BRIGHT FEAR and REST World Premieres to Highlight City of London Sinfonia Season

City of London Sinfonia has announced plans for its 26/27 season, REST - a season exploring migration, memory and belonging through orchestral music. It features two world premieres: Bright Fear by composer Nicola T. Chang and poet Mary Jean Chan (7 November 2026, Kings Place), and REST by Emily Levy (13 March 2027, Hackney Empire). Both are flagship commissions within CLS's expansive five-year strategy, 'Music and…' which reimagines the role of a contemporary orchestra, placing collaborative creation and conversation at the centre of how music is made and experienced.

The 26/27 season opens on Saturday 7 November with the world premiere of Bright Fear. It also marks the launch of The Collections, a new series developed through a partnership between CLS and independent publisher Faber. Bringing composers and poets together to create literary-inspired chamber works, The Collections will offer new perspectives on a variety of themes including multilingualism, identity and belonging. To launch the series, composer Nicola T. Chang and poet Mary Jean Chan - both queer, Hong Kong-raised creatives - have curated a selection of poems from Chan's scintillating second collection, Bright Fear, as the inspiration for a new suite for poet and chamber orchestra. It will receive its world premiere at Kings Place, performed by CLS musicians, Nicola T. Chang on piano and guest artist Chinese instrumentalists, with on-stage readings from the poet, Mary Jean Chan.

REST is a rigorous new work commissioned from award-winning composer Emily Levy examining the people, policies, decisions and public attitudes that have shaped the UK's response to refugees and migrants over the past nine decades. For its world premiere on Saturday 13 March 2027, it will be performed alongside new music co-created with CLS musicians by people whose lives have been directly impacted by these shifting political and social pressures. One of the most ambitious co-creation projects in CLS's history, REST: Borders and Belonging is the culmination of an extraordinary two-year creative journey involving more than 150 people across cultures and generations. Participants from each of the music-led community projects, including: children displaced by the war in Ukraine, Windrush Elders and Descendants, Holocaust and Kindertransport survivors, asylum seekers and foodbank volunteers, will join CLS on stage at London's legendary Hackney Empire to perform some of their original musical creations.

Rowan Rutter, CEO of City of London Sinfonia: 'Our REST season is a bold and necessary statement of who we are and who we want to be: an orchestra that listens, learns, and leads with openness. By centring diaspora voices, queer perspectives and the lived experiences of refugees and immigrants at this moment in the political and social landscape, we are not only broadening our repertoire and deepening our connection to the world around us but sending a clear statement of values and care. We are proud to be working with longstanding collaborators Faber, our venue partners Kings Place, Hackney Empire and Wilton's Music Hall, and to be returning to Opera Holland Park and the BBC Proms. This season is an invitation - to reflect, to celebrate difference, and to recognise the power of music as a shared human connection.'

Fiona Lambert, Deputy CEO & Director of Participation: 'Music made in the same rooms as connection, longing and hope sounds different. It carries something. At CLS, we ask ourselves constantly: what more can an orchestra do? REST is our answer; an ambitious multi-year effort to ask music to hold one of the most complex questions of our time. Not to resolve it, not to take sides, but to make space for it. Two years with four communities has taught us our orchestra can do that. You will hear it on stage at Hackney Empire in March.'

Alexandra Wood, Creative Director and Orchestra Leader: 'Our REST season is the natural progression in CLS's 'Music and….' discovery journey - from New Frontiers in space to Borders and Belonging on earth. With music drawn from myriad collaborations and communities, and inspired by poetry, politics, policies, and personal experiences, I know that our musicians are looking forward to exploring this kaleidoscopic selection and sharing it enthusiastically and lovingly with our audiences.'

