Southbank Centre News

Fewer Shakespearean characters have caused as much uncertainty as Hamlet's mother, Gertrude: a side-lined female in a canonical story; a shadowy icon of mid-life sexuality; a fearless woman whose power was consistently undermined by the men around her. 400 years since Hamlet was written, storyteller and Shakespeare's Globe consultant Debs Newbold imagines what her story would have been and asks what a?" if anything a?" has changed since her creation.

Grammya"?-winning new-music choir The Crossing, led by Donald Nally, gives the world premiere performances of Michael Gordon's Travel Guide to Nicaragua with cellist Maya Beiser in presentations by co-commissioners, the Annenberg Center on Sunday, March 22, 2020 at 7:00pm in Philadelphia and Carnegie Hall on Wednesday, March 25, 2020 at 7:30pm in New York City. Before the Carnegie Hall performance on March 25, Donald Nally and Michael Gordon will have a 6:30pm pre-concert conversation with John Schaefer, host of WNYC's New Sounds and Soundcheck.

The Philharmonia announces its 2020/21 Season at Southbank Centre, which will be Esa-Pekka Salonen's 13th and last as Principal Conductor & Artistic Advisor of the Orchestra. The highlight of Salonen's final season is a focus on music inspired by Greek myth. In Origin Stories: Greek Myth in Music, Salonen conducts Scriabin's Prometheus: The Poem of Fire with Yuja Wang as soloist (24 Sep 2020) and Strauss' Elektra with soprano soloists Irene Theorin and Lise Davidsen (7 Feb 2021). And to close the Season (10 Jun 2021), Salonen conducts Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe (complete) alongside the European premiere of his own work Gemini.

Southbank Centre, together with its unparalleled line up of Resident Orchestras - London Philharmonic Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, London Sinfonietta - and Associate Orchestras - Aurora Orchestra, BBC Concert Orchestra, Chineke! Orchestra and National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain - today announces a distinctive 2020/21 classical music season with over 230 concerts across Southbank Centre's internationally renowned venues, Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room.

Described by The Times as 'a gloriously inept radical anorak', bedsit anarchist, Alan Parker: Urban Warrior returns with the old gold, the old truths and some new truths (based on the old truths). The Alan Parker Urban Warrior Farewell Tour reaches the Southbank Centre's Purcell Room on Friday 17th April.

Theatre Makers Matt Miller and Peader Kirk have come together to co-create a solo theatre performance, FITTING, drawing on spoken-word storytelling, autobiographical accounts and physical theatre to explore themes of identity and belonging.

Skunk Anansie have shared the video for their powerful new single 'This Means War', which features live footage of the iconic rock group on stage at Pol'and'Rock festival last year where they headlined to a huge crowd of over 850,000 fans. The track is a super-charged, rallying anthem with vocal powerhouse Skin's fiery and provocative lyrics commanding you to sit up and listen.

Once Upon a Mattress opens Upstairs at the Gatehouse in March 2020. Returning to the Gatehouse with another classic musical rarely seen in London, Mark Giesser steps back into the director's chair for his new production of Once Upon A Mattress, the first musical by Mary Rodgers, daughter of legendary musical composer Richard Rodgers.

David Pugh will present Emma Rice's critically acclaimed musical adaptation of Enid Blyton's Malory Towers, originally created with Wise Children. This new production will be co-produced with Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, where the production will open on 27 March 2020, before going on a national tour, concluding at Southbank Centre's Queen Elizabeth Hall, where it will play from 27 July to 31 August, with national press performances on 31 July, 1 and 2 August.

The innovative and experimental musician Rafiq Bhatia is releasing Standards Vol. 1 today, a four song EP that transforms canonical jazz works into otherworldly sounds that are uniquely his own. Bhatia has also shared a phantasmagorical new video for his rendition of Duke Ellington's “In A Sentimental Mood.'

