13 Jan ABRH, London
9 Feb Duke's Hall, London
10 Feb Holy Trinity Church, Folkestone
10 Apr Tate St Ives
16 Jun Jebsen Recital Hall, London
P R O G R A M M E
György Ligeti Chamber Concerto
Rebecca Saunders Chamber works
Colin Riley Broken Line
Tate St Ives Residency Day
Student Works Twelve World Premieres
Every residency starts with what the last one left. Building on our initial three-year residency funded by the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne, the Royal Academy of Music has again expanded our side-by-side, multi-year development project. From January 2027, three composers and six musicians join Riot as resident artists for 18 months of professional development, world premieres, and side-by-side performances and recordings that drop them in at the deep end of new music. Other dates include new works around Ligeti's Chamber Concerto, 'from rehearsal to release' training days, and a fever-dream day trip to Tate St Ives.
Solstices
D A T E
21 Apr Konzerthaus, Berlin
P R O G R A M M E
Georg Friedrich Haas Solstices
In January 2018 we premiered Solstices in Reykjavik, on a day when the sun barely rose. In July 2021 we played it again in London, after fifteen months of Covid lockdown. Haas's work meets the high emotions of moments like these. Played for seventy-five minutes in complete darkness before concluding in a blaze of noise and returning light, it is a hymn to human connection, patience and attention, to the turning of the world and the restorative power of love. When this season asks what survives the wreckage, this is our answer.
The Under-Side of Green
D A T E
28 Jul Les Fieffés Festival, La Rafion, Flamanville
P R O G R A M M E
Andrea Balency-Béarn New work
Jonathan Harvey The Riot
Josephine Stephenson Movement still
Rebecca Saunders The Under-Side of Green
An exchange with Les Fieffés Musiciens and the Ernest Piano Trio, these concerts pair British and French composers and mark our debut in France. At the centre is French-Mexican composer Andrea Balency-Béarn, who came to us through Riot's Royal Academy of Music mentorship scheme. She now returns with her first major commission from us. Alongside her: Josephine Stephenson's Movement still, Rebecca Saunders' The Under-Side of Green, and Riot's titular work (actually written long before we were founded) by Jonathan Harvey.
UR_
D A T E S
27, 29, 30 May, 1 Jun
Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House, London
P R O G R A M M E
Anna Thorvaldsdóttir UR_
W I T H
Royal Opera House cast of singers
Bjarni Frímann Bjarnason conductor
Rivers of speech. Shards of language. And a human entity, travelling between past and future, awakening and obscurity, nature and modernity.
Anna Thorvaldsdóttir's chamber opera UR_ (2015) builds a world from pieces: folk motifs, avant-garde vocal techniques and a language in shards, assembled into something taut, luminous and whole. Netia Jones' staging fuses cutting-edge technology with ancient ritual. On stage, Riot's musicians join the Royal Opera House cast for the UK premiere of this stunning work.
Shelter and Burial
D A T E
12 Jul Darmstadt Ferienkurse
P R O G R A M M E
Evan Johnson Shelter and burial
Jasmine Morris New work
WITH
Sarah Saviet & Marie Schreer solo violins
Aaron Holloway-Nahum conductor
Nobody this season builds more from fragments than Evan Johnson. Shelter and burial steps away from the sparsity of his past fifteen years.
He writes:
“In place of a surface continually perforated on all levels, large and small, by cracks and lacunae, with fragments and wisps emerging from silence and barely hanging together on an inaudible thread, Shelter and burial will feature a nearly continuous dialogue (still for the most part extremely hushed, fragile, and tentative, but rarely silent) between the soloists, each of whom has an echoing percussionist and one or two other 'ancillary' instruments from the ensemble as a personal echo chamber.”