Ahead of the launch of the 2026/27 season, CLS will be performing at Opera Holland Park, where it has been Resident Orchestra since 2003. Upcoming performances include Verdi's Un ballo in maschera (30 July; 1, 5, 7 August) and a new production of Johann Strauss (ii)'s effervescent Die Fledermaus to close the season (31 July; 2, 4, 6, 8 August). CLS heads back to Opera Holland Park Theatre on 11 August for its much-loved annual series, Music for a Summer's Evening, featuring an uplifting collection of music for strings, including Elgar's charming Serenade for Strings and Mozart's dazzling Divertimento in D major. On 27 August, CLS will return to the world's greatest classical music festival for a Late Night BBC Prom featuring the UK premiere of music by Erland Cooper, led by CLS's Creative Director and Orchestra Leader, Alexandra Wood.

THE COLLECTIONS: BRIGHT FEAR (WORLD PREMIERE)

Saturday 7 November 2026
Kings Place

in the penultimate scene where mother and child are listening to one another
speak in spite of everything the way an orchestra might play on bravely
even when the audience claps before it's time you will want to stay awhile

'postscript' (extract) by Mary Jean Chan, from Bright Fear (Faber, 2023)

On Saturday 7 November, City of London Sinfonia will present the world premiere of Bright Fear, a Suite for Poet and Chamber Orchestra composed by Nicola T. Chang and inspired by Mary Jean Chan's celebrated volume of poetry of the same name. It marks the launch of The Collections, a new series that commissions, nurtures and presents literary-inspired chamber works co-created by contemporary composers and poets through a partnership between CLS and Faber.

To launch The Collections, composer Nicola T. Chang and poet Mary Jean Chan have curated a selection of poems from Mary Jean Chan's scintillating second collection to inspire a new suite for poet and chamber orchestra. This is the first collaboration between two artists whose complementary approaches as queer, Hong Kong-raised creatives are anchored in a shared belief in music and poetry as vehicles for change and discovery at both the personal and universal levels.

Described by The Guardian as 'like testing the blade of a knife and finding it exquisitely sharp', Bright Fear engages fearlessly with intertwined themes of identity, multilingualism and postcolonial legacy. Even while confronting some of the most painful aspects of the human experience - prejudice, intolerance, shame and fear - Mary Jean Chan's poems remain keenly attuned to moments of beauty, tenderness and grace.

Now re-examined in collaboration with award-winning composer and sound designer, Nicola T. Chang, the collection finds new resonance through music, extending its exploration of how we might find a home within our own bodies, in places both distant and near, and in the constructed space of the poem itself.

Composer, Nicola T. Chang: 'When I first met Mary Jean, they spoke about their poems being a room to hold people to collectively imagine. I really want the music to echo that, and to in turn hold their words. I hope that audiences will be held safely and warmly to collectively imagine, and access their own interpretation of Mary Jean's words and to be moved in their own way. Hopefully this performance becomes a vehicle to evoke something, be it a memory or an emotion, and can ask them to stay a while, you know? So stay - stay a while.'

Poet, Mary Jean Chan: 'What a privilege it is to have my poems interpreted and translated into music by Nicola, who is also a friend. I'm very glad that Bright Fear is being cast in a different medium altogether. For example, there are tones and textures that I had not imagined as I was writing these poems. When poetry and music are put in dialogue, the composer's interpretations are theirs - maybe you're asking questions of my poetry, or giving an answer to a question I posed in a poem. I think that is really beautiful because it offers the audience a different way to relate to poetry through music.'

For its world premiere at Kings Place, Bright Fear will be performed by CLS musicians, Nicola T. Chang on piano and guest artist Chinese instrumentalists, with on-stage readings from the poet, Mary Jean Chan.

Bright Fear is presented in partnership with Kings Place Music Foundation.

More about The Collections: The Collections is the latest collaboration between CLS and Faber, a partnership which began in 2019 with Faber's 90th anniversary celebration, In Place and Time, and more recently in 2023 with the first staging with music of Simon Armitage's The Owl and the Nightingale, with the Poet Laureate performing in the role of the narrator. The Collections will commission literary-inspired chamber works co-created by composers and poets featured in Faber's contemporary poetry collections to offer new perspectives on a variety of themes including multilingualism, identity and belonging. This bold new co-creation model will pair each poet with a composer to develop a brand new work for orchestra that harmonises the literary source material as well as the personal and artistic experiences of the lead artists in a porous, responsive creative process supported by CLS' musicians, staff and Artists Council. Each commission will receive its world premiere at Kings Place, the UK presenting partner venue for The Collections.