I Could Go On Singing came to me very suddenly, after a very long time. Time spent trying to distill years of experience into a piece of work that contained those years. My love of Judy Garland grew in my heart, quietly, privately. Reading book after book. My love of noise music, particularly that of Okishima Island Tourist Association, developed physically, publicly, going to gig after gig. 

New strategic arts initiative Something to Aim For, which supports artists with lived experience of discrimination creating socially engaged work, has announced its first season including works from international cabaret icon Le Gateau Chocolat and radical performance artist FK Alexander. From self-destruction to self-expression, from isolation to austerity, the artists tackle pressing social issues with their own distinctive performance styles including cabaret, performance art and grime and rap.

Metta Theatre a?" one of the UK's leading mid-scale touring theatre companies a?" has six new British musicals in progress, all being developed and showcased around the UK throughout the first half of 2020. Established in 2005 by Poppy Burton-Morgan and Motley trained Designer William Reynolds, Metta Theatre is at the forefront of new work - with a strong focus on the development of new British musical theatre, and a commitment to highlighting climate justice and sustainability; disability and deaf integration and inclusion (both from a political perspective and in order to artistically enrich the work); queering mainstream and family theatre - writing characters that represent and normalise (rather than problematise) the diverse range of queer experiences and identities; re-gendering protagonists in order to give girls strong female role models.

The music of rock legends Queen is to be celebrated like never before as West End leading lady Kerry Ellis joins Scandinavian tribute stars Queen Machine for a fully orchestrated UK tour.

a??a??a??a??a??a??a??Opera Philadelphia scored a hit at O19, a?oeits increasingly essential September festivala?? (New Yorker), with the world premiere of Denis & Katya. A timely and immersive multimedia chamber opera by composer Philip Venables and librettist-director Ted Huffman, the new work was recognized with the 2019 FEDORA-GENERALI Prize for Opera and by inclusion in the New York Times's a?oeBest Classical Music of 2019.a?? Commissioned and produced in collaboration with Music Theatre Wales and Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier, now Denis & Katya makes its European debut with a tour of Wales (Feb 27a?"March 27) and dates at London's Southbank Centre (March 13 & 14), underscoring Opera Philadelphia's role as a?oea hotbed of operatic innovationa?? (New York Times) that represents a?oeone of North America's premier generators of valid new operasa?? (Opera News).

Artistic Director Kumiko Mendl celebrates 25 years of Yellow Earth Theatre; the company dedicated to developing and staging work by British East Asian* (BEA) theatre makers. Named after the seminal Chinese film of the same title, the company launched in 1995 to widen the type of roles being offered to BEA actors, writers, directors and designers, with the aim to create fresh and vibrant work that reflects the BEA experience.

The WOW Foundation has today announced the full line up for the 2020 10th anniversary Festival in London. British Vogue will present 'Forces for Change' with Editor-in-Chief Edward Enninful OBE. Forces for Change was launched in The September Issue of British Vogue guest edited by HRH The Duchess of Sussex. For this special WOW event, the editor-in-chief has invited artists, activists and fashion pioneers to join him for an evening of conversation exploring the publication's ongoing movement, sharing stories of female trailblazers setting the agenda across the globe.

Hong Kong has been convulsed by an ongoing protest movement which has increasingly been seen as a last stand for its semi-autonomy from China since March 2019; a year which also saw the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Solidarity movements have formed across the globe, including repeated gatherings of up to 4,000 people outside the Chinese embassy in London.

Hot on the heels of its acclaimed Christmas season run at Jermyn Street Theatre, Craig Taylor's warmhearted, humorous and compassionate series of dramatic vignettes on life in contemporary Britain returns to The Watermill Theatre where it premiered in 2016.

Hester Chillingworth directs Nicki Hobday and Nando Messias in Sylvan Oswald's radical new work Trainersa?? a queer, visionary adventure story, which asks what separates us from each other, our bodies, and ourselves, and how we might complete one another.