REST: THESE MEMORIES MAY BE TRUE

Tuesday 10 November 2026
Wilton's Music Hall

REST: These Memories May Be True is a concert curated by CLS's Creative Director and Orchestra Leader, Alexandra Wood, reflecting on what it means to call a place 'home'. Featuring music by Lembit Beecher, Aaron Copland, Bushra el-Turk, Reena Esmail, Dinu Lipatti, Astor Piazzolla and Vaughan Williams, all composers whose music summons an undeniable specificity of place transporting us to 'homes' both known and imagined, near and far.

At the centre of the programme is Lembit Beecher's These Memories May Be True, which lends its name to the concert. Described by the San Francisco Chronicle as 'winsome and imaginative', this four-movement tribute to the Estonian-American composer's grandmother and the stories she told him of their homeland. Exploring the space between emotional truths and historical facts in family folklore, CLS will perform the affectionately titled third movement, Estonian Grandmother Superhero.

Pastoral landscapes at once real and imagined, and fragments of folk melody are given new life in Vaughan Williams's Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus and Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring (Ballet Suite for 13 Instruments). In the former, English song is gently refracted through a wistful orchestral haze, and in the latter, American folk simplicity is distilled into an atmosphere of openness and luminous optimism. Though rooted in different traditions, both works seem to suspend time, evoking places half-remembered rather than known.

In Saffron Dusk Bushra El-Turk recalls her Lebanese heritage as a lens through which to pay tribute to the victims of the 2020 Beirut port explosion in a work of searing intensity. Solo works by Reena Esmail and Astor Piazzolla evoke suspended worlds through melody: Esmail's Zinfandel for solo flute, with its evocative arcs shaped by Indian classical music traditions, and Piazzolla's Oblivion, one of his most poignant works, with its irresistibly melancholic lyricism.

Part of a season exploring migration and belonging through orchestral music, REST: These Memories May Be True sees CLS return to Wilton's Music Hall, an atmospheric, intimate venue with its own long history of bringing communities together. The musical programme will be enriched by introductions from CLS players and readings that deepen the season's exploration of how we build a 'home'.

REST: BORDERS AND BELONGING

Saturday 13 March 2027
Hackney Empire

On Saturday 13 March, City of London Sinfonia will present the world premiere of REST, a brand new work for chamber orchestra by award-winning composer, Emily Levy. Across four movements, this rigorous new work examines the people, policies, decisions and public attitudes that have shaped the UK's response to refugees and migrants over the past nine decades. From the Kindertransport of 1938–39 to the present day, it charts the shifting political and social pressures that have directly impacted the lives of new arrivals to the UK.

Commissioned in summer 2024, against the backdrop of anti-immigration riots, it will have its world premiere as part of an expansive programme of new music created in community projects by people who know what it means to try and build a new life far from home.

Over the past two years, REST has been developed alongside four bespoke music-centred projects. CLS' RPS-Award winning Participation team and musicians were invited to work in partnership with a diverse group of independent community groups, in their spaces and with their members, totalling more than 150 people.

Ahead of the performance of Emily Levy's REST, participants from each of the projects will take to the stage at Hackney Empire to share some of the music they have been co-creating with CLS musicians in kitchens, classrooms and community centres across London.

Pupils from St Mary's Ukrainian School Choir, including children displaced by the war, will perform original songs created in workshops with composer, Jessie Maryon Davies; young steel pan musicians from New Generation Steel Orchestra, all Windrush Descendants, will perform a powerful new work shaped by oral histories they have collected and recorded with Windrush Elders; and asylum seekers from Care4Calais and volunteers from the JW3 Foodbank in Camden will perform a selection of songs they've created together with CLS players and composer, Jessie Maryon Davies.

All of their music has now been orchestrated to mark the culmination of the projects, and on Saturday 13 March participants will be united with the full CLS orchestra on one of London's most iconic stages. Accompanying the performance is a series of short films by Claudia Lee - to be screened across the evening and made available to watch on-demand as part of a permanent digital archive - introducing each of the projects and offering a snapshot of these new creative communities.

Holocaust and Kindertransport survivors from the Holocaust Survivors Centre are too frail to join the performance at Hackney Empire so have created an interactive exhibition titled, I Am An Onion. Combining story and song, it has been developed together with facilitator Caroline Welsh, CLS musicians and artist Joanna Brinton, and will tour to different sites across the UK including The London Archives.

One of the most ambitious co-creation projects in CLS's history, REST: Borders and Belonging is the culmination of an extraordinary two-year creative journey involving more than 150 people across cultures and generations. It stands on the belief that an orchestra can and where possible should engage in and respond to the questions that matter most in our lives when the people whose experiences and stories sit at the centre of these questions lead both the conversation and the musical co-creation. By bringing together artists and communities, in their own spaces, new voices can be heard and orchestral music-making finds new resonance.

Composer, Emily Levy: 'It has been a privilege to be part of CLS's REST. The project feels both every-day and epic in its scope, encompassing everything from cooking and conversation to new music suffused with ideas of home, journey, and belonging. I've often worked with these themes in previous projects, but in REST the task has been to explore things from both individual and national perspectives. The nine-decade focus on the UK's immigration policy has certainly been a challenge – a good one! Every day, every hour, the news is full of policy, opinion and reactions that shift the dial yet again. We are all implicated and affected by our country's actions and inactions, and I've sought to convey some of this in the piece.

Whenever I felt daunted during the writing process, I returned to moments within the REST workshops: a Kindertransport survivor bringing to a session the violin they meticulously crafted for it to be played by a CLS musician; the recorded voice of a Windrush Elder sparking compositions in the young players of the New Generation Steel Orchestra; a pause in the busy kitchen of a foodbank, where noise from talking and cooking momentarily stopped and we all listened to Arvo Pärt's music being played by CLS musicians. For a few moments we were bound together by things we share and things we can never share, by music, memories, sorrow and joy. Everything I have written for this project grows from these shared acts of attention. I can only hope the music reflects something of the generosity, resilience and humanity that I encountered through REST.'

MORE ABOUT THE REST PROJECTS

Over the past two years, pupils from St Mary's Ukrainian School Choir in Holland Park, including children displaced by the war, have been taking part in song-writing workshops with composer Jessie Maryon Davies and CLS musicians. The children were keen to add original songs to their repertoire and worked together to develop lyrics and melodies to express themselves in their own words. The Choir has delighted audiences across the UK with their new songs, including at Westminster Cathedral in the presence of HRH Princess of Wales, and will now bring their inspiring music and powerful message of peace to Hackney Empire in a performance of two original songs.

Young musicians - all Windrush Descendants - from New Generation Steel Orchestra, one of the UK's leading youth steel pan ensembles, have been working alongside composer Jessie Maryon Davies and CLS musicians to develop a new work for steel pan and orchestra shaped by oral histories they have collected and recorded with Windrush Elders. Combining steel pan, classical orchestration, song, soundscape and spoken-word testimony, this is an intergenerational conversation spanning almost 80 years that underlines both the resilience of the Windrush Elders and their indelible contribution to modern Britain, while revealing the echoes of their experiences in the lives of many Windrush Descendants.

Improvisation and collaboration are fundamental ingredients in both music and cooking. At JW3 Foodbank in Camden people seeking asylum from Care4Calais and foodbank volunteers have been working together with CLS musicians each Thursday morning while preparing meals for people living in temporary accommodation. As well as devising new recipes, the group have created original songs shaped by memories of food, home and the communities we build. Two of the songs created in these sessions will be performed at Hackney Empire.

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